REAL-LIFE STAR WARS
StratCom & the Militarization of Space
Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7373Stan Cox
Last January 11 (2007), a missile launched from China’s Xichang Space Center destroyed a satellite 537 miles above the Earth’s surface. Although the target was a weather satellite belonging to China itself (shot down ostensibly because it was obsolete), the act clearly rattled the U.S. space establishment.
Said one observer, “The new space policy says we can defend the heavens with technology. But we can’t, and the Chinese just proved it.”
Precisely six years earlier, on Jan. 11, 2001, the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization issued a report to Congress. The group, which had been headed by President-elect George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary-tobe Donald Rumsfeld, asserted that it’s only a matter of time until there’s all-out war in the heavens:
We know from history that every medium — air, land and sea — has seen conflict. Reality indicates that space will be no different. Given this virtual certainty, the U.S. must develop the means both to deter and to defend against hostile acts in and from space — and ensure continuing superiority.
The current thinking of military and industry officials was revealed last month at the annual Strategic Space and Defense Conference in Omaha, Nebraska, held in the backyard of the U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM).
And that strategy includes not just war-mongering against countries like China and Pakistan by “space warriors,” but it poses a threat to the safety and liberties of all Americans.
The Militarization of Space
Military space officials will have to develop new doctrine and concepts for offensive and defensive space operations, power projection in, from, and through space, and other military uses of space. --Rumsfield’s Commission Report
The opening talk at the Strategic Space conference was given by USSTRATCOM acting commander Lt. Gen. Robert Kehler, who repeated that old cliche about the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Implicitly responding to China’s January selfattack, he added, “Well you know what? We get paid to deal with interesting times.”
But how USSTRATCOM plans to deal with them isn’t clear. In 2002, the Air Force undersecretary for military space acquisitions told The New York Times that “We haven’t reached the point of strafing and bombing from space,” but that “we are exploring those possibilities.”
This fall marks the 40th anniversary of the Outer Space Treaty, an agreement among 98 nations (including the U.S.), that banned nuclear arms from space but left out mention of other weapons. Nevertheless, no nation has ever launched an attack into or from space, and the costly U.S. missiledefense program that began life two decades ago as President Reagan’s “Star Wars” dream continues to founder.
Spending on missile defense has doubled since 2000, and the program is expanding into Poland and the Czech Republic. But Bruce Gagnon of Brunswick, Maine, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, believes the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, with its current official budget of more than $9 billion, is just “a Trojan Horse.”
He says, “Missile defense brings in the money but the real story is offensive, preemptive attack technologies for global strike. That’s where the real action is.” Gagnon agrees that current U.S. space policy remains entirely consistent with the aggressive stance taken in the Rumsfeld report, “although they have slacked off just a bit on their rhetoric.”
In September, The New York Times relayed a similar message from a former Pentagon official, who said that space weapons are “still definitely part of the program, but they don’t emphasize it because the arms-control people come out of the woodwork.”
From the World Policy Institute and other sources, we know about some of the weapons under planning or development in the murkier parts of the military-industrial budget:
• Micro-satellites that could stalk and destroy satellites of other nations
• The Evolutionary Air and Space Global Laser Engagement (EAGLE) project, a series of orbiting mirrors to direct beams from ground- or air-based lasers at targets in space
• The ground-based Kinetic Energy Anti-Satellite Weapon, which could shoot down satellites with missiles, along with the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, a missile-defense system that could double as an anti-satellite weapon
• The Washington Post revealed this week that the Congress has appropriated $100 million for a space-weapon system called “Falcon,” described as “a reusable Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle (HCV) capable of delivering 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles ... in less than two hours.” House and Senate conferees wrote, “Enhancing these capabilities is critical, particularly following the Chinese anti-satellite- weapons demonstration last January.”
• Hypervelocity Rod Bundles, or “Rods from God,” 20-foot-long, one-foot-diameter tungsten poles (existing only on paper at this point) that would be hurled from low-Earth orbit at 25,000 miles per hour to pulverize “hardened” targets in enemy territory.
Such specifics were scarce at the Omaha conference, but the audience knew how to peer between the speakers’ euphemisms and understand what was being discussed when, for example, Global Strike deputy commander Rear Adm. James Caldwell said his mission was to “deliver global effects, both kinetic and non-kinetic”or when Air Force Col. Kevin McLaughlin, as if giving a medical lecture, spoke of the “timely application of space power.”
USSTRATCOM was created in 1992, replacing and expanding upon that old nuclear warhorse, the Strategic Air Command. Not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, USSTRATCOM — which already commanded the nation’s nuclear weaponry — was given a host of other missions, including those of the former Space Command and a new Global Strike Integration Command, which will wield space weapons if they’re ever fully deployed.
Tim Rinne is state coordinator of Nebraskans for Peace, which holds demonstrations outside the Strategic Space conference each October. He says that in its “global strike” capacity and its drive to enforce what the generals like to call “our mastery of space”, USSTRATCOM has turned Omaha into “the most dangerous place on the face of the Earth.”
Harking back to filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s classic tale of nuclear Armageddon, Rinne likens USSTRATCOM to “Dr. Strangelove on steroids.”
What Will It Take to Start a War in Space
A ‘Space Pearl Harbor’ will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the U.S. Government to act. --Rumsfeld’s Commission Report
Why should we citizens even care what goes on outside the planet and its atmosphere? The prospect of space war seems a lot less ominous than did, say, the threat of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear holocaust. Nobody lives in space; no civilians will be maimed or killed by a robotic shoot-em-up in orbit.
Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath answered such arguments in their book War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space, published earlier this year. In the wake of the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, they wrote, humans across the globe began asking, “Would [outer space] be the venue for wars and synchronized killings, or the common space for a complex of cooperative peaceful efforts benefiting our species? The two uses of space could not exist side by side.”
They stress that the first deployment of weapons will set off a multi-trillion-dollar arms race, risk littering orbital space with enough debris to make it unusable for any civilian purpose, and possibly trigger a nuclear war.
The central problem is the vulnerability of orbiting spacecraft. They have the great advantage of ‘seeing’ vast regions of the Earth’s surface, but that leaves them hanging out there fully exposed. Space objects not only have nowhere to hide; they also move in fully predictable ways, making them vulnerable to attack at an adversary’s convenience.
USSTRATCOM’s Gen. Kehler — who, ironically, bears a slight resemblance to the late actor Peter Sellers (but only as he played the amiable President Muffley, not the crazed Dr. Strangelove) — emphasized that dilemma with an old war axiom: “If the enemy’s within range, so are you.”
That places space weapons in a classic ‘use ’em or lose ’em’ position, pushing their owner to launch a preemptive strike at the first sign of danger. In the words of one analyst, “The hair trigger that characterized nuclear deterrence during the Cold War would be elevated to the heavens.”
As for what might bump that hair trigger, most of the rhetoric at the conference focused on the socalled “War on Terror.” But when Air Force Lt. Gen. Frank Klotz predicted that “our next conflict may involve more traditional warfare against an adversary with more significant forces,” he was pointing at the country that seemed to be on everyone’s minds: China.
Back in 2000, China’s official Xinhua News Agency gave U.S. strategic planners reason to worry, with an coyly ‘hypothetical’ article predicting that “For countries that could never win a war with the United States by using the method of tanks and planes, attacking the U.S. space system may be an irresistible and most tempting choice.”
China only knocked out its own satellite on Jan. 11; nevertheless, one conference speaker equated that incident’s impact to the alarm caused by the Challenger and Columbia space-shuttle disasters of 1986 and 2003. Others in the hall implicitly compared the event to an even bigger turning point, referring to it as “1/11.”
Speaker after speaker voiced the feeling of vulnerability that comes with having one’s most critical military hardware protected by nothing but the void of space:
“Space is no longer a sanctuary.”
“In the past, we were the unique masters of the air and space domains. Today, that cannot be taken for granted.”
“Space is not a benign environment anymore.”
“Malicious actors can disrupt communications links, and thereby our very way of life.”
“We aren’t ready for the big show.”
It fell to a civilian, an industry man — Northrup-Grumman vice president Frederick Ricker — to hearten the military whiners: “If we can’t have sanctuary in space, we can certainly have superiority.”
Tim Rinne of Nebraskans for Peace sees a near-obsession with the “terrestrial and celestial encirclement of China,” led by the warriors at USSTRATCOM with no thought given to diplomacy. “They simply are not going to allow China to become an economic or military rival in space.”
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