Tag Archives: North Korea

Witness to Evil: German Doctor Endorses Bush Depiction of North Korea, Opposes Engagement’ with Its Brutal Regime

(Washington, D.C.): The father-son Kim dynasty that has subjected North Korea for over five decades to a form of totalitarian repression that even Joseph Stalin could not have imagined made a serious mistake a few years ago. Believing it had found a German doctor who would willingly serve its propaganda ends, the Communist regime in Pyongyang parted the veil behind which it has long obscured the so-called “Hermit Kingdom.”

After Dr. Norbert Vollertsen allowed himself to have portions of his own skin removed to enable a badly burned North Korean factory worker to receive a life-saving graft — an extraordinary personal sacrifice subsequently repeated so that it could be recorded for the government’s indoctrination purposes, the North’s dictator, Kim Jong-Il, allowed Dr. Vollertsen a privilege few Westerners (if indeed any other) has been accorded: an internal passport and driver’s license that allowed him to travel freely throughout much of the country (excluding only areas where the existence of concentration camps and other secret military facilities put them off-limits to virtually everyone).

As a result of this latitude, Dr. Vollertsen had an unequaled opportunity to witness first-hand the true magnitude of the evil that is the North Korean regime — and the staggering toll it is taking on those who are its most immediate and constant victims: the millions of ordinary citizens being starved, terrorized, brainwashed and forced to endure untold hardships in the name of glorifying and serving the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-Il.

Dr. Vollertsen’s testimony, which has appeared most recently in the form of an op.ed. in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, is a welcome validation of President Bush’s depiction of the actual character of the Kim regime in North Korea. It is also a much-needed antidote to those who believe that any good can come from treating with, appeasing or otherwise providing political legitimacy and/or economic life-support to this quintessentially evil government.

Memo to Mr. Carter: Evil Exists
By Norbert Vollertsen
The Wall Street Journal, 7 March 2002

As a German physician, I was greatly moved by an inscription quoting former President Jimmy Carter at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. — “[W]e must forge an unshakeable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent, never again will the world . . . fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide . . . We must harness the outrage of our own memories to stamp out oppression wherever it exists.”

It is hard to believe that these words came from the same man who recently lambasted President Bush’s “axis of evil” speech, calling it “overly simplistic and counterproductive.” Nowhere in Mr. Carter’s words did I see the caveat “stamp out oppression wherever it exists (excepting North Korea and/or any other dictatorial regime that rapes, murders and systematically starves its own people).” President Carter wrote those words in September 1979 for his President’s Commission on the Holocaust. Twenty-three years later, he seems to have forgotten their meaning.

President Bush has not. He has chosen to speak out; to borrow Mr. Carter’s phrase, he will not “stand silent.” He has bravely called North Korea “evil” — and he is right. I know, because I have seen the evil with my own eyes. From July 1999 to December 2000, I traveled with the German medical group, Cap Anamur, and gained access to some of the Stalinist country’s most remote and secretive regions.

What I witnessed could best be described as unbelievable deprivation. As I wrote for this newspaper last April, “In the hospitals one sees kids too small for their age, with hollow eyes and skin stretched tight across their faces. They wear blue-and-white striped pajamas, like the children in Hitler’s Auschwitz.”

It became clear to me that Kim Jong Il and his Stalinist regime had made little effort to distribute medical supplies and food to the people who needed it most. I soon realized that North Korea’s starvation is not the result of natural disasters or even lack of natural resources. Like the Holocaust in Europe, the horror in North Korea is man-made. Twenty-two million people suffer under a dictatorial regime that uses torture, surveillance and starvation as tools to control its own people. Only the regime’s overthrow will end it.
I was eventually expelled from North Korea because of my open criticism of the government. Since then, I have been on a global campaign to raise interest in what I can only describe as crimes against humanity and genocide in North Korea. This is a country where food is used as a weapon against any opposition, Christians are persecuted, women sexually abused and young children forced into labor. Still, the world either doesn’t know, doesn’t care or doesn’t want to believe.

Last month I had the opportunity to interview around 250 North Korean defectors near the China-North Korea border and was truly horrified by their stories. Most had escaped from hidden concentration camps where they suffered and witnessed routine torture, mass-execution, baby-killing, rape, human biological experiments (including the effects of anthrax) and, of course, starvation. These people were talking about hell, not paradise. Like Mr. Bush, they call it evil too.

As a German born after the Holocaust, I feel it is my duty to speak out. But strangely, few are willing to listen. In my native Germany and the rest of Europe they speak of “engagement.” In South Korea they speak of a “sunshine policy” to help Kim Jong Il modernize and liberalize. What they don’t understand is that he is not interested in helping his people; rather he is interested only — like Hitler and Stalin — in clinging to power. In my opinion, “engagement” and “sunshine” are not only synonyms for appeasement, they are synonyms for cowardice.

Now, the very same people who wish to engage a state that starves its own people are calling President Bush a “war monger” for using the word “evil.” Ironically, but not surprisingly, it is the “refined” European diplomats, “liberal” American newspapers, and “politically correct” human-rights activists who are most outraged at Mr. Bush’s choice of words. They should be ashamed of themselves.

President Bush has rightly identified North Korea as a prison state that uses terrorism against its own people. Moreover, his “axis of evil” speech has sent a strong message to the North Korean people that they are not forgotten — and they are listening. Every North Korean defector I spoke to over several weeks was delighted by President Bush’s words. For the first time in their lives they feel as if the outside world understands the hell they have endured. Moreover, they are full of hope that, like President Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, President Bush’s “axis of evil” speech will eventually lead to the collapse of Kim Jong Il’s brutal regime.

Perhaps those who are outraged with President Bush’s choice of words should ask survivors of the Holocaust, survivors of the Soviet gulag and survivors of North Korea’s concentration camps what they think of Mr. Bush’s use of the word “evil.”

Perhaps Mr. Carter should return to the Holocaust Memorial Musuem that he helped build and take a look at another inscription there, this one from the book of Genesis: “What have you done? Hark, thy brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground!”

Dr. Vollertsen, a physician from Germany, worked in hospitals in North Korea from July 1999 to December 2000.

Who Pulled the Plug on the Chinese Bugs’?

(Washington, D.C.): A highly classified U.S. operation that promised to provide important — perhaps even geopolitically explosive — insights into Communist China’s international conduct is suddenly compromised. As a result, Beijing is spared the embarrassment, or worse, that might have followed. So is a United States government anxious to improve relations with the PRC.

This could describe the sensational news that Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s security services last fall discovered highly sophisticated listening devices placed aboard a modified Boeing 767 intended for his use. Interestingly, it also describes an incident that occurred in this country in 1996.

Remember the Norinco/Poly Technologies Affair

On that occasion, a “princeling” — the term applied to family members of the PRC leadership who exploit their powerful “connections” to profit in business — was about to be nabbed by American law enforcement authorities.1 Wang Jun had been identified in a sting operation as the prime-mover behind an arms smuggling network involving two Chinese companies called Norinco and Poly Technologies that intended to put two thousand Chinese-made AK-47 automatic rifles into the hands of American street gangs. Worse yet, the well-connected entrepreneur expressed a willingness to provide even more formidable firepower, including anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and armored vehicles, to the drug lords he thought were his customers.

Shortly before the princeling arrived in this country to consummate the initial deal — at which point he was expected to face prompt arrest, interrogation and prosecution — someone leaked the story to the American press. He never set foot on U.S. soil, escaped American justice and spared both his own government and the Clinton Administration the problem of trying to limit the damage such an affair would inevitably cause Sino-American relations.

At the time, furious law enforcement personnel let it be known that they thought the sting had been deliberately compromised by American officials in the White House or State Department. The actual facts in this case have never come to public light. But the earlier episode inspires a question about the compromise of the “bugs” on China’s “Air Force One”: Might someone privy to what was, presumably, a tightly compartmented U.S. intelligence operation have deliberately tipped the Chinese off to the fact that their new presidential aircraft was wired for sound?

Inquiring Minds Need to Know

To be sure, the PRC — which is said to have discovered these “state-of-the-art,” “satellite- activated” listening devices within a month of the plane’s delivery last September — is putting out the word that the bugs were discovered when they began emitting static during flight trials. Alternatively, Chinese counter-intelligence may have detected their presence during a routine electronic “sweep” of the new plane.

Still, if one reflects on the kinds of things that might have been learned from monitoring President Jiang’s unguarded conversations, it would appear that “Friends of China” would have even more to be concerned about in this instance than if the gun-runner with close times to the regime in Beijing had been successfully apprehended.

For example, what if Jiang were overheard confirming arrangements for further Chinese transfers of missile- and/or nuclear-related technology to clients like Pakistan, North Korea, Iran or Iraq, who may be U.S. targets before the war on terrorism is over? What if he were overheard outlining Beijing’s plans for expanding its hegemonic influence in the Pacific rim, at the expense of the United States, its allies and interests?

Or perhaps we might have secured confirmation of insidious Chinese activities in our own hemisphere. He may have shed important light on the PRC’s role in supporting Colombia’s Marxist narco-traffickers known as the FARC, its connections to the ever-more-despotic Hugo Chavez, who has announced his desire to replicate the Maoist revolution in Venezuela, or its plans for expanding China’s military and intelligence “footprint” beyond the electronic listening facility it is using to “bug” the United States from Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

We might also have received evidence that previous threats made by senior military officers to use China’s modernizing offensive ballistic missile force to attack Los Angeles or other American targets were not unauthorized statements by “rogue” officers, but reflect official policy for dealing with what the Communists call “the main enemy,” namely the United States.

The Bottom Line

It is, of course, possible that the Chinese found the bugs all by themselves. It may even be, as some are speculating, that Jiang’s plane was wired by domestic rivals jockeying to succeed him. One thing is clear, however: “Friends of China” are doubtless breathing a sigh of relief that they are not having to do what the Clinton Administration routinely did — “spin,” conceal or otherwise apologize for hard evidence that China is no friend of the United States.

A thorough investigation should be conducted to determine whether an American with such sentiments might have compromised the operation that would have collected this sort of unwanted evidence. Unfortunately, the logical place for such a review, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), seems ineligible to conduct it since the Board is now chaired by one of China’s best American friends, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.

Certainly it is to be hoped that, when President Bush heads to China next month, he will not express any regret to his hosts over a failed U.S. intelligence operation. The only cause for regret, as with the foiled sting aimed at the princeling gun-runner, is that the United States was denied insights it urgently needs into the PRC’s true character and agenda.




1 See, the William J. Casey Institute Perspective entitled, “Non-Renewal of M.F.N. For China: A Proportionate Response to Beijing’s Emerging, Trade-Subsidized Strategic Threat” (No. 97-C 76, 09 June 1997).

China: The Not-So-Hidden Dragon in the War on Terror

(Washington, D.C.): If Pakistan and India go to nuclear war in the coming days, each country will be blamed for precipitating that calamity. The real responsibility, however, will lie elsewhere — with Communist China.

China’s Contribution to Terror

After all, it was the People’s Republic that put Pakistan in the atomic weapons business. Had it not been for Chinese know-how, personnel and technology, Islamabad would almost certainly not have "the Bomb" today.

Beijing and its North Korean proxy have also been instrumental in Pakistan’s ballistic missile delivery systems for such weapons. According to the Washington Times’ Bill Gertz, Chinese-supplied M-11 missiles — which the Pakistanis have renamed the Shaheen and armed with atomic if not crude thermonuclear weapons — have been readied for use against India.

To be sure, even if China had not decided years ago to play the Pakistani "card" against the PRC’s democratic enemy, India, by arming the Paks to the teeth, the present circumstances in Kashmir may still have produced yet another war between the two countries. But it would almost certainly have remained conventional in character, and the casualties on both sides relatively small.

Unfortunately, China’s rampant proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has not only brought democratic India to the brink of nuclear war with her neighbor. According to the Associated Press, the Pakistani government recently detained two individuals, Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mahmood and Abdul Majid, "on suspicion of sharing technical information with [Osama] bin Laden. They worked for Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission until retiring in 1999."

Evidence accumulating from liberated enemy compounds, bunkers and hard drives attests to the keen interest bin Laden and Company have had in acquiring weapons of mass destruction [WMD]. It is hard to believe that Chinese-trained and -empowered Pakistanis, who were clearly sympathetic to his cause, were not forthcoming. If so, Americans may have even more direct reason to fear the effects of the PRC’s nuclear trade than deadly Indo- Pakistani missile duels.

Matters are made even worse by the prospect that Pakistan has acted upon its longstanding desire to be the source of the "the Islamic Bomb." Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are among the countries of the Muslim world who would love to get their hands on the technology and materials needed to put themselves into the atomic or nuclear weapons business. Islamabad may well have served as a willing cut-out for Chinese help to some or all of these nations, and perhaps others as well.

Iraq’s Friend, Not Ours

Of these, Iraq is probably the most dangerous in the near-term. Baghdad’s ever-increasing WMD inventory — and Saddam Hussein’s willingness to use them — is the subject of a compelling new study by Dr. Kathleen Bailey entitled "Iraq’s Asymmetric Threat to the United States and U.S. Allies," (published by the National Institute for Public Policy.)

The threat posed by Iraq is compelling the Bush Administration, finally, to bring about the end to Saddam’s reign of terror against his own people and others around the world. The increasingly compelling, if circumstantial, evidence of Iraqi involvement in recent terrorist acts against the United States — the subject of a newly released book, The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks, by Dr. Laurie Mylroie — makes clear that we defer such action any longer at our extreme peril.

When the Administration does move against Iraq, it — and the American people — will be confronted once again with an unhappy reality temporarily obscured by the war on terrorism and the strange (and often unsavory) bedfellows coalition cobbled together by Secretary of State Colin Powell to prosecute it: Communist China is no friend of the United States.

To the contrary, the PRC is a growing problem. Its burgeoning demand for energy has translated into troubling partnerships with unsavory regimes not only in Iraq but in Iran, Sudan and even Venezuela in our own hemisphere and into imperialistic aggression in the Spratly Islands. Beijing is buying an array of advanced weapons designed by the Soviets/Russians to destroy American military hardware and personnel. And, to add insult to injury, it is seeking to underwrite such activities either directly or (given the fungibility of money) indirectly on our own capital markets, unbeknownst to most American investors.

Add into the mix China’s systematic dissemination of WMD technologies and delivery systems to countries we call "rogue states" and they call "clients" and you have a disaster waiting to happen. It would be reckless for America to ignore these developments — or their longer-term implications.

Still worse would be for our leaders to succumb to the siren’s song emanating from "Friends of China" like former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke who recently urged President Bush (a man whose leadership Holbrooke has assiduously worked to undermine around the world) to negotiate a fourth "communique" with Beijing, based on a putative "common strategic concern [with] terrorism."

The Bottom Line

Unfortunately, our strategic concern should be with a China that has been abetting terrorism in Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere for years. Beijing may want us, in the name of the war on terror, to legitimate its repression of long-suffering minorities like Muslim Uighurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong or Christians. But we must not ignore the not-so-hidden dragon role China is playing in greatly exacerbating the costs and dangers associated with that war.

Prepare for Two Wars’

(Washington, D.C.): This just in: The retired four-star admiral who formerly commanded all American forces in the Pacific (a job known as CINCPAC) and served until recently as U.S. Ambassador to China announced last Friday that a “rising China is okay” and, from a military perspective, “not really” a threat. According to the South China Morning Post, Joseph Prueher told an audience in Seattle that the PRC’s “People’s Liberation Army was not very potent’ as a fighting force, even though China yearned for a strong military that matched its standing in the world.”

This analysis supports the effort now being made by “Friends of China” and others who want Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to solve the Pentagon’s present budget conundrum by cutting the American military’s force structure. They are urging him to use such an approach rather than press President Bush for additional funding authority needed to do the job of “transforming” the armed services for the future while fixing what ails them today. They contend that divisions can be safely cut from the Army, carrier battle groups from the Navy and air wings from the Air Force since the United States no longer need worry about the danger of fighting two simultaneous major regional conflicts around the globe.

What is Wrong With This Picture?

There is only one problem with the Prueher analysis. It is wrong.

A “rising China” is not “okay” because its ambitions are at odds with American interests. The Communist regime in Beijing is under no illusion on this point and, therefore, it routinely refers to the United States as “the main enemy.” Party cadre and military leaders declare war with the U.S. to be “inevitable.” And, when it suits their purposes, Chinese officials threaten this country with nuclear attack — threats that, unfortunately, have to be taken seriously in the absence of any deployed defense against the PRC’s “not very potent,” but still potentially devastating, long-range nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.

While it is certainly true that the PLA’s conventional forces are today no match for their American counterparts, it would be foolish to take undue comfort from such a snapshot in time. For one thing, history is full of instances in which weaker countries have taken on stronger ones. What is more, China is rapidly modernizing every facet of its military, thanks in no small measure to the PRC’s “strategic partnership” with Russia and the advanced arms and training in their use, maintenance and manufacture that flows from it.

Beijing is also aggressively pursuing unconventional or “asymmetric” means of dealing with a superior American military. These techniques include cyber-warfare, electro- magnetic pulse (EMP) weapons and anti-satellite capabilities designed to attack and neutralize the electronic and information technologies upon which that U.S. superiority critically depends.

Beijing’s Regional Strategy

Most relevant to the question of whether the United States can responsibly abandon the force- structure requirements mandated by the so-called “two-war” strategy, however, are the steps China is taking with its clients around the world to confront America with at least two simultaneous conflicts if ever the two nations come to blows. Alternatively, Beijing may be calculating that far-flung crises involving U.S. allies and interests would allow it to secure its strategic objectives — notably, conquest of Taiwan — without any interference from this country.

Consider developments in two candidate regions. The intensifying conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbors may metastasize at any time into a wider war. If so, it is entirely possible that weapons made available by China to her customers in the Middle East — both directly and indirectly via her proxy, North Korea — will be used not only in attacks against the Jewish State but to establish effective control over the oil lanes of the Persian Gulf. Such attacks could run the gamut from those involving ballistic missiles bearing conventional warheads or weapons of mass destruction to the use of deadly Silkworm anti-ship missiles.

Meanwhile, dynamic forces are at work in East Asia. North Korea’s thoroughly weird despot, Kim Jong-Il, has just completed a lengthy visit to Russia in which those two nations affirmed their friendship and solidarity. (Kim’s inveterate deceitfulness was on display in the course of his travels as he treated dignitaries to his favorite dish of donkey meat while representing it as “Heavenly Cow.”) It seems likely that the backing North Korea enjoys from both the Russians and Chinese will make Kim more intractable in ending the abiding threat his army and regime pose to South Korea.

This is all the more worrisome insofar as South Korea’s former political prisoner-turned- President, Kim Dae Jung, seems prepared to adopt anti-democratic practices to silence critics who fear that, under present circumstances, his so-called “Sunshine Policy” for normalizing relations with the North is increasingly dangerous. He is using trumped up tax investigations and arrests to suppress opponents in the media; he is denying an American request for a top North Korean defector and prominent skeptic about Kim Jong-Il’s intentions to take his warnings to the United States. Members of Congress, led by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, are among those who fear that such developments could come to imperil not only to South Korean democracy but its security and stability on the Korean peninsula.

China has also been at work in our own hemisphere, making a concerted effort to open trading and strategic ties with Communist Cuba and Venezuela’s Castro-wannabe, Hugo Chavez. In addition, the PRC has secured facilities from which it could disrupt or deny at will American use of the Panama Canal. In the event of two widely separated conflicts, these ties could impair free U.S. exploitation of the sea lines of communications through the Caribbean and Panamanian isthmus, seriously exacerbating any inadequacies in the size, capabilities and location of our forces.

The Bottom Line

Left to his own devices, Donald Rumsfeld is certainly smart enough to understand that — like the People’s Liberation Army — we should pay heed to the teachings of the ancient Chinese strategist, Sun Tsu. Sun observed that it was far preferable to accomplish your objectives without a war than by having to fight one.

Former CINCPAC Joe Prueher may not understand that a “rising China” is bent on creating strategic and other circumstances that will enable it to do just that. (An interesting question is whether his successor in that job, Adm. Dennis Blair — who is reportedly under consideration to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — is under a similar illusion.) It behooves the Bush Administration to ensure that America has sufficient forces, with the requisite capabilities and forward deployed in the right places so as to ensure that we can, in fact, deal with and, thereby, deter the two conflicts we don’t want to have to fight.

Accept No Substitutes on the Aegis Sale to Taiwan

(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow is D-Day for Taiwan — the day the Bush Administration advises our democratic friends on Formosa whether it has decided to approve their request for four Aegis air- and missile-defense ships needed to protect the island against the large and growing threat posed by Communist China. Unfortunately, according to press leaks to the Wall Street Journal, the answer appears to be a “Maybe.”

The Journal reports that “a senior official familiar with the [internal U.S.] deliberations” told it that the leading option would be to forego the Aegis sale if “China cuts back the number of missiles pointed at the island.” This idea tracks with a suggestion made several weeks ago by the United States Pacific Command — whose commander (known by the acronym of his title, CINCPAC) once made clear his attitude towards Free China in an off-color, but revealing, comment to congressional staffers. He told them that Taiwan is “the turd in the punchbowl of U.S.-China relations.”

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

The Bush team should be under no illusion: The CINCPAC proposal is a non-starter. Not only are the Chinese — who strenuously oppose the U.S. sale of Aegis ships to Taiwan — unlikely to play along. Even if they were to do so, the idea would be unworkable and undesirable from the U.S. and Taiwanese points of view. Consider just a few of the problems inherent in such an approach:

What Baseline? First, the United States cannot be absolutely sure how many missiles Beijing has pointed at Taiwan right now. Intelligence reports suggest that there may currently be as many as 300 of them. Is that correct? Or have the Chinese successfully concealed some of their missile deployments? Given the great lengths to which the People’s Liberation Army goes to prevent us from correctly assessing their present and emerging order of battle (their deliberate take-down of our EP-3 is but the most recent and egregious example of their concealment and deception program), it would be an act of considerable hubris to believe we can and will know precisely what the PLA is doing.

Alternatively, can we be sure that other, longer-range missiles in the PRC’s inventory are not also targeted on Taiwan? If that is not the case today, in the exceedingly unlikely event China were actually to agree to relocate some of its shorter-range missiles away from locations where they could reach Taiwan, would other weapons be reassigned to cover the original targets? Would we have any inkling that the threat was thus being maintained, if not exacerbated?

See No Evil: Second, assuming we did have some way of knowing with confidence precisely how much of a capability to attack and destroy Taiwan Beijing was maintaining at any given time, there is the matter of what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” Policy-makers who don’t want to be confronted with evidence that their policies are not working out make little secret of their preferences. Bill Clinton once notoriously admitted to engaging in a practice he called “fudging” the facts. For his part, Al Gore rejected an unwelcome intelligence finding that his favorite Russian interlocutor, then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, was thoroughly corrupt by scrawling a “barnyard epithet” across it.

Giving the Bush team the benefit of the doubt, let’s just say they wouldn’t behave so irresponsibly as to discourage the intelligence community from speaking truth to power. Our cumulative experience with arms control agreements nonetheless suggests that there is a powerful tendency within the intelligence community to find only ambiguity when reasonable clarity might entail undesirable repercussions. A case in point has been the systematic failure by the U.S. intelligence community to acknowledge that first the Soviet Union and then Russia built and operated a territorial defense against ballistic missile attack impermissible under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Here’s how it would work in the current context: Analysts at the CIA or other parts of the intelligence community tasked with monitoring Chinese missilery within range of Taiwan would surely find ample grounds in the aforementioned uncertainties to avoid any conclusion or finding that would trigger Aegis deployments. As a result, the U.S. commitment to provide Taiwan with the defense the Bush Pentagon has confirmed it needs would never become operational.]

Picking Up Where Clinton Left Off? Finally, there is no getting around the fact that the Aegis component of the present arms package is the litmus test for the Bush policy towards China. Beijing has made blocking the Aegis sale the object of its most virulent criticism. The PRC’s allies in U.S. business and academic circles have, as usual, rallied to its side, arguing that the sale would be far too provocative [(although, interestingly, the ultimate “Friend of China,” Henry Kissinger has reportedly made known in private his view that the United States should sell Aegis ships to Taiwan.)] For these reasons, among others, the Administration was apparently inclined before the EP-3 episode to give Taiwan other weapon systems — including four, less-capable Kidd-class destroyers — but to turn down the Aegis sale.

The Bottom Line

China’s belligerence in taking down and holding our surveillance aircraft and the U.S. expression of regret required to extract our service personnel held hostage by the PRC have, however, indisputably changed the circumstances under which the Bush decision on the Taiwan arms package will be perceived in Beijing and in the region. Should the flagship (literally) element of that package — the sea- based air- and missile-defense systems Taipei urgently requires — now be stripped from it, or made subject to some specious Chinese missile movements, it will be seen as evidence that the U.S. practice of accommodating the PRC has not changed, even if the occupant of the White House has.

Until such time as the United States can construct and turn over Aegis ships ordered by Taiwan, it should provide her friends there not only with Patriot anti-missile systems, diesel submarines and other elements of the requested arms package. America should also immediately begin to equip and assign her own fleet of Aegis ships to provide interim anti-air and -missile protection to the people of Taiwan — as well as those of Israel, Japan, Europe, South Korea and those here at home.

The High-Tech for China’ Bill

shington, D.C.): As the Bush Administration and Congress consider ways in which to respond to the increasing belligerence of Communist China so much in evidence in the EP-3 affair, one idea unlikely to top the list is the idea of giving the People’s Liberation Army a massive new infusion of militarily relevant U.S. high technology. Yet that would be just one of the untoward effects of legislation Senator Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, hopes get enacted in the next few weeks.

Sen. Gramm is the chief sponsor of S.149, formally known as the Export Administration Act (EAA). Its working title, however, should be the “Hi-Tech for China” bill since Beijing will be one of the principal beneficiaries of the emasculation S.149 proposes for what remains of U.S. controls on the sale of sensitive equipment and know-how.

Military Fire Sale’ to China?

This bill is basically a reprise of legislation (S.1712) that Mr. Gramm introduced in the last Congress. Fortunately, that version died aborning — despite the Texan’s considerable clout, forceful personality and intensive lobbying on the part of U.S. firms weary of government regulations that interfere with their ability to sell whatever they want to whoever has the necessary cash. Their list includes such militarily useful equipment as: supercomputers, fiber optics, advanced telecommunications switching and routing gear, heat-resistant alloys and carbon-carbon materials, sophisticated machine tools and stealth technology.

Sen. Gramm was stymied last time around by a combination of factors. The most important of these was that national security-minded legislators strenuously opposed his effort to eliminate the vestiges of a real export control regime that survived the Clinton-Gore Administration’s wrecking operation. Led by Senator Fred Thompson, who chairs the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, senior members of the Foreign Relations, Armed Services and Intelligence Committees were able to stymie the chairman of the Banking Committee even though his panel enjoys tremendous institutional advantages under Senate jurisdictional arrangements.

Having a committee dominated by export promoters write export-control laws is about as ill-advised as having the Treasury Department’s champions of foreign investment run the interagency process charged with assessing the national security implications of overseas firms’ purchases of sensitive U.S. companies. The proverbial foxes guarding the latter chicken coop see no harm, for example, in approving the pending sale of Silicon Valley Group — the last U.S. manufacturer of high-end lithography equipment critical to the mass production of state-of-the-art electronic equipment.

Anything Goes?

To their credit, Sen. Thompson and the chairmen of the three national security committees (Sens. Jesse Helms, John Warner and Richard Shelby, respectively) — together the chairman of the influential Senate Republican Steering Committee, Sen. Jon Kyl — have sallied forth once again to resist S.149. They argue persuasively that this bill “will reduce the ability of the United States government to maintain effective export controls on American-made products that can be used for civilian and military uses (so-called dual-use products).”

They are alarmed — as should be all Americans — at the provisions in the Gramm bill (whose other prime-mover is Sen. Mike Enzi, Republican of Wyoming) that would require the Secretary of Commerce to decontrol any item that is deemed to be available “in volume” in the country that produces it. As Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control recently noted in the Los Angeles Times: “[Electronic switches that can be used as] nuclear weapon triggers, carbon fibers [that can make warhead nosecones more lethal] and maraging steel [needed for nuclear weapon-related centrifuges] are all available in volume in the United States, but that doesn’t mean they are readily available to countries trying to build the bomb.”

The Commerce Secretary would also be obliged to decontrol any technology that “controlled” countries could buy from “sources outside the United States.” Taken to its logical conclusion, if the Russians (or our allies) are willing to sell sensitive dual-use technology to China, then U.S. companies should be able to compete for such deals. For that matter, if German firms want to sell Libya or Iran chemical warfare-related equipment (as they have done in the past), or the North Koreans are prepared to provide ballistic missile technology to those or other rogue states (as they are doing now), shouldn’t Americans be able to get a piece of the action?

Presumably, President Bush’s response would be a resounding “No!” Yet, the Gramm-Enzi bill would significantly interfere with his authority to prevent such U.S. sales. To do so, he would have to intervene personally and make a number of burdensome findings in order to overrule a determination of mass market or foreign availability made by his Secretary of Commerce. The latter would be triggered upon the petition of any “interested party” (read, “interested” in making a dubious sale of heretofore controlled equipment to a controlled end-user). Even then, the President’s objection could only stand for eighteen months.

The Bottom Line

In the aftermath of the Chinese wake-up call near Hainon Island, it would be the height of folly — not to say of ignominy — were the Gramm-Enzi “Hi-Tech for China” bill to become law. This is particularly true in light of the second thoughts being expressed by many in Congress who had previously believed that nothing was more important than opening China’s markets to American sales of non-dual-use goods and services.

Under these circumstances — to say nothing of the even worse ones the People’s Liberation Army evidently has in mind for American interests down the road — it is hard to believe that majorities on Capitol Hill and President Bush will agree effectively to clear the way for the wholesale distribution of militarily relevant U.S. products to Communist China and its friends.

Message to Beijing’s Communists: It’s Time for them To Go

(Washington, D.C.): The Communist Chinese are exacerbating the crisis precipitated by the latest in a series of escalating acts of aggression against American personnel, allies and interests in East Asia. While the Bush Administration has properly rejected Beijing’s outrageous demands for an apology and compensation following the loss of the pilot and aircraft that crashed into the U.S. EP-3, America must make sure that its policy towards the PRC is not held hostage, along with its 24 airmen and women.

The Center’s President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. wrote an essay which appeared in National Review Online on Tuesday recommending specific, strategic steps the U.S. government should now be taking. These measures should be implemented at once.

“What to Do About China: Don’t Contain Chinese Communism, Fight It”

By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

National Review Online, 3 April 2001

The tendency in official Washington in the wake of incidents like Chinese interference with a U.S. military-surveillance aircraft is to try to “contain” the damage. Diplomats and policy-makers tend to concern themselves narrowly with the immediate task at hand expediting the release of the 24 Americans now held hostage and their EP-3 that was, at least until its arrival in China, chock-a-block with sensitive intelligence-collection gear.

Were the Bush administration to confine itself to such tactical responses to the present crisis, however, it would be making a grave error. American policy should be guided instead by the far-reaching strategic considerations brought to bear by this episode: China is engaged in a determined effort to accelerate what it perceives to have been the United States’ waning influence in East Asia over the past decade and to assume the role of regional overseer. Neither American interests nor those of our regional allies nor, for that matter, those of the Chinese people will be served by accommodating Chinese aggression.

What is needed is for Mr. Bush to adopt a response geared toward the pattern of behavior displayed by the downing of our plane. Such a response would involve a number of measures:

For starters, the president should use this occasion to make clear to the American people that the PRC is acting in an increasingly belligerent manner not only toward U.S. military vessels, aircraft, and personnel, but also toward allied democracies in the Western Pacific and East Asia. Taiwan is the most obvious, but hardly the only friend of this country to have been threatened by Beijing. Philippine territory has been taken over by armed Chinese forces; the PRC appears to be abetting the turmoil fracturing Indonesia; and Vietnam continues to fear that China will once again lash out in its direction.

Then there are the countries increasingly at risk from China’s ballistic missiles and/or weapons of mass destruction especially the weapons that the PRC is selling to rogue state clients around the world. Israel, India, South Korea, Japan, Europe, and even the United States are within range of missiles built, deployed or sold by the PRC, or adapted from its technology with Chinese help. Senior People’s Liberation Army officers have even taken to explicitly threatening American cities like Los Angeles with devastating attacks. Mr. Bush needs to talk about these threats as well as his commitment to defend the American people, their forces overseas, and their allies.

The president should establish clearly that the United States is going to remain a force to be reckoned with in East Asia. This message is a necessary corrective to the impression left by his predecessor, and is vital to stopping the geopolitical equivalent of tectonic shifts that have led some in South Korea, Japan, and even Taiwan to opt for appeasement of Beijing over resistance. The president needs to demonstrate that we will continue to monitor aggressive Chinese behavior through all means available and that we will maintain an increased U.S. military presence in the region for the foreseeable future.

We must also increase the ability of our friends in East Asia to provide for their own defense. First and foremost, this means approving the package of arms sales sought by Taiwan and deemed by the Bush Pentagon to be required for the island’s security in the face of the growing threat posed by offensive PLA forces arrayed against the Republic of China. Aegis air-defense destroyers, Patriot anti-missile systems, and submarines must all form part of the deal whether the Chinese ultimately return our EP-3 and its crew or not. Until such systems are delivered, however, the United States should adapt its own Aegis ships as quickly as possible so as to provide some interim missile defense for Taiwan pending the delivery of her own self-protection capabilities.

Most important, President Bush should adopt the same strategic course Ronald Reagan that implemented two decades ago against the monstrous Communist empire of his day the Soviet Union. This would entail a strategy not of containment, but of “roll-back,” aimed at denying the odious regime in Beijing the political legitimacy, the financial underwriting, and the military advantages of “partnership” with the United States and thus increasing the costs of PRC-repression tactics at home and adventurism abroad.

No Olympics should be held in China as long as authoritarianism rules. No Chinese government entity or state-owned company engaged in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, espionage, abuses of human rights, or religious freedoms should be able to secure funds on the U.S. capital markets from unwitting American investors. And the PLA should be denied the considerable espionage opportunities that arise from so-called military-to-military contacts and should no longer be able to acquire nuclear weapons-relevant supercomputers, missile technology, and other potentially deadly equipment from the United States.

Have no doubt: Helping the Chinese people liberate themselves from Communist despotism will be more difficult than was the job of taking down the USSR. The extent of China’s penetration of the West is far greater than was true of the Soviet Union; Beijing’s influence and agents are much more widespread. Still, part of the reason that Beijing attacked our plane was in furtherance of its classic social- engineering campaign whereby external threats (even manufactured ones) are used to promote support for the regime and to suppress dissent. The fact that the Chinese are growing increasingly restive is the best hope for making common cause with them in achieving a transformation of China. It is also the best hope for avoiding a conflict with the United States that China’s leaders clearly seem determined to foment.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy under President Reagan. He is currently the president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.

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.

Hell No, Clinton Shouldn’t Go — to North Korea

(Washington, D.C.): The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported what may be George W. Bush’s first serious foreign policy mistake: According to the Journal, “[On Monday], Bush transition spokesman Ari Fleischer said Mr. Bush would leave any decision on a visit to [North Korea] to Mr. Clinton. We won’t weigh in on decisions the administration has to make between now and January 20.'”

This statement follows — and presumably reflects — the substance of meetings between senior Clinton foreign policy personnel and Mr. Bush’s newly announced Secretary of State- designate Colin Powell and his National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice. It could greatly compound the damaging legacy President Clinton will bequeath to his successor.1

A Dismal Record on North Korea

A particularly egregious example of this legacy is the Clinton policy of appeasement towards Stalinist North Korea. It began with a misbegotten 1994 deal whereby Pyongyang was supposed to give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for Western financial life-support, oil and two reactors (capable, by the way, of producing vastly more weapons-useable plutonium than the two aging ones they were to replace). There is reason to believe, that the North may nonetheless have acquired several atomic weapons and is still covertly working to obtain more.

The appeasement of North Korea intensified earlier this year with a Nobel Peace Prize- winning visit to Pyongyang by South Korean President Kim Dae Jong, and a host of concessions by the South unreciprocated by any appreciable diminution of the North’s threatening “good-to-go- to-war” military posture.

Not to be outdone, the Clinton Administration dispatched Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to pay court to Kim Jong Il — complete with the appalling spectacle of her applauding tens of thousands of schoolchildren parading Pyongyang’s commitment to its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs — in the hope of clearing the way for Mr. Clinton to do his own kow- towing pilgrimage to the “Hermit Kingdom.” Its purpose? To secure yet another set of phony North Korean promises, this time involving missile production and proliferation.

It is not in the United States’ interests or those of its allies in East Asia to perpetuate the notion that unverifiable, unworkable and unbalanced agreements with dictators like Kim Jong Il, who have no respect for the rule of law — either at home or internationally — and a track record of ignoring such agreements whenever it suits them. The apparent insouciance about such a prospect on the part of the incoming Bush foreign policy team is especially worrisome since it is utterly at odds with, and manifestly repudiates, the strong opposition to this initiative expressed by congressional leaders in a letter to Mr. Clinton sent last week.

An Ill-Advised Carte Blanche

Of even greater concern than the particulars of the deal Mr. Clinton will try to strike if he does go to North Korea — and the commitment that accord will inevitably inflict upon his successor and the Nation effectively to prop-up Kim Jong Il’s odious regime — is the idea implicit in Mr. Fleischer’s pronouncement: The incoming Bush-Cheney Administration seems to be signaling that it is comfortable with the idea of carrying forward not only what have been, at best, the hapless policies, diplomatic initiatives and international obligations of the Clinton-Gore Administration to date, but those the latter might fashion between now and Inauguration Day, as well.

Just how ill-advised this sort of “carte blanche” may prove to be is evident from even a cursory look at what the Clinton team has been doing since the election and would like to do before it leaves office:



  • An agreement signed last week by Secretary Albright and Russian Foreign Minister Ivanov committing the United States to pre- and post-launch notifications that will prove a grievous, if not fatal, impediment to America’s pursuit and exercise of space power — an activity the new Rumsfeld Commission will shortly affirm is critical to U.S. security and commercial interests during and beyond the Bush-Cheney years.2


  • An agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians that will provide no just and durable peace with security for Israel but that will, instead, likely accelerate the slide towards another Mideast war on Mr. Bush’s watch.3


  • Enrolling in the International Criminal Court despite the fact that the magnitude of the assault it has come to represent on American sovereignty and constitutional processes has obliged even the Clinton White House and Defense Department to oppose making the United States a signatory.


  • Binding the United States still further to another sovereignty- and economy-sapping international order — the Global Climate Control regime — in talks with European and other negotiators. While this effort has reportedly foundered for the moment, primarily over French insistence that the Kyoto Protocol be implemented in a way that will do maximum damage to the U.S. economy, it may yet be resuscitated and finalized before Messrs. Clinton and Gore leave office.


  • A strategic arms control deal with the Russians binding the United States to unacceptably radical cuts in offensive nuclear arms and possibly adding to the already significant impediments to the deployment of defensive anti-missile systems.


  • Normalization of relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

The Bottom Line

Neither the national security, American interests more generally or the next President’s stewardship of the foreign policy portfolio will be advanced by these and similar steps taken in other areas by a lame duck Clinton Administration. Mr. Bush ran on a platform that explicitly assailed the Clinton-Gore record on security policy. The President-elect cannot safely stand by and allow the latter to expand and exacerbate that record under the deadline of the incumbent’s imminent return to private life.



1It is not clear whether the presence of a strong Secretary of Defense-designate in the mix would have produced different results. But this episode certainly underscores the need for the Bush-Cheney national security team to be balanced by the presence of an effective and forceful advocate for the Defense Department’s views and responsibilities.


2See the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled Senior Military Leaders Urge Rejection of Ill-Considered U.S.-Russian Launch Notification Accord (No. 00-P 98, 11 December 2000); Clinton Legacy Watch #51 : What a President Bush Must Undo (No. 00-D 91, 20 November 2000).


3See Daniel Pipes: The Winds of War Are Blowing in the Mideast (No. 00-F 60, 20 December 2000) and What Undid the Middle East Peace Process’ (No. 00-F 52, 31 October 2000).

Clinton Legacy Watch: The New World Disorder

(Washington, D.C.): A perfect example of the New World Disorder (NWD) Bill Clinton and Al Gore are bequeathing to their successors can be found north of the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula.

On the one hand, impoverished, Communist North Korea is leading its rich, democratic neighbor to the south in a diplomatic dance that is mesmerizing Western policy- makers with visions of sugar-plum treaties, economic engagement and “peace in our time.”

On the other hand, North Korea continues to prepare for war. Worse yet, with its burgeoning proliferation of ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction technology, Pyongyang is sowing the seeds for mayhem elsewhere around the world. Nowhere does this appear to be more menacingly true than in that most explosive of tinderboxes: the Middle East.

The latest round of bilateral diplomacy will occur this week as defense ministers Cho Song-Tae of South Korea and Kim Il-Chol of North Korea meet on the South Korean island of Cheju. This meeting is expected to address issues such as trans-border railroad construction, a security hotline between the two countries and “confidence-building measures.”

What North Korea is Really Up To

Unfortunately, there appears to be precious little basis for “confidence” that North Korea has actually changed course; if not, the upshot of this latest bilateral fandango may be to exacerbate the likelihood of conflict on the Korean peninsula.

Indeed, last Friday’s New York Times reported that a new, leaked Pentagon study concludes that: “While the historic summit between the North and the South holds the promise of reconciliation and change, no evidence exists of the fundamental precursors for change. There is little or no evidence of economic reform or reform-minded leaders, reduction in military or a lessening of anti-U.S. rhetoric.”

Proliferation ‘R Us

Worse yet, each passing day seems to bring fresh evidence of North Korea’s determined contribution to a more disorderly — if not a vastly more dangerous — planet. Its dictator, Kim Jong-Il, regards ballistic missiles as an export commodity, one of the few things that his country produces that can provide its bankrupt regime with infusions of hard currency. He recently acknowledged that his country is selling missile technology to its fellow rogue states. These include:

  • Iran. Tehran has just conducted its latest flight test of the so-called Shahab-3 ballistic missile, believed to have been derived from North Korea’s No Dong missile. When deployed, it will be capable of delivering chemical, biological or even small nuclear weapons against Israel.

    In the past, the Iranian government paraded a Shahab-3 through the streets of Tehran, accompanied by posters that said, “Israel should be wiped from the map” and “The USA can do nothing.” While the most recent test apparently failed shortly after lift-off, it is unlikely that the Islamists in Tehran will be dissuaded from pursuing the means by which they can threaten immense harm to the “Great Satan,” its friends and interests.

  • Libya. On September 24, the London Sunday Telegraph revealed that Libya has completed its own, ominous missile deal with North Korea. According to the Telegraph, Muammar Gaddafi’s unreconstructed, terrorist-sponsoring regime has secretly taken delivery of the first of fifty No Dong missiles and seven mobile launchers from Pyongyang:

    “Despite co-operating closely with Iran and Yugoslavia on developing missile technology, both the Libyan missile projects have encountered severe development problems. The deal with Pyongyang will enable Col. Gaddafi to bypass his own development programs as the North Koreans will provide him with ready-made ballistic missiles which will soon be able to pose a significant threat to the security of Israel and southern Europe.”

    North Korea is said to have supplied, in addition to the missiles themselves, nine engineers who will presumably not only abet Libya in wielding the threat its No Dongs represent but will assist Gaddafi in acquiring still-longer-range delivery capabilities for his weapons of mass destruction.

  • Syria. On September 25, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that “Syria successfully tested its first North Korean ground-to-ground Scud-D missile early Saturday morning” and that Israel’s “military establishment was somewhat surprised by the model of missile fired.” The longer range and mobility of the Scud-Ds mean that Syrian forces will be able to hold Israel at risk from a much larger area, considerably decreasing the likelihood that the vaunted Israeli air force will be able to locate and disable these weapons before they are used to rain weapons of mass destruction down on the Jewish State.
  • Iraq/Sudan. North Korea is also reportedly helping Iraq to build a Scud missile manufacturing plant near Khartoum in the Sudan. Such a facility will presumably greatly facilitate the proliferation of ballistic missiles in Africa, the Middle East and beyond.

Clinton-Gore: Exacerbating the N.W.D.

In light of these developments, it is mind-boggling that the Clinton-Gore Administration persists in seeking normalized ties with North Korea and down-playing — the newly leaked Pentagon report to the contrary notwithstanding — the real risks associated with its continued appeasement of Pyongyang.

No less disturbing are two other, related Clinton-Gore policy mistakes: First, the Administration is trying to nail down a multilateral agreement creating a so-called “Global Action Plan Against Missile Proliferation (GAP).” This initiative was spawned by Russian President Vladimir Putin who, during a visit to Pyongyang, cooked up the idea of paying the North Koreans to give up their ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles (rockets inherently capable of being used to deliver not only payloads into space but weapons to earth-bound targets thousands of miles away) as a means of derailing U.S. missile defenses. Even though Kim Jong Il subsequently dismissed the idea, the U.S. and others are actively proposing to launch satellites for the North (and other ballistic missile wannabe states), perhaps even paying for the privilege of doing so!

Second, President Clinton has deferred to his successor any action on deploying competent American missile defenses. By so doing, he has compounded the danger already made too real by his earlier, adamant opposition to fielding effective anti-missile systems: The likelihood that the United States will be obliged to deploy such defenses after they are needed, rather than before.

The Bottom Line

Of course, if Israel or someplace else we care about — to say nothing of the United States, itself — is struck by a ballistic missile-delivered weapon of mass destruction, the debate about deploying missile defenses will be over. In its place will be a national commitment to a Manhattan Project-style crash program imbued with the utmost national priority and a charter to put an array of protective layers in place at the earliest possible moment.

But by then, the true, menacing nature of the New World Disorder that is going to be Bill Clinton’s most dangerous legacy will have become evident to all Americans.