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Military Space Control is Slipping

Posted on: Wednesday, 1 September 2004, 06:00 CDT

The value of U.S. space assets has not escaped the notice of our adversaries.

A few years ago, retired Air Force Gen. Bernard A. Schriever, the godfather of military space, issued a warning: America's superiority in space, the cornerstone of U.S. military power, was not secure. "We have almost no means to deny usage of space to an adversary," said Schriever, "let alone protect our own usage."

To Schriever, the problem was not so much technical as political.

Washington, he said, kept letting arms control get in the way of vital Pentagon "space control" programs.

That was in 2000. Four years have passed, and the pursuit of space-related weapons -- even defensive ones -- still faces ferocious opposition.

Critics say it will spark a ruinously expensive arms race, upset nuclear stability, and so forth.

Things look different, though, to the Air Force, which operates most U.S. military space systems and controls 90 percent of the Pentagon's space budget.

Air Force officials say space systems are vulnerable to disruption, and adversaries are learning to exploit space to their own advantage.

"It's my belief that we can no longer view space as benign or a sanctuary," summed up Gen. Lance W. Lord, commander of Air Force Space Command in Colorado.

It is a view that appears more and more in Air Force studies, particularly in Space Command's "Strategic Master Plan," a paper that places unprecedented emphasis on the need for "counterspace" capabilities.

This is not really surprising. America's military has come to depend on space to an extent few would have thought possible. In the Iraq war, U.S. forces used 50 satellites for surveillance, communications, navigation, warning and weather forecasting.

The value of U.S. space assets has not escaped the notice of our adversaries, who now see them as attractive targets. The peril is spelled out in two classified studies, "Threats to U.S. Space Systems and Operations Over the Next 10 Years" and the "Interim Space Capstone Threat Capabilities Assessment."

Evidently, they make for somber reading. To quote Space Command: "We cannot expect to continue to have unchallenged access to our space capabilities."

Indeed, such challenges have begun. In Gulf War II, Iraq tried -- unsuccessfully -- to jam the GPS signals in hopes of snarling the guidance of U.S. precision weapons.

In the future, Space Command will need to do more than prevent such interference. It must also keep adversaries from using space against U.S. forces. Commercial satellite firms produce a flood of quality images and other capabilities, which are available to almost anyone.

The Air Force is approaching the counterspace problem on three fronts.

* Highest priority goes to strengthening "space situation awareness," the foundation of counterspace actions. "There are some 10,000 objects in space," said Peter B. Teets, Air Force undersecretary and DOD point man for space. "We know precious little about many of them, and we'd like to know more."

* Next in importance comes development of defensive counterspace powers -- ways and means to protect orbital and ground-based space assets.

Space Command is updating defensive tactics, techniques and procedures.

* The last and least urgent step focuses on "offensive counterspace" capabilities -- the power to keep an adversary from using space systems for his own military advantage.

Unless the United States makes a course correction, it will, at some point, probably suffer a serious attack on its assets in space, one that would hamper its military operations.

Seen in that light, the Air Force's space proposals seem not only sensible but restrained.

The Bush administration and Congress need to get on with the task of funding these projects so that airmen can do their work.

Robert S. Dudney, editor in chief of Air Force Magazine, wrote this columnn for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is bdudney@afa.org.

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