Tag Archives: Defense Budget & Expenditures

The American Mainstream’ Wants a U.S. Missile Defense; Guess That Makes its Opponents Extremists’

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday, the respected polling firm McLaughlin & Associates sent a message that should be read loud and clear in the Bush White House, on Capitol Hill and in media and other elite salons across America: The vast majority of Americans — seven in ten — strongly support the development of a national missile defense system.

The poll, which sampled 1,000 likely voters, is remarkable, among other things, for the fact that even those who identified themselves as “liberal” responded “Yes” by a clear majority (58.1%) when asked “Should the United States develop a missile defense system to guard the Nation from missile attacks from Iraq, Iran, and other terrorist states?” In addition, some 63 percent of Democrats polled likewise responded in favor of missile defense, as did a full 70 percent of African-Americans and 72 percent of women.

As a press release issued by the polling firm put it:

The public sentiment to develop a missile defense system is strong across all voting segments. More than 4 in 5 Republicans want a missile defense system developed, and nearly two-thirds of Democrats and independents believe the United States should build a missile defense system. Women are slightly more in favor of developing a missile defense system than men. Majority support for this national antiterrorist missile defense system extends across every geographic area, every ideological group, every age group tested, and is equally solid among African-Americans and whites.

Confirmation of Previous Opinion Research

McLaughlin’s results broadly confirm the findings of earlier polls and focus groups concerning the missile defense issue. For example, a poll two years ago, commissioned by the Center for Security Policy, the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute and the Family Research Council was revealing not only about the breadth of support for the deployment of missile defenses (as much as 86 percent of registered voters) but the intensity of that support: Fully forty-six percent believed it to be an “urgent priority.” Only eight percent of the electorate was then opposed to such a deployment.

The fact that this poll registered even larger majorities in favor of deploying missile defense than the McLaughlin survey may have been attributable to the fact that, in 1998, the respondents were first asked whether they thought the U.S. military could destroy a missile if one were launched at this country. Only 27% of those polled correctly answered that the U.S. military would not be able to destroy a ballistic missile fired at the United States. Seventy-four percent either believed that the U.S. military could destroy the ballistic missile (54%) or said they do not know (20%).

When told the unhappy truth, 78% of those queried said they were “surprised” (45%), “shocked and angry” (19%), or “skeptical” (14%) of government documents that indicate that the U.S. military cannot destroy even a single incoming missile. Only twenty-two percent said that they were “not surprised at all.”

Insofar as there has still not been a sustained, nationwide effort mounted to expose the public to the full extent of their vulnerability to missile attack, it is entirely possible that the McLaughlin data actually understates how strong the American people’s support for anti-missile defenses would actually be if so informed.

The Bottom Line

While George W. Bush has properly declared that his policy decisions will not be predicated upon polls, it can only encourage him as he prepares to act on his oft-stated commitment to deploy national missile defenses “as soon as possible” that he will enjoy broad-based, bipartisan support from the American people when he does so.

This will be particularly true if Mr. Bush chooses to proceed in a way that will appeal to his constituents’ native common-sense and sense of fiscal responsibility. That would be the effect of his announcement in the immediate future that we will begin in six-month’s time to adapt what the Nation has already bought and paid for — namely, the Navy’s fifty-five Aegis fleet air defense ships — to serve as the infrastructure for a missile defense, first for our forces and allies overseas and, “as soon as possible,” for the American people and homeland as well.

At a minimum, the President, his advisors and the rest of us should take note of one unmistakable fact: It is the opponents of such a deployment of missile defenses — not the Administration and its allies — who are clearly “out of the mainstream” or, in the political vernacular of the day, “extremists.”

Safire makes the case for a missile defense for allies and US

In yesterday’s New York Times, syndicated columnist William Safire addressed with characteristic lucidity the folly of the left-wing governments now running virtually every Western European nation who are bent on forging a separate defense "identity." In other words, they are seeking ways to diminish, if not actually to eliminate, the Transatlantic security pillar and its principal instrument, NATO.

The perils of this stratagem are evident amidst reports that the former leftist Committee on Nuclear Disarmament agitator turned British Minister of Defense turned NATO Secretary General, George Robertson, is in Moscow seeking to thaw chilly relations with Russian president Vladimir Putin by promising to "go much farther in [NATO’s] cooperation" if the Kremlin is willing to do so, as well.

In his column, Mr. Safire ridicules the European Rapid Reaction Force (EERF — "barkingly pronounced erf!") and offers a different approach, one that "revives the original idea behind NATO. American power — including the nuclear umbrella — was extended across the Atlantic to protect our European allies, as their forces joined in mutual defense."

In planning to cope with the threat sure to come from Iraq, Iran or some well-financed terrorist group, an American-built missile defense system should again be assisted by, and in return protect, our allies. Therefore, we should not limit ourselves to N.M.D., a national missile defense. We should test and deploy an A.M.D., an allied missile defense, extending its reach to allies endangered by blackmailers with deliverable weapons of mass destruction.

Fortunately, the most cost-effective, near-term and flexible approach to missile defense would be to adapt the U.S. Navy’s Aegis fleet air defense system so as to give it the capability to shoot down as quickly as possible missiles aimed at U.S. forces and allies overseas and Americans here at home. It can only be hoped that President Bush will commit the Nation to such a course of action in the very near future and — by so doing, that he will revitalize not only American security, but the common defense of freedom loving peoples everywhere.

 

NATO or ERRF?

By William Safire

The New York Times, 25 January 2001

London — Believers in a united European superpower have taken their vision beyond the realm of economic union. Led by French chauvinists and Brussels bureaucrats, they now espouse a military alliance without the United States, called the European Rapid Reaction Force — ERRF, barkingly pronounced erf!

The non-American force would not supplant the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the go-it-alone crowd in Europe insists. With the old Soviet threat gone, erf! would "rebalance" the Atlantic Alliance by taking regional responsibility for strictly local interventions.

This Euro-isolationism delights American isolationists. What are we doing in the Balkans anyway? our America-firsters ask. Let Europeans take care of Europe; Lafayette, we are outta here.

One European leader not yet in power is resisting this slow dissolution of the alliance. In a Churchillian speech defending the U.S.-European strategic relationship, William Hague, the Conservative challenger to Tony Blair’s "third way" government of Britain, said: "Conservatives wanted cooperation inside NATO, to strengthen NATO. What we are getting is duplication outside NATO, to weaken NATO."

President Bush inherits a wishy- washy U.S. response to Euro-isolationism. Bill Clinton’s "three D’s" accepted erf! provided it did not decouple Europe from NATO, did not duplicate forces, and did not discriminate against Turkey, the NATO member outside the European Union. That was strategic sophistry: erf! is designed to do all three.

Pollsters here give the bold, bald Hague no chance of ousting Labor in elections this spring. Despite the resignation of Blair’s chief political guru yesterday after a passport-influencing episode was revealed, the most that the small rightist minority is said to hope for is a gain of 80 seats in the lopsided Parliament.

The agile Blair, Clinton’s buddy, is now pulling out all the stops to get a pre-election photo op with Bush. Because meddling in the elections of democratic allies is not good policy, I hope our new president prudently waits to make a post- election date to reassert our special relationship with whomever the British choose as their prime minister.

That’s also because Hague understands America’s need for a missile defense against rogue-state blackmail. Although Blair, like many Europeans, nibbles his nails about an American shield lest it be seen as an invitation to a new arms race, Hague says, "I believe Britain should cooperate with the United States to the best of our ability as it develops and builds its weapons shield."

How? In Fylingdales, among the black-faced sheep of northern Yorkshire, sits a radar station built by the U.S. If expanded, it could well become an outpost much needed to track missiles on their way to North America and to plot their interception.

The Fylingdales upgrade is resisted because any nation that cooperates with U.S. missile defense might itself become a terrorist target. For that reason, Hague wishes that the Bush administration would go beyond "a purely national missile shield." Instead, "the aim should surely be a global defense shield to which Britain could contribute its early warning radars as well as much-needed political and diplomatic support."

This revives the original idea behind NATO. American power — including the nuclear umbrella — was extended across the Atlantic to protect our European allies, as their forces joined in mutual defense. In planning to cope with the threat sure to come from Iraq, Iran or some well- financed terrorist group, an American-built missile defense system should again be assisted by, and in return protect, our allies.

Therefore, we should not limit ourselves to N.M.D., a national missile defense. We should test and deploy an A.M.D., an allied missile defense, extending its reach to allies endangered by blackmailers with deliverable weapons of mass destruction.

That will be costly; only the superpower can afford it. Tests will fail and fail and ultimately succeed; only the superpower’s technology can achieve it.

The same idea that protected the free world from Communist domination for a half-century can protect the world from future terrorist intimidation. That idea is not erf! or multi- isolationism or a go-it-alone shield. It is the idea of collective security exemplified by NATO and led, as before, by a powerfully safe America.

The Osprey as Phoenix

(Washington, D.C.): Seems like a no-brainer. The new Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, is under orders to cut some big military procurement programs so as to “transform the military” on the (relatively) cheap. Everybody from the General Accounting Office to “60 Minutes” to the Pentagon’s own testing czar have identified an obvious choice for cancellation: the V-22 Osprey. Vice President Dick Cheney’s past opposition to the Osprey; its recent, fatal crashes, substantial price tag and technical complexity; and, most recently, allegations that Marine Corps personnel covered up its maintenance problems — all appear to validate the argument that this is a weapon system the armed services can live without.

There is only one problem with this emerging conventional wisdom. It’s wrong.

The Corps Requires the Osprey

Although 60 Minutes’ powerful assault on the V-22 program — with its heart-rending appeals from those who lost Marines in the latest Osprey crashes — made the point dismissively, the Corps is right when it says the missions of the future require the application of this aircraft’s revolutionary tilt-rotor technology. In fact, successive studies by the Pentagon and by outside experts (including the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory) conducted over the past eighteen years have confirmed again and again that no combination of traditional helicopters offers as much combat performance, mission flexibility and survivability at a lower cost than this aircraft which can take-off and land vertically, but convert in-flight to operate like a conventional plane.

The fact is that the Marines will have to purchase something to provide for the future mobility of their air assault forces and the associated equipment. The existing fleet of CH-53 and CH-46 helicopters is rapidly obsolescing and has been forced to stand-down for safety reasons at various times in recent years.

Indeed, problems associated with keeping sophisticated weaponry on-line — like those said to be afflicting the V-22 and allegedly being suppressed — are, unfortunately, affecting not only the Corps’ other aviation assets. The cumulative effect of inadequate funding for spare parts and maintenance and the wearing-out of so much of the Pentagon’s inventory is part of the Clinton legacy that Messrs. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are going to have to work hard and invest massively to overcome.

No Substitutes are Acceptable

While the manufacturer of the Blackhawk UH-60 helicopters have been trying to kill the Osprey for years with assurances that their product can supplant it for less cost, the siren’s seductive song is deceptive. To make an apples-to-apples comparison, the Blackhawks would have to be modified to carry larger payloads and many more would have to be purchased. In addition, a new buy of the heavier lift CH-53 helicopters would be required to get comparable capabilities to the planned V-22-only fleet. Since the CH-53 is no longer in production, there would be considerable delays in taking delivery and large costs associated with restarting the line — especially if, as seems certain, there would have to be redesigns and requalification of suppliers. Additional high costs associated with maintaining the existing fleet of Marine helicopters for a still-longer period would, accordingly, have to be factored into the equation.

Then there are more intangible, but no-less-real operational considerations. Studies have shown that the V-22’s significantly longer range and faster speed may contribute decisively to success on the battlefield. Not least, this can mean losses avoided in a currency we hold even more dear than dollars — the lives of our troops as they fight the Nation’s wars.

Unlike the alternatives, the Osprey was designed from the ground up to operate in nuclear, chemical or biological weapons-contaminated environments. As going into harm’s way in the future may well require fighting in such difficult conditions, the armed forces must have the best “NBC” protection possible.

The V-22 has also been designed to be self-deployable — a huge, albeit difficult to quantify, contribution to the flexibility and rapidity with which the United States can respond to far-flung crises without tying up already over-committed and rapidly aging transport aircraft. Various scenarios that have been modeled that suggest the difference can between a timely intervention that makes possible a decisive and low- cost victory on the battlefield, on the one hand, and a tardy and insufficient engagement that can incur needless tactical setbacks and human tolls on the other.

These qualities mean that once the Marines have perfected the Osprey, the other armed services are sure to purchase tilt-rotor aircraft in significant quantities. The Air Force is already committed to acquire a derivative of the V-22 to support the Nation’s special operations units. In due course, search-and-rescue, combat medevac and the Army’s heliborne forces will likely find the enhanced performance made possible by tilt-rotor technology to be irresistible, with a possibly profound and positive impact on the economies of scale and unit price of each plane. Ditto the very sizeable potential for foreign military sales.

The Peace Dividend’

There is, however, another powerful argument for the United States to support the Marines in their determined effort to capitalize on the nearly twenty-year-long investment in the V-22 — an argument that neither 60 Minutes, nor the GAO nor the other critics have addressed: Tilt-rotor technology will not only revolutionize the art of war. It promises to transform civil aviation in this country as well.

At a time when the American people are reeling from the effects of grid-locked airports with little likelihood of additional construction of long-runway facilities to ease the congestion, commercial spin-offs of the V-22 offer the promise of cost-effective and convenient air transport for millions of our countrymen. The export potential of such aircraft is possibly huge as well with keen interest in the civil tilt-rotor being expressed in densely populated countries like Japan, where real estate and rapid transit are at a premium. These considerations make decisions about the future of the V-22 truly national ones; the Marines should be extolled — not criticized — for their willingness to make the investment upon which we all stand to capitalize.

The Bottom Line

The V-22 was named for the Osprey for their shared and extraordinary aerodynamic abilities. Given the compelling reasons for fulfilling this aircraft’s promise that have repeatedly overcome the program’s technical challenges and previous efforts to terminate it, the tilt-rotor it might more appropriately be named for another creature — the Phoenix. Like that mythical beast, the V-22 can — and must be allowed to — rise again.

Now Hear This: The Commandant Speaks Out on the V-22

(Washington, D.C.): On last night’s edition of PBS’ “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General James L. Jones, responded publicly to criticism of the Corp’s revolutionary V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft, known as the Osprey. The General forcefully defended the Osprey as a proven technology, of inestimable value to the military and a potentially huge “peace dividend” for the Nation as a whole when tilt-rotor technology’s civil applications are fully exploited.

The qualities of leadership, courage, integrity and candor that were recognized when General Jones received the Center for Security Policy’s 1999 Keeper of the Flame Award were much in evidence in this interview with Ray Suarez. Highlights include the following:

Interview with Gen. James L. Jones

The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 22 January 2001

…The Osprey is, first of all, not a new technology. This particular airplane has been flying for over 11 years. The V-style concept goes back to almost 1953 with the XV-3 and more recently its precursor, the XV-15 back to 1977.

So we have many years of data on this kind of technology. Most of the difficulties that have been associated with the program over the 11 years that this type of airplane has been flying have been not related to the tilt-rotor technology itself but other ancillary events that have caused mishaps. Statistically it is within the norms of other new-type airplanes that come on line, and I won’t bore you with those details.

But in the experimental phases, there are tragically accidents that happen. And in the operational phase, we continue with every aircraft we bring in to our inventory to experiment, and we learn more as we go along. That doesn’t make it a test model flown by test pilots in the production phase.

So simply put, the tilt rotor technology is not nearly as new as it is being portrayed. So far, the accidents that have happened are not necessarily linked to tilt rotor technology but other problems that can be and have been resolved.

* * *

…I think that any commander and anyone in charge of the operational tests and evaluation phase of particularly transport airplanes wants to make sure that the aircraft is as safe as possible before you put troops in it.

* * *

It’s very disturbing to hear [about allegations that maintenance data has been falsified.] Obviously upon hearing of it, we ordered the Inspector General down to investigate and either substantiate or [disprove] the allegations. It is particularly disturbing in an organization like the United States Marine Corps, which prides itself on integrity and truthfulness. There is no program that I know of that would justify anyone to make false statements concerning readiness of a program. This is peacetime. We don’t have to do that.

The most important thing is the safety of our Marines. Whether it’s in the air, on land or at sea, that is job one for any commander. So this will be looked at appropriately and we’ll come to the conclusions that we have to draw from this lesson — including looking at ourselves to see what it is that might cause our commanders to feel or a commander to feel that he would have to do something like that.

* * *

We will investigate this not in limited fashion but in an unlimited fashion to make sure that all throughout the chain of command people have acted properly, and I’m confident that we’ll do a very thorough investigation that will be fully open and vetted in the public domain because of the people’s right to know.

* * *

This airplane has been looked at in over seven Cost and Operational Effectiveness Analyses since its inception. It has been studied. It has been delayed. It has even been canceled, but each time, it has survived the critics because of its enormous potential — a potential that really transcends the military community and extends, in my judgment, into the commercial sector as well.

When you think of the potential benefits to our industrial base by being able to market this kind of technology, it’s going to be, I think, a very big addition to reducing our crowded airways over our airports and the like.

The military application though is beyond question: Twice as fast, three times the payload, five times the range of any comparable helicopter. This enables not only Marines but members of the special operation forces and our Navy — who are also buyers in this program — to do things that we’ve never been able to do in a much more unlimited way against the threat and [that we will] face in the future.

So, as someone who is an advocate for safety and preserving the lives and the risk we subject our troops to, to have a technologically advanced capability to do this is exactly what we should do — but not simply because it’s a program that we have fallen in love with.

In 1954, the Department of Defense had over 770 airplane accidents. In the year 2000, it had 24. That’s what technology can do for you. But yet over those 770 accidents, all were regretted and all were unforeseen and on airplanes that we thought were safe, and humans did their best to make safe.

But the fact is that flying still has a certain amount of risk to it. It takes heroes to do it. We mourn their losses. We grieve for their families, but nonetheless, in the final analysis we have to do what’s best for our troops, what’s best for our military and what’s the safest thing that we can send our troops in harm’s way [in] if they have to go there and bring them back alive.

* * *

I’m confident in the technology. I’m confident in the research that’s gone into it. I’m confident in the people that advise me with regard to the potential of this airplane, but we are not going to do anything reckless. We are not going to expose our pilots or our crew chiefs or our crew members or our Marines unnecessarily.

If at the end of the evaluation period not only the IG, but the accident report and more importantly I think the blue ribbon panel that Secretary Cohen convened, we will take a measured look — and I’m reasonably confident that this technology is going to be a boon to our military. It will be a boon to our industrial base and will bring a great new concept into aviation.

The Rumsfeld Effect’: Leadership on Missile Defense

(Washington, D.C.): A few years back, the conventional wisdom had it that the Soviet Union was an immutable fact of life, that U.S. security could only be obtained through negotiated arms control agreements with the Kremlin and that the alternative to acceding to the lowest-common-denominator consensus among America’s allies was isolationism. Today, many of those who held such views assert with equal adamance that the United States is legally prohibited from building missile defenses without Russia’s permission and that neither Moscow — nor, for that matter, Beijing and allied capitals — will ever agree to such a deployment.

Just as the first set of assertions have been shown to be false, the current conventional wisdom is becoming ever more palpably wrong. In the attached, excellent column published in today’s Washington Post, Robert Kagan observes the already discernable impact of President-elect Bush’s appointment of Donald Rumsfeld to run the Pentagon once again:

Call it the “Rumsfeld effect.” Bush’s pick for secretary of defense — described in European headlines as a “hawkish missile advocate” — has gone a long way toward convincing the Europeans that Bush, unlike Clinton, is serious about going forward with an ambitious missile shield. Missile defense hard-liners and astute American diplomats have long argued that creating an aura of inevitability is the key to winning European and eventually Russian acquiescence in a program they now think they hate. As Rumsfeld puts it, “once the Russians understand that the United States is serious about this and intends to deploy…they will find a way…to accept that reality.”

Cases in Point

By way of evidence of the “Rumsfeld effect,” Mr. Kagan points to an important speech on the future and durability of the “U.S.-European strategic relationship” given on 12 January by William Hague MP, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. Mr. Hague said, in part:

The new U.S. administration is firm about…the early deployment of a missile shield. I welcome the appointment of Donald Rumsfeld, who has done more than anyone to heighten public awareness of missile proliferation, as Secretary of Defense. It is a signal of the importance that the President-elect attaches to early deployment. I think the United States should be supported in pushing forward this project and in pursuing the necessary research.

Further evidence of the tectonic shifts the new American leadership is causing on the missile defense front can be found in the left-wing British newspaper, The Independent, which made the following, for-it-extraordinary statement in an editorial published on Monday: “Fortunately for us, the Americans could only protect themselves by protecting us….The Americans may receive little gratitude for national missile defense, but yet again, they will be making a large and disinterested financial sacrifice in the cause of world peace.” (Emphasis added.)

If even the British left is swinging at anchor before the new Administration actually takes office, it is predictable that — if the Bush-Cheney team speaks with one voice along Secretary Rumsfeld’s lines and moves out smartly to begin deployment of the first components of missile defenses at the earliest possible time — Russia and China will have little choice but to accommodate themselves to the fact of American determination, as well.

It behooves the new President, therefore, to eliminate any possibility of confusion on this score. One place to start is by ensuring that the Rumsfeld effect is maximized by confirming that responsibility for missile defense rests where it belongs, with the Pentagon. This would mean that it is not, in fact, “an assignment of the Secretary of State” — a formulation Mr. Bush hopefully did not mean to use in a New York Times interview published last Sunday. This is all the more important insofar as his Secretary of State-designate, General Colin Powell sent signals during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing yesterday that could embolden opponents of missile defenses to believe that redoubled criticism in places like China and Europe could have the effect of delaying, if not scrubbing, U.S. deployments of NMD.1

The Bottom Line

President Bush’s inaugural address provides an opportune — and appropriate — chance to affirm the course the new Administration will follow, both in terms of policy and programs (notably, an accelerated deployment of anti-missile systems at sea aboard the Navy’s existing Aegis ships) to provide effective missile defenses to the American people as soon as technologically possible, as the law of the land requires. Draft speech language toward this end has been suggested by the Center’s President, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., in a memo to President Bush that appeared in National Review Online this week (see the attached).



1 For example, in his confirmation hearing yesterday, Gen. Powell emphasized the need to “persuade our Chinese interlocutors that this [NMD] system is not intended, nor does it have the capacity…to destroy their deterrent force.” To our allies who are opposed to the NMD, Powell recommended to the Senate that “we have to do a better job of explaining to them and communicating to them how it will all fit together.”

Rumsfeld Hits Two Home Runs

(Washington, D.C.): To say that once-and-future Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has had a busy week would be an understatement. First, he dazzled Senators with his encyclopedic knowledge of U.S. defense and national security issues at his confirmation hearing yesterday. Then, in the course of his hearings, a report of potentially immense strategic significance that had been prepared over the past year under his direction as Chairman of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization was issued.

As the Wall Street Journal correctly points out in its lead editorial published today, the second Rumsfeld Commission (the first, completed in 1998, profoundly reshaped the debate about missile defense by establishing the threat posed by long-range ballistic missiles is real and growing) makes the absolutely crucial central point, that

The U.S. has been muddling along, taking its pre-eminence for granted and leaving itself vulnerable to “a space Pearl Harbor” while other nations have been developing space programs apace. Space is a “vital national interest,” says retired Admiral David Jeremiah, who served on the panel. “We need higher expectations and more emphasis on doing than on word-smithing.”

This and other points in the Journal editorial and in the Rumsfeld II report track with observations and recommendations made in the course of the Center’s recent High-Level Roundtable Discussion entitled, “Space Power: What Is At Stake, What Will It Take?” See attached for copies of the highlights of this important Roundtable.

Rumsfeld II

The Wall Street Journal, 12 January 2001

At the same time that Donald Rumsfeld’s confirmation hearing was taking place in the Armed Services Committee yesterday, the latest evidence of why he is precisely the Defense Secretary the nation needs at this point in history was being delivered elsewhere in the building.

The Rumsfeld Commission report on space, which was unveiled yesterday, is up there in importance with the report of the first Rumsfeld Commission, which warned in 1998 of the danger of ballistic missile attack. As if on cue, a month later North Korea provided real-life confirmation of the threat by testing a missile over the Sea of Japan. Rumsfeld I put the lie to the Clinton Administration’s blithe assertion that there is nothing to worry about.

This time the issue at hand is the not-unrelated subject of space power, what’s at stake and what it will take to ensure that the U.S. remains pre-eminent. Though the Defense Secretary-designate resigned from the commission the day he was nominated, the report is laced with Rumsfeld wisdom. For one thing, like Rumsfeld I, Rumsfeld II is both bipartisan and unanimous, which means its recommendations ought to be relatively easy to implement. For another, the organization and streamlining that the commission recommends reflect Mr. Rumsfeld’s experience as a CEO with his eye fixed firmly on the bottom line.

In this case, the bottom line is maintaining U.S. superiority in space. The commission’s main message is that the U.S. has been muddling along, taking its pre-eminence for granted and leaving itself vulnerable to “a space Pearl Harbor” while other nations have been developing space programs apace. Space is a “vital national interest,” says retired Admiral David Jeremiah, who served on the panel. “We need higher expectations and more emphasis on doing than on word-smithing.”

Among the commission’s recommendations are such no-brainers as satellite defenses, a fast-track program to develop a space-launch capability that can compete with the French and the Chinese, and better incentives for American students to study technology and engineering. But the heart of the report is its recommendations for restructuring the myriad Defense Department, military and intelligence bodies responsible for space programs with the aim of forcing them to work together more closely. The idea is to arrange things “so we get better policy judgments,” says Admiral Jeremiah.

Toward that end, the commission also recommends the establishment of a Presidential Space Advisory Board, similar to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. It would be made up of experts from industry, government and science and would advise the President on what’s technologically feasible. And while the commission stops short of calling for the creation of a separate space force — favored by Senator Bob Smith, sponsor of the legislation setting up the commission — it makes it clear that that’s probably not too far off. Most of the commission’s recommendations for reorganization can be implemented in a matter of weeks if the President chooses, as Mr. Rumsfeld’s new boss almost certainly will.

The commission wasn’t afraid to tackle the trickier stuff, and it speaks plainly about weapons in space and arms control: Weapons in space are inevitable, it says, and the U.S. ought to review existing arms control obligations that get in the way of deploying a space-based deterrent. This matter-of-fact approach is sure to inflame those who think the Saddams of the world will stay out of space if the United Nations gets a few countries to sign a piece of paper telling them to. Land, sea and air are battlegrounds and “reality indicates that space will be no different,” says the report. Adds the Admiral: “We’ll have to be organized to do some kind of warfare in space.” We’re not organized now.

Anyone who doubts that space is where this century’s wars will take place would do well to take a look at the Chinese space program. The Hong Kong newspaper Sing Tao Daily reported last week on China’s ground test of a scary satellite weapon called a “parasite satellite.” This is a micro-satellite that could attach itself to just about any type of satellite with the object of jamming or destroying it if it received a command to do so. As Sing Tao put it, “to ensure winning in a future high-tech war, China’s military has been quietly working hard to develop asymmetrical combat capability so that it will become capable of completely paralyzing the enemy’s fighting system when necessary by ‘attacking selected vital points’ in the enemy’s key areas.” China’s not the only country working on micro-satellites; consider what could happen if Osama bin Laden got his hands on one and decided to use it as a weapon on U.S. satellites.

In his confirmation hearing yesterday, Mr. Rumsfeld got a chance to talk about space as well as to reiterate his commitment to a national missile defense. The two are of course closely tied; an effective NMD system is impossible without the effective use of space and both are impossible so long as the U.S. remains a party to the ABM Treaty. In our view, the best first step toward attaining both goals would be for President-elect Bush to use his Inaugural Address to announce the U.S. withdrawal from that outdated treaty.

There’s one more important recommendation from the Rumsfeld Commission that deserves mentioning. Even more important than better management of space, the panel says, “the critical need is national leadership to elevate space on the national security agenda.” That’s excellent advice. We trust the Defense Secretary-designate will listen to it.

Prelude to Rumsfeld II’: Center Issues Summary of

(Washington, D.C.): On Thursday, a blue-ribbon, congressionally-mandated commission chaired by Secretary of Defense-designate Donald Rumsfeld will release a major new report concerning the need for U.S. control of outer space — and how it can most effectively be acquired and maintained. On the eve of this strategically momentous development, the Center for Security Policy released a nineteen-page summary of a High- Level Roundtable Discussion it convened to address the subject on 11 December 2000.

The Roundtable — entitled “Space Power: What are the Stakes, What Will it Take?” — brought together over eighty past and present senior military officers, executive branch officials, industry leaders, members of the press and congressional staff members. The Roundtable featured important contributions by its lead discussants: Senator Bob Smith (R- NH), a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee; Major General Brian Arnold, USAF, Director, Space and Nuclear Deterrence, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition; Dr. Lawrence Gershwin, National Intelligence Officer for Space; Richard Fisher, Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation; Dr. Marty Faga, former Director of the National Reconnaissance Office; Ambassador Henry Cooper, former Director, Strategic Defense Initiative Organization; Dr. James Schlesinger, former Secretary of Defense and Energy, and Director of Central Intelligence; and General Charles Horner, USAF (Ret.), former Commander, U.S. Space Command, and a member of Secretary Rumsfeld’s Commission on National Security Space Management and Organization.

China’s Ambitious Bid for Space Control

Particularly noteworthy is the section of the summary that addressed emerging threats to U.S. access to and/or use of space. Just as the North Koreans in 1998 confirmed the findings of the first Rumsfeld Commission concerning the proliferation of long-range missiles with their launch of a three-stage rocket, China appears poised to validate the recommendations offered in the course of the Center’s Roundtable — and those expected to emanate from the Rumsfeld II Commission.

According to a Hong Kong newspaper, Sing Tao Jih Pao, Communist China has completed ground tests of “an advanced anti-satellite weapon called parasitic satellite’ [which] will be deployed on an experimental basis and enter the stage of space test in the near future.” The paper’s January 5 edition cites “well-informed sources” as saying that:

…To ensure winning in a future high-tech war, China’s military has been quietly working hard to develop asymmetrical combat capability so that it will become capable of completely paralyzing the enemy’s fighting system when necessary by “attacking selected vital points” in the enemy’s key areas. The development of the reliable anti-satellite “parasitic satellite” is an important part of the efforts in this regard.

It is reported that the “parasitic satellite” is a micro-satellite which can be launched to stick to an enemy satellite; and in time of war, it will jam or destroy the enemy satellite according to the command it receives. As a new-concept anti-satellite weapon, the parasitic satellite’ can control or attack many types of satellite, including low-orbit, medium-orbit and high-orbit satellites, both military and civilian satellites, single satellite, and constellated satellites. An enemy satellite, once locked on by “parasitic satellite,” cannot escape being paralyzed or destroyed instantaneously in time of war, no matter how sophisticated it is, and no matter whether it is a communications satellite, early-warning satellite, navigational satellite, reconnaissance satellite, radar electronics jamming satellite, or even space station or space-based laser gun.”


While no effort was made to forge a consensus on the part of the participants in the High-Level Roundtable, the sentiment among the experts, scientists, military personnel and others present seemed to be that the United States can no longer afford to ignore the growing capability of potential adversaries to exploit the vulnerability arising from the dependence of both America’s military and civilian economy on unencumbered access to and use of outer space. There appeared to be a nearly universally shared hope, moreover, that the Rumsfeld II Commission will catalyze fresh thinking on the part of the new Bush-Cheney Administration about the need for space power — and give rise to an urgent, reorganized, disciplined and far more energetic effort to obtain and exercise it.

View summary of the Space Power Roundtable Discussion (PDF)

Space power: What is at stake, what will it take

On the day that nineteen distinguished retired U.S. military commanders warned President Clinton that a U.S.-Russian agreement expected to be signed later in the week in Brussels is inconsistent with his declared space policy — and with the Nation’s national security and economic interests — the Center for Security Policy convened the latest of its High-Level Roundtable Discussions to address “Space Power: What is at Stake, What will it Take.”

The discussion brought together over 80 past and present senior military officers, executive branch officials, industry leaders, members of the press, and congressional staff members. The Roundtable featured important contributions by its lead discussants: Senator Bob Smith (R-NH), a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee; Major General Brian Arnold, USAF, Director, Space and Nuclear Deterrence, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition; Dr. Lawrence Gershwin, National Intelligence Officer for Space; Richard Fisher, Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation; Dr. Marty Faga, former Director of the National Reconnaissance Office; Ambassador Henry Cooper, former Director, Strategic Defense Initiative Organization; Dr. James Schlesinger, former Secretary of Defense and Energy, and Director of Central Intelligence; and General Charles Horner, USAF (Ret.), former Commander, U.S. Space Command, and a member of the Commission on National Security Space Management and Organization, chaired by Secretary of Defense-designate Donald Rumsfeld.

The present Rumsfeld Commission is scheduled to release its report on 11 January and its findings are expected to address many of the points covered in the CSP Roundtable. In fact, it seems likely that the highlights of last month’s event, summarized in the following pages, will represent a sneak preview of the Commission’s deliberations and conclusions.

This is especially the case in light of news reports that Communist China has completed ground tests of a microsatellite it calls a “parasite satellite” said to be capable of attaching itself undetected to and, upon command, disabling or destroying satellites at all altitudes. Such a development is not unexpected (see the discussion that follows of China’s space control program); its announcement should, nonetheless, serve to concentrate the minds of U.S. policy-makers on the urgent need to establish American space power capabilities.

Senator Smith Calls for U.S. Space Control

Sen. Smith — who has, during his tenure in the Senate, established a reputation as one of the Nation’s most thoughtful and indefatigable advocates of space power — keynoted the Roundtable with a forceful call for safe, reliable and affordable U.S. access to and control of space. Sen. Smith said in part:



  • “I believe that space power is absolutely critical to the future security of this nation. I cannot emphasize that enough. [Yet,] I think when you look at…the resources and how they are allocated, it does not support the concept that space power is critical to the future security of this nation. Our resources don’t even come close, not even close, to supporting that concept.”


  • “Over the last 40 years…this nation has grown to be the world leader in space, thanks to the ingenuity and hard work of many Americans….But many of you have heard me in the past express my own personal dismay that our military focus over the years has been limited more to information superiority, not true space power, and there is a difference between information superiority and true space power.”


  • “The space systems we have today provide remote sensing, navigation, communications and other support services to all of our land, air, and sea forces. And don’t misunderstand me, I do support information superiority. It’s very important. It’s critical. We all witnessed what happened in Desert Storm and without information superiority, that could have been a disaster.”


  • “But there are two other types of programs that are missing if we are to achieve true space power: Number one, we have lacked space control technology and capabilities. We don’t have space control capability, in my view. If we intend to maintain our information superiority, we need a strong space control program to protect our assets and to deny our adversaries the use of their own systems.”


  • “Having shown the world the utility of space systems, it would be pretty naive to think that our adversaries are just going to be sitting around idly and not developing their own space-based information capabilities and the tools and techniques to counter the current U.S. space advantage….We see a proliferation of reconnaissance navigation and communication satellites in countries all around the world. China is involved in that, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Iran, Russia. We have witnessed operations on a massive scale to deceive our intelligence assets prior to the India and Pakistan nuclear tests. We continue to read in the press about our adversaries developing rapid access to space capabilities and anti-satellite weapons, as well.”

    • KE-ASAT and Other Space Programs


  • “That’s why for years I have pushed…for programs like [Kinetic Energy Anti-Satellite Weapon] KE-ASAT. KE-SAT is a low cost, low risk, near-term — near-term, I emphasize — space control capability to use as a last resort to deny an adversary the use of space. Without an anti-satellite capability, today’s foreign and commercial surveillance satellites could easily detect our now famous dogleg in the desert that allowed the U.S. to quickly end the Desert Storm operation with very few casualties.”


  • “Without KE-ASAT, this nation will not have the satellite negation capability to deter satellite operators from sharing or selling our adversaries sensitive intelligence of the U.S. military, resulting in longer wars and more lives lost.”


  • “Since 1993, almost alone, I have had to put back in the budget, year after year after year, the money for KE-ASAT. We’ve spent $350 million on that program. We have another 40 or 50 million to spend to finish the job, to have the three kill vehicles tested. Yet, what’s happened? I have been attacked, personally attacked by Members [of the Senate], some in this Administration, for supporting this program. Many in the program have been attacked, have been investigated, have been harassed. That’s what has happened in this Administration, and I believe it’s a deliberate bias against space activity, military space activity.”


  • “The bottom line is we need a comprehensive space control program and we don’t need it tomorrow. We need it now, right now.”


  • “And [second,] we have lacked a flexible power-projection capability that leverages the advantages of space and space flight — programs like space-based laser and the space plane. A space-based laser will someday provide precision strike at the speed of light. It could potentially engage not only targets in space, but also targets in the air, on the ground, and on the sea. But we’re not spending the dollars that we need to spend on that program.”


  • “A military space plane promises low-cost, rapid access to space for a variety of space control and information superiority missions. Can you imagine being able to launch that and getting anywhere in the world in about 45 minutes? Yet…it was line item vetoed by the President of the United States two years ago, one of three items, and only three military items that were line items, only three, space plane, KE-ASAT, and Clementine, all line item vetoed….Luckily, the Supreme Court found the line item veto unconstitutional and the budgets Congress put in place for these programs were restored. However, the money was still not spent, for the most part. It was basically ignored.”


  • “The Administration was not able to kill these mandated space programs, but they did their best to ensure that the needed space power technologies were not pursued and that the program management was muddled, and it happened in KE-ASAT and it’s happening in the space plane and it’s happening in Clementine.”


  • “The annual budgets repeatedly shortchange space programs. The annual realignment of funds at the end of each fiscal year disproportionately takes money from space programs to fund other service activities. And I’m not dumping on any other service activities. They are necessary, many of them, but you do have to prioritize. People without space background are promoted ahead of people with space background. Treaties have negotiated away our space advantage. We kneel at the alter of the ABM treaty, in spite of the fact that we know that the ABM treaty is restricting — is restricting our ability to do what we need to do.“

    • Space Commission


  • “You shouldn’t be surprised if we’re not accessing space in this Administration….That’s why I established, with language in last year’s budget, the Commission on National Security Space Management and Organization, commonly referred to as the Space Commission….the Commission has 13 nationally-recognized space experts. I met with Donald Rumsfeld [Chairman of the Commission]. I have a great amount of confidence in him.”


  • “I just want a fair look, and today’s military space efforts, in my view, are primarily led by the Air Force. And despite…a lot of rhetoric by the Air Force leadership and civilian leaders to the contrary, the Air Force, as a whole, not individually, some are very outspoken, has not shown me that space is a priority.”


  • “I have explicitly asked the Space Commission to look at the creation of a separate space force. Maybe that’s a little premature, but let’s get it on the table, let’s talk about it. A solution as Draconian as breaking off a separate space force may be necessary to overcome the ingrained bias that we see right now against space, and it may be the only way to ensure that funds that have been allocated for space are spent for just that and not just ignored or buried somewhere in the budget or put somewhere else.”

    • Space Management


  • “The problems are not just in the military and the Executive Branch, however. The way we manage space here on the Hill also needs to be looked at….There are six committees in the Congress that oversee space: House/Senate Armed Services, House/Senate Intelligence, and House/Senate Appropriations. If the U.S. is to maintain its current lead in national space security at the lowest possible cost to taxpayers, we need to better coordinate activities among these committees. The kinds of things that need better coordination are three, real quickly: mix of tactical and national reconnaissance, the mix of space and airborne reconnaissance and the way we do tasking, processing, exploitation and dissemination.”

    • Conclusion


  • “Whoever controls space will control the destiny of earth and when you look at the options out there, I would ask you, who do you want it to be, Iran, Russia, Iraq, China? I don’t think so.”


  • “For those who doubt and say we can’t militarize space, I would say to you, do you want somebody else to do it?…It will be no different than the militarization of earth by the United States of America. As witnessed by World War II, when Tom Brokaw said “The greatest generation did what it did,” we use it wisely, we use it cautiously, and we only use it when we have to for the protection of earth, and that’s exactly what we’ll do in space. Exactly what we will do in space.”

Global Utilities

The Roundtable’s next heard from the Director, Space and Nuclear Deterrence, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Maj. Gen. Brian Arnold USAF. Gen. Arnold’s address, entitled “What is at Stake: Global Utilities,” provided the participants with an overview of some of the threats faced by U.S. space assets and the different ways they could be protected. Highlights of Gen. Arnold’s presentation include the following:



  • “The Air Force has taken great strides to look internally at whether or not we want to continue to be a strong advocate for space….From the Chief of Staff of the Air Force on down, we are ready to step along to continue that path and we have some ideas.”

    • Global Utilities


  • “…[There are] various civil, military, as well as international space capabilities…that our economy [is] relying on day in and day out, from environmental to imaging, to location, to timing. And all of these are critical to our national infrastructure, to our national security, and our nation has become very dependent on all these capabilities.”


  • “The importance of space to the nation is clear….We were recently talking to folks from Aerospace Industries Association of America…and they are forecasting out around at 2005 to see the commercial investments go as high as $160 billion a year. While the low-earth-orbit market has flattened out, clearly the investments are going in that direction and have far exceeded the government investments since 1997.”


  • “The United States’ unimpeded access to space is vital to national interests — the word vital’ meaning that we are willing to do whatever it takes to maintain that access.”


  • “For the war-fighter, virtually everything we do [makes use of space] — from intelligence to reconnaissance, surveillance to warning, to timing, getting over the target, to our precision guidance weapons that you saw so well used in Operation Allied Force to limit the collateral damage to put a single weapon on a single target, to the weather, to assessing the battle damage after the fight, to the communications, to the leased communications that we took from the civilian economy…and going even further to computer network defense and computer network attack, which uses a lot of space assets. These are all vital to the war fighter, as well as to our civilian economy. So space affects every one of us one way or another.”

    • Threats to U.S. Space Utilities


  • “Clearly…the evolving threat is coming along. You can see commercial imagery. The remote sensing is there. If you have access to the web, you can purchase it. As long as you have the money, you can get imagery of virtually any place in the world.”


  • “You could have threats to the space asset, the satellite itself, or the links, the up-link and down-link, or to the ground station, the ground opportunities. Clearly, you could have everywhere from a low power laser attack, to a medium, to a high power attack. So you can go anywhere from temporary denial, to disrupting for a short period of time, to degrading a sensor or a part of the satellite, to essentially destroying it.”


  • “Looking at the linkage, a lot of our linkages are unprotected and very fragile. One good example is the GPS signal….It doesn’t take a whole lot to jam that type of a signal. So, therefore, we are interested in doing things like modernizing our GPS systems…because it is such a key element to our war fighting capabilities, as well as to the Nation.”


  • Against the ground systems, this is where we probably are most vulnerable, because a lot of our ground stations are located overseas. So from the low tech end to the high tech end, to the commercial systems, they’re all tied to how well we do our job in both the national security, as well as our national economy.


  • “…There is no specific treaty prohibiting attacks on space systems, links or operations. A lot of people say that there are, but there are not. There are outer space treaties. The 1967 treaty bans orbital weapons of mass destruction, but not…for example, an ICBM coming through the atmosphere. It bans military presence in operations on celestial bodies, but not weapons in space.”

    • Protection of U.S. Space Utilities


  • So how do we protect our systems? Well, first of all, we break down space control into several basic areas. First is situational awareness. This is called space surveillance….You ought to know what’s out there, or if you’re flying in space, you ought to know what’s out there, what the bad guys are up to, what the good guys are up to, and what are all the things that can affect your systems. That’s called space surveillance.


  • The second one is prevention. That’s preventing the bad guys from getting at your valuable resources. Protection is the key piece that I’m talking about today, and that’s protecting your vital assets.


  • Then, finally, negation. As I mentioned earlier, negation can be anywhere from a very temporary denial to a degrade, all the way to a destroy.

    • Organizational Requirements


  • “At the national level, this country needs a national vision on space. We would offer that to perhaps go back to a National Space Council. Others might say a very strong interagency working group. But whatever it is, we need a very smart group of people at the very top that can direct civil, commercial, international, DOD and intelligence communities on exactly what this country wants to do.”


  • “We need a commitment to funding for space. If space is of that much importance for this country and for the world, it needs additional resources. We’ve talked earlier about how we’re trying to recapitalize the Navy, the Army and the Air Force, and, clearly, of all the Air Force assets, I would ask you to name me one that we do not need today.”


  • “Another thing we would recommend is a very strong space caucus in the Congress, just like you have an air power caucus, you have a naval power caucus. It seems to us very smart to have a space power caucus to focus on the key arguments that you would want us to face.”


  • “Moving down to the Pentagon level, we would offer to you a defense space council, headed by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, as well as the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and we would offer to you that they could bring in the DCI, to make sure we have “black” and “white” space matched correctly, we have proper vetting, at that level, and then that group could…be tied to the National Space Council.”


  • “We’re very concerned about the industrial base for radiation hard’ parts, a vanishing vendor, if you will….Right now, we are down to just a couple of vendors that produce these parts, these rad hard parts, and that is a policy issue that needs to be addressed….Critical infrastructure, like MILSTAR, we [Electro-Magnetic Pulse] EMP harden, we do that traditionally, but if you’re going to rely on commercial communications systems, what’s the rationale for not putting rad hard parts on those systems, other than there’s not a good business case? We need some kind of policy that states that.”

Threats to U.S. Equities in Space

The next section of the Roundtable amplified on the issue of emerging threats to American interests and assets in space. Under the ground-rules of this portion of the discussion, Dr. Gershwin spoke on a not-for-attribution basis. Accordingly, the following are presented as highlights of the exchanges that occurred during and after his remarks and those of Richard Fisher, not as verbatim quotes attributable to either lead discussant or the other participants.



  • Competitors and adversaries surely realize the degree to which access to space is critical to both U.S. economic and military power, and we will certainly make strides in countering U.S. space dominance over the next 15 years.


  • International commercialization of space will reduce the current U.S. edge in space support to both civil and military, and intelligence activities. Potential adversaries will continue to develop counter-space systems, pursue related technologies and expertise, and seek new techniques and tactics to reduce and counter U.S. space capabilities, with implications for both U.S. military and U.S. economic security.

    • Commercialization of Space


  • Commercial and civil space services will offer both developing countries and non-state adversaries access rivaling today’s major space powers in such areas as high resolution reconnaissance and weather prediction, global encrypted communications, and precise navigation. For example, foreign military platforms increasingly will incorporate GPS navigation receivers. When combined, such services will provide adversaries capabilities for precise targeting of U.S. or allied force deployments and global coordination of operations.


  • As higher resolution imagery becomes increasingly available on the global market for the next five years at least, foreign intelligence and military consumers will become more familiar with the utility of such high-resolution imagery, which, up until now, has been very much a U.S. unitary advantage. Such high-resolution imagery, for example, provides exploitable information on a range of military targets for which poorer resolution imagery does not. This is not just LANDSAT we’re talking about. This is really one-meter, good stuff.


  • Sales of U.S. one-meter commercial imagery probably has already sensitized foreign governments to the value of such imagery for military or intelligence missions. For example, U.S. vendors of IKONOS high resolution satellite imagery, recently announced a commercial alliance to provide the Turkish armed forces with high resolution imagery to support the Turkish military’s operational needs, and Turkey is one of just many countries that are taking advantage of the availability of commercial imagery for both military and intelligence needs.


  • Widespread availability of both meter and sub-meter resolution imagery eventually will erode U.S. space advantages by encouraging foreign efforts: first of all, to use commercial imagery for reconnaissance against U.S. and allied military forces, and against U.S. defense research and development; second, to increase investment in training foreign intelligence analysts to conduct detailed imagery analysis, something, again, which is today pretty much a unilateral U.S. advantage; and, third, to improve the denial and deception activity of foreign adversaries to hide or obscure their own critical targets and thwart U.S. and other reconnaissance.

    • Counter-Space


  • Our potential adversaries will understand U.S. strategic and economic dependence on our own access to space and will view counter-space operations as an important options for countering U.S. space superiority.


  • Over the next 15 years or so, a number of potential adversaries are likely to develop capabilities to disrupt, degrade, or defeat U.S. space assets, in particular, through denial and deception, anti-satellite technologies, such as electronic or cyber warfare, or with attacks against U.S. ground facilities.


  • Denial and deception is a problem that is growing as global awareness of U.S. intelligence capabilities improve. It is one of the least technologically demanding, yet often highly effective tools to counter U.S. space-based intelligence collection, as well as the U.S. military weapons targeting. Foreign countries are interested in or are already experimenting with a variety of technologies that could be used to develop counter-space capabilities. These efforts could result, for instance, in improved systems, such as, of particular concern, space object tracking, signal jamming, and directed energy weapons.


  • Countries lacking or wishing to augment advanced capabilities to attack satellites or data links could develop plans and capabilities to disrupt U.S. use of space by attacking our ground facilities that are supporting U.S. space operations, most likely using some sort of special operations forces.


  • Two countries [warranting] mention in particular are Russia and China. Russia inherited a variety of counter-space systems and R&D efforts from the Soviet Union and these were well documented in the 1980s, certainly when the Soviet Union was still around. Although economic programs almost certainly have curtailed their programs, Russia remains among the world’s most advanced and comprehensive — retains among the world’s most advanced and comprehensive counter-space capabilities, including the doctrine for its employment. They understand the idea.

    • China


  • China has an extensive space program of its own and is conscious of the importance of space dominance and could emerge over the next 15 years as a leading threat to U.S. space operations. China is making an enormous investment in space infrastructure and has several new space systems under development, including space launch vehicles, satellites, and manned space systems. Chinese military theorists have written a great deal about the U.S. use of space during the Gulf War, and China’s Air Force Academy recently increased the number of courses offered in space war theory.


  • Such things as space object surveillance and identification, jammers, low power lasers, are all in the business of being advertised widely in the open market. Such open availability and transfers have the potential to accelerate foreign system development and provide countries a rapid ramp-up in their counter-space abilities.


  • The threat is probably far more simple and far more elegant and may be far more imminent than we realize. [Examining] the broad scope of PLA modernization, the systems that they’re purchasing from the Russians, the capabilities that they are building themselves, the utter and total concentration on Taiwan and the degree to which they understand the taking of Taiwan would be, for them and for Asia, a major turning point in the global power balance.


  • What we can expect is a very quick war of decision that will combine space systems used to direct precision-guided missiles, cruise missiles, air-launched munitions against hundreds of targets on Taiwan for the purpose of either intimidating the leadership in Taipei, to back down and agree to unification, on Beijing’s terms, or, if they have to use these things, to utterly decimate the Taiwan force and within one or two days, at the most, well before the United States can even mobilize to come to any kind of rescue.

    And as part of that, if you take out enough of our satellite support network upon which our Asian forces depend, what will that tell the person in the White House about the inevitability of defeat and how much more will that complicate our response? And it’s not just the ASAT angle that would blind us and even further delay our response. It’s all the active systems that they’re working on, as well, to go after us and prevent our response. This could all come together well before the end of this decade.



  • China…understands space power and is rapidly developing both the infrastructure and wherewithal to challenge American current space information dominance. The Chinese understand very clearly how we used our own space power during the Gulf War, during Kosovo, and they understand that disruption of our space systems is utterly critical if they are to have any chance at all in prevailing in the conflict for which they are preparing; that is, the coming conflict over the future of Taiwan.


  • In 1998, Hantyen Satellite Corporation and Britain’s University of Surry Space Technologies signed a contract to co-develop micro satellites. Within two years, the first Chinese micro-satellite was launched.


  • The PLA is also…very concerned about being able to jam our satellites, as well as long developed the capabilities and techniques to try to hide what is important for them from overhead view.


  • In addition, the PRC is putting together its own ground-based global space tracking network. It has started operation of a space track facility on the island of Tarowa in the nation of Carabaos in the South Pacific. Just last week, we find out that a contract has been signed with Namibia, in Africa, to create another space tracking facility. They have space track capabilities on ships, but I expect that more nations, perhaps Brazil or France, Pakistan, will be joining their space track network in the future.


  • The other side of the developing Chinese space capability is their great efforts to use space on behalf of their own force, on behalf of their own national economic and military objectives. In August…Xinhua announced that China will be putting up an eight satellite imaging constellation for electro-optical 4 radar satellites. This will give the future commander of the Taiwan campaign a twice revisit capability. The PLA already has access to communication satellites and is developing satellite communication vehicles, one of which was revealed at the last Zhuhai show to support missile units.


  • On Halloween day, China launched its first navigation satellite, the BAIDO. Navigation satellites, their own access to GLONASS, access to GPS, in combination with their new imaging network will be used to provide precision targeting to the hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles that they’re building now and targeting on Taiwan, future land-attack cruise missiles, and even to target American forces in Asia.


  • Foreign technology is critical to China’s continued progress in space. Russian technology pervades their program. In terms of potential future space warfare activities, access to Russian technology, both ASAT and laser programs are probably already providing the PRC with the shortcuts that they are looking for to build their capability.


  • A nightmare scenario that some of us have looked at is if you had a case where it was a crisis over Taiwan or Korea, where we were prepared to deploy, the usual strategy today would be a couple aircraft carrier battle groups and air expeditionary forces….you might be confronted with a very rapid Chinese ability to sort of co-orbit with a number of our critical communications and military support satellites, of which there are not terribly many of them, and very suddenly take those out, either temporarily or permanently. That would pretty well devastate our ability to deploy forces.


  • As we look to the future, what really seems to be the significant approach, when we look at it from an operational standpoint, is the ability to do sorties, whether it’s a radar system that we’re talking about in the future or even a weapon. Weapons for space control or even force application, if we move in that direction, will be far more acceptable if they’re not placed in space permanently, but they are something that you can sortie the capability to do space control, whether it’s offensive or defensive, or sortie the capability to do force application. Manned fighters and bombers would be a lot less acceptable if our strategy was that we sort of keep them up permanently on the borders of a potential adversary, and we don’t do that.


  • There are unclassified papers that the Chinese have published about reusable launch vehicles beyond space plane… of two-stage-to-orbit and fully reusable launch vehicles, and the diagrams of the mission profile are 100 percent similar to the Kissler airbag/parachute-recovery concept of operations. With this sort of reusable launch vehicle capability, they would have a far more robust ASAT or surface-to-surface missile architecture, because you would recover the vehicle like an airplane and put it back together and launch it again.


  • China’s activities in space, they are asymmetric, as we call it, response, is a form of warfare that they’ve been at for 3,000 years. So to them it seems very natural and space is just one other component. How do you take out a big bully who’s got a lot of iron on target and who’s got a lot of military capabilities? Well, from their response, which has been much like water flowing, is take the path of least resistance in the way of stopping that type of projection. And their information activities, their activities in information operations are one very strong component, part of their space program…[aimed at] seeing how they can try and nullify U.S. advantages in their arena.

Roger Robinson, Chairman, William J. Casey Institute of the Center for Security Policy concluded this section of the discussion with several important points on the record:



  • “An emerging dimension of China’s ability to militarize space and challenge our assets there is that of finance or the funding side. We have been looking at China in this regard — that is, the national security dimensions of their use of our capital markets, our and bond markets, over the past four years, in what we call a capital markets transparency initiative, and have come up with some troubling findings. There are firms, state-owned firms, in particular, that are very close to the Chinese PLA, as well as their military intelligence capability, that are attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in our markets.“


  • “Hundreds of thousands of Americans are unwittingly engaged in this process. The People’s Republic of China, in its own name — no cut-outs, no subterfuge, just the government itself — has thus far borrowed $4.2 billion on our bond market. No questions asked as to where the money is going or how it’s being used; no discipline, no stated purpose for the use of funds. And we can be fairly confident that, at minimum, there is an indirect link with many of the programs that [have been discussed today, particularly their more advanced systems, and I would guess their space-based systems, as well, or those that they are aspiring to acquire.”


  • “We have keeping close tabs on this and we found that it’s escalating at an alarming rate. China has attracted totally about 25 billion in our markets thus far, with, again, never a question asked about any of the firms, no vetting for national security concerns, human rights, not to mention human rights and other concerns.”


  • “But even our core security interests have been ignored by all of the underwriters and the purchasers of these instruments, who normally would engage in more comprehensive due diligence, but national security has never been part of that mix.


  • “There is a cavalcade of literally hundreds of Chinese state-owned companies, many of the wrong sorts, from our point of view — or the parent company, affiliates and subsidiaries are certainly the wrong sorts — are planning to, in effect, fund programs of the type described from unwitting U.S. investors, and I would argue that they can’t live without our capital markets.”

U.S. Space Power Policy versus U.S. Space Power Capabilities

The Roundtable next focused on what systems and organization the United States required in order for it to exercise space power. This section was led by Dr. Marty Faga, who served as a member of the Defense Science Board’s recent Task Force on Space. Dr. Faga summarized some of the Task Force’s most important recommendations:



  • “[Defense Science Board (DSB) task force on space] observed that we possess space superiority today and noted that DOD defines superiority as that degree of dominance in space of one force over another, which permits the conduct of operations by the former, and its related land, sea and air forces at a given time and place, without prohibitive interference by the opposing force.”


  • “We see our advantage lessening, not just for what we may be failing to do, but for what others are doing; that is, potential adversaries are gaining understanding and they are attempting to gain capability. They are attempting to acquire systems that would disrupt, deny, degrade or destroy U.S. systems, and budget limits on our side are hampering U.S. modernization and introduction of new space concepts.”


  • “There is exploitation of our systems by people who can freely use GPS for whatever purpose they may choose. Adversaries are gaining access to the use of space through their own systems. They may be able to attack our ground facilities and infrastructure. They could in the future make attacks directly on satellites, perhaps, and a failure to react to these specifically in the budget and the modernization programs will obviously affect our ability to respond.”


  • “We suggested several courses that ought to be taken: 1) a protective course that would implement defense of space control capabilities that ensure that U.S. space systems perform as we plan for them to; 2) a preventative course to implement offensive space control to preclude an adversary from using U.S. or other space systems for their purposes; and 3) a modernization and new initiative course to pursue modernization, better access to space, and more effective capabilities.”


  • “A few of the key observations that we made were: U.S. policy states that access and use of space is central to U.S. national security interests and interference is viewed as an infringement on sovereign rights. The task force thinks that superiority depends largely on the deterrent value of protection and that we need to demonstrate an ability to respond, along with political, legal and economic needs, but to demonstrate the ability to apply force, if it were necessary. The U.S. should declare that it will take all appropriate self-defense measures and it would defend against use of space hostile to U.S. national security interest. We observed that there is no reasonably foreseeable threat in space against satellites, but that many nations could impinge on individual systems by terrorism, by electronic attack, and other means.”


  • “We recommended a strategy of space systems inherently designed to counter near-term attack through redundancy and robustness and hedge programs to apply within the lead time of intelligence warning to counter longer-term threats.”

Dr. Faga was followed by Amb. Henry Cooper, former Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization and former Chief Negotiator at the U.S.-Soviet Defense and Space Talks in Geneva. The following were among the main points made by Dr. Cooper in discussing the impediments to U.S. space power:



  • In 1983, Frank [Gaffney] and I worked together on a space policy report, which was in response to an amendment [by then-Senator Paul Tsongas]. Congress, at that time, demanded that we halt the testing of the F-15 ASAT until we were prepared to enter negotiations on a comprehensive ban of all anti-satellite testing and deployment. It was our objective to go through and explain why this was not a good idea and, of course, reverse the constraint that Congress had imposed. We made the case and…the test went off very well, I believe it was in 84, against a non-cooperative target.


  • But no good deed goes unpunished. Congress killed the program anyway. Now we have a reverse situation, where at least some in Congress want to build a kinetic energy ASAT, as Senator Smith told us this morning. He’s a principal lead in it, and it’s the Administration that is not pursuing that diligently.


  • In any case, I would just point out that in spite of all this, the space technologies matured most rapidly out of the SDI program. In the latter days of the Reagan Administration in 1988, the President vetoed the authorization bill, basically because it was putting a cap on how we could spend resources on space-based interceptors.


  • It’s interesting to me that the most explicit discussion so far today of the successor technologies to those that were leading technologies in the SDI program are being pursued by Surry and the Chinese, not by the Pentagon and certainly not by the Air Force, to my knowledge, unless it’s a deep, dark ” black” program. And I think this is evidence, again, of the prejudice that exists within the community against the SDI efforts of Ronald Reagan. Unfortunate, but I believe it’s true.


  • Why do we have this great political headwind that I am describing to you? I believe that it was at least heavily influenced by what I [call] the collective guilt complex of at least an influential segment of the scientific community that had been associated with the Manhattan Project and was, for sure, not going to permit the technology cutting edge in the United States [to]have such an event again. In 1946, Oppenheimer referred to it by saying “The physicists have known sin,” and this propagated.”


  • “I think we have to figure out how to reorganize the Federal bureaucracy that deals with space to rectify the dysfunctional arrangements, which I believe were deliberately put into play in the 1950s. I don’t think these things just happened. I think that they were part of a reasoned approach to the problem. And we have to build the best systems we can, of course, and somehow or other, we’ve got to get free of a lot of these trappings of the arms control history that Gen. Arnold mentioned earlier that constrain our ability to move ahead today. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll get the Pearl Harbor that President Eisenhower [had worried about in the 1950s].“

A highlight of the discussion that followed were remarks by Christopher Lay, a Senior Analyst at SAIC and long-time member of the Center for Security Policy’s National Security Advisory Council:



  • “Just having a reusable, whether single-stage-to-orbit or whatever kind of space launch vehicle, that’s only part of the answer. [You are still in trouble] if you have that system and you remain reliant only on the two existing launch facilities in Florida and California, both of which I think anybody would agree are highly vulnerable to a dedicated effort to cripple them or take them out, we haven’t solved the problem. We need to really think seriously about a variety of alternative launch facilities and, also, a launch infrastructure that’s really more suited to so-called launch-on- demand, which the Air Force has talked about at various times as a future requirement.“


  • “What that means, and it has to do with the way payloads are integrated on launch vehicles, the way satellites are designed and built or whatever you’re going to put in space, but it’s really what I call a launch infrastructure issue — geography, location, alternative means, maybe some air- launch capability, maybe even a sea-launch via submarine, whatever. But this issue of kind of being confined to these two, admittedly, very grand facilities, but if a cruise missile or even something more simple than that were directed in the right place, at the Kennedy Space Center or at Vandenberg, we’re really in trouble. We can’t reconstitute.”

Dr. Schlesinger on the Importance of Space Power

During a working lunch, Dr. James Schlesinger offered remarks on the importance of the United States continuing to exercise dominance in space. He argued that the vulnerability of U.S. space assets would jeopardize not only the United States’ ability to prosecute wars, but it could also undercut public support for American foreign policy in general:



  • “The United States, at this time, is not just any other country in the United Nations. It is the one to whom others in trouble turn, hoping that we will pull their chestnuts out of the fire, and we have been doing that with some frequency.”


  • “[Even as there has been] this growth of the American role in the world, the public has basically tuned out with respect to foreign policy. In the old days, there was the Soviet threat out there — a single permanent foe, well-equipped militarily and ideologically abhorrent to the American people — on which the public could focus.”

    “So [today] we have a public that’s turned off and, at the same time, the responsibilities that have either been thrust upon us or we have seized have grown immeasurably, and the consequence of that is that in order to continue the foreign policy role that we have taken on, we are going to have to avoid what the public wishes desperately to avoid — and that is casualties.”



  • “The public is willing to tolerate the foreign policy established by our governing elites only so long as casualties remain low. And what permits us to fulfill this role, quite simply, is our space capabilities. Without those space capabilities, we could not fulfill the international role that we have while keeping casualties low.”


  • “Our position depends upon space, space sensors, space communications, space intelligence, and, also, guiding our weapons accurately from space.”


  • “All of this is a marvelous achievement, but it creates for us a potential vulnerability and that is if we are somehow or other cut off or our ability to utilize space is reduced, we are going to be engaged around the world in ways that the U.S. public will not particularly tolerate, in that we are likely to come home with large numbers of bodies in bags. The consequence is that the public will be turned off. So our international role might come crashing down. And the moral of the story is that we have to protect the usage of space.”


  • “There has been some discussion…of ballistic missile defense and we have at least a hypothetical program to begin to deploy interceptors at some point during the decade ahead in Alaska. But one should recall that the deployment in Alaska is only a first stage, dealing with a relatively primitive foe, and that others will discover ways or develop ways of circumventing that deployment, unless we continue to upgrade it. And one of the things that will be essential for upgrading any ballistic missile defense will be the use of space and, most notably, space sensors.”


  • “Finally, let me throw out that war games that I have participated in start with somebody firing a launcher up into space with a nuclear weapon aboard, and nuclear weapon technology is spreading slowly, happily, but slowly spreading around the world, and that the weapon in space will, over time, if not instantly, degrade our space assets. So over time, we are going to have to learn to protect those assets better against such possibilities. Part of the protection is hardening, part of the protection is redundancy, and part of the protection should be reconstitution of space capabilities.”


  • Those who are interested in asymmetrical attacks are particularly interested in those capabilities, freely or at low cost, available from space that might inflict damage on us; for example, guiding a weapon onto a U.S. military base overseas during a moment of crisis. A particularly juicy target, of course, is the Global Positioning System itself, which has a very weak, very weak signal, and that signal must be upgraded in strength. At the present time, that signal can be jammed very readily and the Russians, whom we have encouraged to learn free market ways, now have on the free market a commercial jammer that you can purchase. This would have devastating effects since our whole civilian economy has gone over to use of GPS.


  • “Some years ago, in an exercise called “Eligible Receiver,” the National Security Administration (NSA) demonstrated that they could turn off all of the power on the east coast simply by information warfare, not by jamming…, but by information warfare and breaking into the computers that control the flow of power on the East Coast, or they could have done it in the Midwest or even in Texas, which has a separate system, or on the West Coast, which has had two power blackouts over the course of recent years. Now, those of you in this room who…remember the 1967 blackout in New York City may recall the panic that ensued at the time of that blackout. So I ask you, in a moment of crisis, if somebody is able to turn off power on the East Coast or the West Coast or generally nationwide, what the response would be of the American public?”


  • “One must recognize that the Internet, that the financial community, all of these things are dependent upon the signals from space, and that creates the vulnerabilities and it is for that reason that we must convey to the Congress and to the general public, through the medium, regrettably, of the media, the high degree of dependency and get support for keeping us well out in front by the techniques of hardening, protection, reconstitution of our own capabilities, and being able to cut off others from employing those assets from space to do damage to the interest of the United States, particularly our bases overseas.“


  • “One of our problems in the civilian area is that when you go out and talk to industry, they don’t trust the government. And when you talk to the people in the financial community about sharing information, the response is, yes, but we don’t want it to be shared with the FBI or we don’t want it to be shared with the IRS. And so we’re going to have to develop a technique in which people in the private sector repose sufficient faith that they are willing to discuss the problems that are emerging with regard to hacker attacks. If you can’t deal with hacker attacks, you’re not going to deal with the attacks of some hostile power overseas. That mutual distrust is something that will have to be overcome if we are going to be able to help on the civilian side.”


  • “Another problem that we have is that as the people in the civilian community tend to think about information warfare as attacking their own firms or their own corporate world, and that the consequence is that they will be the victims of fraud. When you think about the larger possibilities of a massive information warfare attack, they say, well, that’s the responsibility of the government to solve.”


  • “Unless we are able to slow down the combination of capabilities that permit others to attack our bases overseas, a U.S. military establishment that is dependent upon overseas bases is somewhat vulnerable. You think of major engagements of the United States and the dependency upon a string of bases, say, off the coast of East Asia, that is quite worrisome, and we ought to be thinking now of ways of getting around that problem.”


  • “It is not just the national enemies that are taking advantage of these new technologies. I suppose I should have mentioned that earlier. But the criminal activities around the world, you can use the GPS system to drop — from aircraft, drop drugs off our shores at a specified point and that through GPS guidance, we get a motor launch that comes out from shore and picks up those drugs and so forth.”


  • “I think we are going to have to look increasingly at anti-satellite vehicles. We are going to have to look at a whole range of things that, for reasons of the hopeful arms controllers, we have been reluctant to look at in the past. That was a reflection of the fact that others were having — were achieving access to these technologies more slowly than one might have feared, but that era is passing.”

Organizing for Space Power

The final portion of the Roundtable involved a very animated discussion led by the former Commander of U.S. Space Command, Gen. Charles Horner. Among the most stimulating of Gen. Horner’s remarks were the following:



  • “The commercial space advantages we have are probably 99 percent based upon research and development that’s done for military space, national security space, panels, gyros, materials, launch vehicles.”


  • “I think one of the major problems we face with regard to national security space is the vulnerability of our technology base — the industrial support of space. R&D is drying up. Private companies are using their own initiative money to bid proposals, because business has gotten so hard that it doesn’t make any sense to do R&D when you don’t know whether you’re going to be in business the next year or not. And, also, there’s a constant problem with regard to attracting new, young, bright people to the space sector. Now they go to the dot-coms, as I understand it.”


  • “We saw that just recently in the Discoverer-2 [space-based radar] program. Now, you can get any kind of answer you want as to why Discoverer-2 failed or was canceled, but one of them was not military utility and another one was not technical capability. So its failure is evidence of dysfunctional relationships, in my view.”


  • “I [have] called for a space architect. I was very frustrated trying to build a unified command, integrated program list, priority list, to say these are the things that representing all the other unified commanders, this is what we want to see space go after.”


  • “It’s interesting that in the relationship between the Department of Defense and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, that cooperation is fundamental and vital to smooth working relationships between the national security space agencies. And I would challenge you to point to the meetings that have occurred in the recent years and the agendas that were discussed in those meetings. I am not aware of any.”


  • We need more public awareness and discussion. I went before the Senate Armed Services Committee and I said — I was, at the time, the Commander of Space Command, and I said that my experience in the desert, in Desert Storm, was that space had become fundamental to warfare, particularly the way we like to fight wars, and that as space became more important to warfare, space control would become more important to warfare, at which time one Senator attacked me, which didn’t bother me, but said You just want to shoot down a satellite.’

    “I said, No, sir, I didn’t say that, but if people are dying on the battlefield, we’ll have to know what to do and how to do it and get on with it.’ And finally he was brought under control by John McCain, who is a dear friend, and so we got all done and everything. That Senator is now the Secretary of Defense and he’s talking about space control. So I guess what goes around comes around.”



  • With regard to the relationship between the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the Pentagon — we’re primarily talking Air Force space. I think we have to have a coming together there. We have a lot of very talented people in the NRO and they have a history of doing some very exciting things in space. You would hope you would be able to transfer that into the Air Force space, bring our cultures together, so that you could take advantage of what the NRO has in terms of streamlined acquisition procedures, and so on and so forth, and make them work together.”


  • “There is no doubt, in my mind, we are going to have to do space control in the future, and so we ought to be honest and open about it in order to both build deterrents, because if you keep everything in the dark, there’s no deterrence, and, also, to get the American public aware of this.”


  • “I think we have to come to grips with ballistic missile defense in space. It’s going to happen. There are some impediments and treaties and the treaties and arms control things cause us a lot of problems in space. Frank [Gaffney] mentioned the one about launch notification. In and of itself, probably not a bad thing, but the trouble is it even goes to the point where, in the future, if you launch an air-to-air missile, you want to shoot down a MIG, you have to give the Russians 24 hours notice, under some interpretations of this particular treaty, and, of course, we find that ridiculous.”


  • “With regard to research and development, I think that there is a general awareness that we must increase our research and development funds across the military, and certainly space is one area where they have a lot of leverage.”


  • “The space warriors of a decade or so from now are not going to be necessarily the people that have grown up in space today, because there is a different mind set from — and if anything, I mean, one of the things that I think the fighter pilot mind-set is probably a little closer to where we need to go than the space geek mind set.”


  • “We need to have space people who understand what other people are doing to make their efforts integrate, to make their efforts of most use. But I think the other issue, the one we’re arguing, is we need people in space to provide leadership in space to promote space doctrine, not doctrine that uses space, and, of course, that’s the one that people hope that a space service would solve. Just like the Air Force cannot be ignorant of how the Army, Marine Corps, and Navy think, and now that the Navy no longer is out there in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific, they can no longer be ignorant of how the Air Force and the Army think, and the Marine Corps. So yes, there has to be an integration there, but we also have to create people who are different.

    • Discussion


  • “If we had a clear understanding of what the post-Cold War world is, what the policies are, we could devise strategy, which would then lead to forces, and that’s probably what we need to do with the new leadership coming into the White House….That would help with a lot of these issues. Then we’d know how much allocation of funds we need to put on space.

    “If you just leave it up to the Air Force, you get a third of the defense budget to do whatever you want to with it, it’s got to trade off B-2 against Discover-2. They’re not equipped to make that decision.”



  • “Quibbling over who supplies the money is kind of irrelevant to me. The issue is we have to make a national commitment, I think, in the future to say that we have a opportunity, and I think most of the people here seem to have agreed that we can have a space dominant strategy in the decades ahead, but we’re not going to get there unless we take some number of years, maybe it’s five, maybe it’s ten — it’s certainly not more than ten — and do things.”


  • “We’re going to have to take some chances here on research and development. This isn’t to deploy these things, but to go out and demonstrate them. I mean, they never did the question mark thing if they didn’t have an airplane. They had to cut a hole in an airplane. So somebody had to buy them an airplane.

    “So I think in order to do these things in space, somebody’s going to have to buy us the necessary prototypes to go demonstrate that we can do it and if we don’t do this, all this is moot.”



  • “The Chinese things we saw earlier today, about two years ago, they offered those — the University of Surrey, they offered them to us to finance them and go do these things so they could sell the capability. For various reasons, we chose not to do that. So now you see them on Chinese boosters. So there is a point of seizing the day when you have an opportunity to do it. This was an opportunity to get some foreign technology and have it here, and it’s relatively small money. That micro-sat or nano-sat that they showed earlier, that cost about 700,000 dollars, and that technology is now someplace we don’t want it. In the future, we need to be proactive on these kind of things.”


  • “When you get a corporation to extend itself out to the design capability and is just about ready go on contract, and we say, Oops, we’re sorry, we don’t want to buy that anyway,’ they have already gone through that and they’ve invested a whole bunch of infrastructure, all the way maybe to developing a set of jigs to go build this item and then we turn around and change the whole course of the way they’re going.

    “So if you look at recent articles on Fortune magazine talking about industrial base unwillingness to invest in military projects because of the uncertainty out there, so we’ve got to be able to strengthen that to the point where we say we’re on board with you, we want you to go develop radiation hard parts, because we’re going to procure X thousands. And then they can see there’s a business case there. They can go out and get the backing for that and they can make that investment and they go off and do that.

    “But right now, it’s tenuous, at best, and we’ve got to be able to stake it, right now, in ’05, I’m going to buy X millions of these parts and do these kinds of things, and then they will go out and do that. Otherwise, they’re going to turn their attention to places where they can make money.”


While no effort was made to forge a consensus on the part of the participants in the High-Level Roundtable, the sentiment among the experts, scientists, military personnel and others present seemed to be that the United States can no longer afford to ignore the growing capability of potential adversaries to exploit the vulnerability arising from the dependence of both America’s military and civilian economy on unencumbered access to and use of outer space. There appeared to be a nearly universally shared hope, moreover, that the Rumsfeld II Commission will catalyze fresh thinking on the part of the new Bush-Cheney Administration about the need for space power — and give rise to an urgent, reorganized, disciplined and far more energetic effort to obtain and exercise it.

Fuggedaboutit’: Gen. Shalikashvili’s Paean to C.T.B.T. is Wrong — as well as Dead on Arrival

(Washington, D.C.): Here we go again. The last gasp of the Clinton-Gore Administration apparently will be expended trying to breathe new life into the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). That is the reported upshot of a study prepared by General John Shalikashvili, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented to President Clinton today.

In order to validate his pre-ordained recommendation that the CTBT be ratified, Gen. Shalikashvili had to do two things: 1) ignore what is certainly happening with respect to the deterioration in the U.S. deterrent stockpile and 2) bet the farm that what might happen with respect to slowing the inexorable proliferation of nuclear weapons know-how, technology and devices will actually eventuate. Such an approach to security policy can only be described as reckless — and should continue to be rejected by the U.S. Senate.

Don’t Bother Me With the Facts

Gen. Shalikashvili evidently chose to overlook not only classified information that argued against the idea that a permanent, zero-yield test ban was compatible with the national security. He apparently even disregarded information now in the public domain. For example, the New York Times illuminated some of the many, serious concerns about the implications of the CTBT in a lengthy article published on 29 November 2000. Among its highlights were the following:

  • Concern is growing: “Since [1992, when the United States began a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing], the Nation has evaluated the thousands of warheads in its aging arsenal in a program called science-based stockpile stewardship, using computer simulations, experiments on bomb components and other methods to assess the condition of the weapons without actually exploding them.

    “Program officials have been confident that the stockpile is safe and secure and that the stewardship program can fully maintain the weapons. Now, however, some of the masters of nuclear weapons design are expressing concern over whether this program is up to the task. Concerns about the program take a variety of forms, including criticisms of its underlying technical rationale and warnings that the program’s base of talented scientists is eroding….”

  • Leap of faith: “A stewardship program with no testing is ‘a religious exercise, not science,’ said Dr. Merri Wood, a senior designer of nuclear weaponry at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Wood said that as the weapons aged, it was becoming impossible to say with certainty that the stockpile was entirely functional. ‘I can’t give anybody a safe period,’ she said of the possibility that some weapons could become unreliable. ‘It could happen at anytime…’

  • Obsolescing Weapons: “Even with all the [advanced diagnostic tools the SSP is supposed to provide], critics say, crucial questions about the performance of aging bombs must still be answered directly by data from old tests. Because bombs this old were never tested, they say, computer simulations cannot definitively determine the seriousness of new types of changes caused by continued aging….”

    “Assessing the changes can be bewilderingly difficult. The degradation turns symmetrical components shaped like spheres or cylinders into irregular shapes whose properties are a nightmare to model in computer simulations. Inspectors, who typically tear apart one weapon of each design per year and less intrusively check others, find weapons components deteriorating in various ways because the materials age, and because they are exposed to the radioactivity of their own fuel. Even tiny changes in those materials can lead to large changes in bomb performance, weapons designers say.”

Whistling Past the Graveyard

There is, at present, no basis for believing that these and other problems afflicting our aging deterrent — notably the need to introduce new weapons designs to assure its future effectiveness — can be resolved without at least periodic, low-yield nuclear testing. Unfortunately, Gen. Shalikashvili attempts to obscure this reality, reportedly suggesting that the United States can safely forego future testing if only it: increases spending on verification, makes greater efforts to maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal and conducts a joint review by the Senate and administration every 10 years to determine whether the treaty is still in the Nation’s best interest.

These recommendations miss a central point: The Senate considered and rejected these and similar placebos as wholly inadequate.1 As one of the key figures in those deliberations — Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) — observed in a press release after President Clinton received the General’s analysis: “Gen. Shalikashvili’s report simply rehashed the same flawed arguments that failed to persuade the Senate to support the treaty.”

Ditto Gen. Shalikashvili’s shopworn arguments that the CTBT has to be ratified by the Senate in order to slow the pace of global nuclear proliferation. As the Center for Security Policy has documented,2 there is no reason to believe that any nation determined to acquire atomic or nuclear weapons capabilities — and there are many — will actually be precluded from doing so because of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. As the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), testified before the Foreign Relations Committee on 7 October 1999 in connection with his committee’s conclusions about the CTBT:

I’m not confident that we can now or can in the foreseeable future detect any and all nuclear explosions prohibited under the treaty. While I have a greater degree of confidence in our ability to monitor higher-yield explosions in known test sites, I have markedly less confidence in our capabilities to monitor lower-yield and/or evasively conducted tests, including tests that may enable states to develop new nuclear weapons or improve existing weapons.

At this point, I should point out too that while the proponents of the treaty have argued that it will prevent nuclear proliferation, the fact is that some of the countries of most concern to us — North Korea, Iran and Iraq — can develop and deploy nuclear weapons without any nuclear tests whatsoever.

The Bottom Line

The conclusion of Senator Kyl’s press release made the relevant point:

[Gen. Shalikashvili’s recommendations] were rejected by a host of former senior officials, including six former Secretaries of Defense….In light of the stated opposition of President-elect George W. Bush, Vice-President-elect Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense-designee Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of Energy-designee Spence Abraham to the treaty, [Sen. Kyl is] confident that the Senate would not revisit the issue….

“In light of the fact that the Senate has already considered and voted to reject this flawed treaty once, and the incoming President and his team have said they oppose the CTBT, I think it’s important that we focus our efforts on devising a new, more effective strategy to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction, rather than continuing to rehash the merits of an old treaty that clearly would do more harm than good.“




1 See, the Center’s Press Release entitled, Center Releases ‘Truth or Consequences’ Series, Selection of Commentary Providing Senate Key Facts on C.T.B.T. (No. 99-P 114, 12 October 1999).

2See, the Center’s Press Release entitled, Roundtable Summary Shows C.T.B.T. is Defective and ‘Unfixable (No. 00-P 19, 29 Feb 2000).

Bipartisanship on Defense Spending: Schlesinger and Brown Call for Sustained Increase in National Security Funding

(Washington, D.C.): As the Bush-Cheney team prepares to appoint its Secretary of Defense,
the
true — and staggeringly high — price of accomplishing the “rebuilding of the U.S. military” is
coming into focus. Performing on that campaign pledge will take more than “reforming the
Pentagon.” And, unfortunately, it will take far more than the $45 billion over ten years Gov.
Bush promised to invest in defense.

The latest indication of what will be entailed comes on the heels of warnings over the past
year
by Marine Corps Commandant General James Jones, the Congressional Budget Office and —
after the election — Secretary of the Air Force F. Whitten Peters and the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, General Hugh Shelton. In today’s Washington Post, two former
Secretaries of
Defense, the Nixon and Ford Administration’s James Schlesinger and the Carter
Administration’s Harold Brown, make clear that fixing the armed forces may require as much as
an additional $100 billion per year for the next five-to-ten years.

An early test of President Bush’s commitment to rebuild the military and his choice to
succeed
Messrs. Schlesinger and Brown will be whether the new team is willing to heed — and act upon
— this bipartisan call for a large and sustained increase in defense spending.

What About Defense?

by James Schlesinger and Harold Brown
Washington Post
20 December 2000

In this year’s presidential campaign, both major candidates spoke easily of spending trillions
more in coming years on domestic needs such as Social Security and Medicare. In contrast, they
said little and proposed to add only marginally to spending on national security. Yet over the
next decade, the nation will need to spend significantly more certainly hundreds of billions of
dollars on defense and foreign assistance if we are to maintain a military force capable of doing
the things that both candidates seemed to feel it would have to do.

The U.S. military that President-elect Bush inherits, while far superior to any other, is not
what it
needs to be. Over the past decade, it has been asked to triple its overseas deployments and
operations with substantially fewer resources. America’s armed forces are now 40 percent
smaller than they were during the Cold War, and they are severely stretched. Problems with
maintaining the readiness of today’s military include a need for parts for planes, ships and tanks,
as well as the fact that many troops are not getting their full quota of realistic training. Morale is
declining, as evidenced by the difficulty in recruiting and retaining skilled personnel in the face
of competing opportunities in the private sector.

The issues that will determine the capabilities of tomorrow’s military are even more acute. A
few
weeks ago the Congressional Budget Office released a study concluding that we need to spend at
least $50 billion more each year just to keep our armed forces at the present level of combat
capability. According to CBO, $75 billion or more is needed to perform the sort of wholesale
recapitalization of the U.S. military that has been made necessary by a decade of underfunding.

A thorough and independent assessment by Daniel Goure and Jeffrey Ranney indicates that it
would cost roughly $100 billion more a year to ensure that the armed forces have the kind and
quantity of equipment, realistic training and quality-of-life conditions that the Clinton
administration has said will be required in the years ahead. The bulk of this amount (roughly 80
percent) would go toward replacement of obsolescent aircraft, ships and tanks.

During the campaign, both major presidential candidates largely ignored this issue, pledging
to
increase defense spending between $45 billion (Gov. Bush) and $100 billion (Vice President
Gore) over the next 10 years. Moreover, the campaigns indicated that these sums would largely
be allocated to meet deficiencies in pay, housing and other quality-of-life areas.

Some justify this failure to address procurement needs on the grounds that the country now
needs
to “skip a generation,” passing up equipment now ready for use in favor of future systems that
will be more capable and less costly. There may well be a case for doing that. But there are also
current demands and new priorities that will require more spending in the next decade than either
candidate indicated he would seek.

Others have suggested that instead of modernizing the force with the next generation of
equipment, we can save money by buying more of the kinds of ships, aircraft and armored
vehicles we have today — thereby recapitalizing the force rather than modernizing it. But it is
precisely such attempts to skip a generation of procurement between the late 1980s and today
that have left the U.S. military with the problem of an obsolescent force.

Some money can be saved by not moving forward with new-generation systems, and indeed
a
careful review of programs now in early stages of development should be made by the new
administration, with a view toward reducing their number. But in many instances, these new
capabilities are required to meet new tasks.

This is a problem that cannot be solved without more money. The alternative, a substantial
reduction in force structure, must be resisted. Recent events in the Middle East should underscore
that we are living in unpredictable and even dangerous times. A strong military is a bulwark
against threats to U.S. vital interests and to our homeland.

While the additional sums required to restore our military are large in absolute terms, it must
be
remembered that the United States today spends slightly less than 3 percent of its gross domestic
product on defense, the lowest level since before Pearl Harbor.

Even with all the efficiencies and management improvements that are politically feasible, to
make up the current shortfall will require a phased increase in defense spending to a level about
20 percent higher than the present one. An additional one-half percent out of the national
economic dollar to be allocated to national security is well within the capability of the U.S.
economy. A small portion of this increase should be devoted to foreign assistance and to the
overseas operations of the State Department; starving diplomatic efforts also impairs national
security.

Clearly, this time of economic prosperity is the moment not only to make the investments
needed
to address other national priorities such as health care, education and “saving Social Security”
but also to save our national security.

James Schlesinger was secretary of defense from 1973 to 1975. Harold Brown held the
post from
1977 to 1981.