A dozen years later, during the Iraq War, the United States became the aggressor, armed with upgraded space assets that provided an overwhelming asymmetric advantage. Weather satellites, spy satellites, military communications satellites, and two dozen Earth-orbiting GPS satellites charted and imaged the battlefield. Down on the ground, young soldiers drove down danger-ridden roads in armored vehicles. And because of portable access to spaceborne assets, by and large they knew where their targets lay, how to get there, and what obstacles stood in the path. Meanwhile, anyone in America who publicly criticized the way the war was justified, funded, or conducted soon felt pressure to bracket their accusations with lavish declarations of support for the troops. Despite the pressure, hundreds of thousands of peace-minded US civilians, joined by hundreds of members of a fierce new generation of antiwar vets and by millions of Europeans, again put their bodies on the streets and their testimony on record to call for a swift end to the invasion.8
Congress, as usual, was not in the vanguard of the antiwar battalions. For more than half a century, it has neither exercised its constitutional right to declare war nor withheld funding to pursue a specific war. This time it simply voted on whether to give the president free rein to use US armed forces against Iraq “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate.” In January 1991—upholding the firm twentieth-century pattern of Democratic-controlled Congresses voting in support of war—a Congress with substantial Democratic majorities had voted 250–183 in the House and 52–47 in the Senate to authorize a Republican president to do as he saw fit with the troops.9 Now, in October 2002, a more evenly split, but now Republican-controlled, Congress voted 296–133 in the House and 77–23 in the Senate to give another Republican president similar authorization. And so, ostensibly to avenge the horrors of September 11, 2001, we went to war to rid the world of Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction and to liberate the citizens of Iraq from a tyrant who promulgated torture, repression, and poison-gas attacks on his own people but also, as it happens, supplied them with free university education, universal health care, paid maternity leave, and monthly allotments of flour, sugar, oil, milk, tea, and beans.10
The first few years after 9/11 were a fine time to be a mercenary, a military engineering firm, or a giant aerospace company. Vietnam felt very far away. Blackwater, Bechtel, Halliburton, KBR, and their brethren prospered; returns on one global aerospace and defense index rose nearly 90 percent, compared with a 60 percent rise for global equities.11 At the mention of the words “terrorism” or “homeland security,” liberal Democrats made common cause with conservative Republicans.
With the winding-down of the Cold War, the aerospace industry had undergone unrelenting shrinkage and consolidation. Seventy-five aerospace companies were in operation on the day Reagan was elected, merging into sixty-one by the time the Berlin Wall fell, and finally into just five titans—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics—by the time the Twin Towers crumbled into toxic dust. Some 600,000 scientific and technical jobs had vanished in just a dozen of those years, along with incalculable quantities of experience and intellectual capital.12
Terrorism to the rescue—if not for American S & T workers, then certainly for American industrialists. The rescue was ably assisted by the 2001 final report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, better known as the Rumsfeld Space Commission after its aggressive chairman, who was about to begin serving as George W. Bush’s secretary of defense. The report invokes vulnerabilities, hostile acts, attacks, deterrence, breakthrough technologies, space superiority, encouragement of the private sector, and prevention of a “Space Pearl Harbor” (a recurrent phrase). It calls for “power projection in, from and through space” to ensure that the United States “remain the world’s leading space-faring nation,” and declares that America must be able “to defend its space assets against hostile acts and to negate the hostile use of space against U.S. interests”—altogether a grandiose and open-ended agenda.13 The report was published exactly eight months before 9/11, and while it mentions terrorism multiple times, Osama bin Laden is mentioned only once. The threat level of its pages, however, is consistently reddish orange.
One Rumsfeldian pillar of space management was missile defense, the much-questioned ballistic missile interception technology announced as a goal in 1983 by Ronald Reagan and quickly dubbed Star Wars. Under the budget for missile defense from 2001 to 2004—George W. Bush’s first term as president—Boeing’s contracts doubled, Lockheed Martin’s more than doubled, Raytheon’s nearly tripled, and Northrop Grumman’s quintupled.14 At the same time, corporate aerospace contributions to both parties in election campaigns ranged in the tens of thousands of dollars, while the corporations’ multiyear missile-defense contracts ranged in the billions—an enviable return on a modest investment.15 The Defense Department’s Star Wars budget, $5.8 billion in 2001, reached $9.1 billion in 2004. Early in its tenure, the Bush administration withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, thus escaping from international constraints on testing weapons technology in space and enabling the newly renamed Missile Defense Agency to execute its mandate.
The picture of overall military spending for 2001–2004 was as expansionary as the picture for Star Wars. The formal “budget authority” for national defense—the permission given to the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, NASA, and other agencies to sign new contracts and place new orders—rose from $329 billion in 2001 to $491 billion in 2004. Meanwhile, America’s military credit line plus preauthorized payments edged toward a trillion dollars a year, not to mention additional expenditures such as the off-the-record billions in shrink-wrapped packets of bills handed out in Baghdad.16 Whether this spending increased US national security is a matter of debate.
People who care about politics—and about safety—barely intersect on a basic definition of security: national, global, or otherwise. According to the mission statement for the middle-of-the-road American Security Project, for instance:
Gone are the days when a nation’s security could be measured by bombers and battleships. Security in this new era requires harnessing all of America’s strengths: the force of our diplomacy; the might of our military; the vigor and competitiveness of our economy; and the power of our ideals.17
A different spin comes from the left-of-center American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project:
Our Constitution, laws, and values are the foundation of our strength and security. Yet, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, our government engaged in systematic policies of torture, targeted killing, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and religious discrimination. It violated the law, eroded many of our most cherished values, and made us less free and less safe. . . . We work to ensure that the U.S. government renounces policies and practices that disregard due process, enshrine discrimination, and turn everyone into a suspect. We also seek accountability and redress for the victims of abuses perpetrated in the name of our national security. These are the ways to rebuild American moral authority and credibility both at home and abroad.18
The federal government’s National Security Agency displays an extremely general motto on its home page—“Defending Our Nation. Securing the Future.” Its Trump-era mission statement owes more to defense jargon than to political philosophy:
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Information Assurance (IA) products and services, and enables Computer Network Operations (CNO) in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances.19
Speaking of the National Security Agency, its most famous whistleblower, Edward Snowden, is far more sympathetic to the ACLU’s vision than to that of his employers. Rather than invoking national security, to which he was quickly and widely accused of doing irreparable harm, he invokes the public
interest—not the freedom of government to engage in massive, blanket surveillance of individuals for the ostensible goal of national security, but rather the right of individuals to know, debate, understand, and meaningfully consent to the actions of their government.20
Taking yet a different tack, the progressive Massachusetts-based National Priorities Project looks at national security in terms of the costs of various components and different viewpoints, noting that in 2016 US taxpayers shelled out, per hour, $57.52 million for the Department of Defense while spending $11.64 million on education and $2.95 million on the environment.21
Move outward from nation to globe. On the plane of raw human survival, scientists have cited overuse of antibiotics and the resultant increase in highly resistant microbes as a threat to national and ultimately global security, while the Pentagon, along with the United Nations and scientists across the globe, has identified climate change as a parallel threat—a trigger for regional conflicts over freshwater, food, and refugees; a condition leading to drought, wildfires, and pandemics; and a cause of rising sea levels, which in turn would redraw coastlines and submerge low-lying countries.22 The European Union contends that in the current era of “multifaceted, interrelated and transnational threats . . . the internal and external aspects of security are inextricably linked.”23
By any definition, for any individual and any nation rich or poor, security—in the simplest sense of safety—is a central, if not the central, concern. Survival is merely step one. Beyond that, at the very least, are freedom from fear and freedom from want. On any scale—individual, familial, societal, national, or global—security also requires practices that are viable for the long term. In a technologically advanced world, an insufficiency of food, water, or education creates unviable, unsustainable conditions. Ultimately, security on the broadest scale is unachievable without an embrace of multilateral coexistence. From a couple of hundred miles up in space, after all, every nation is a landmass among landmasses—a collage, like the others, of green, brown, blue, and diminishing splashes of white—signaling the oneness of Earth and the inescapable togetherness of its inhabitants. It is a signal easily picked up by astronauts.24
In the years that followed 9/11, I was running New York’s Hayden Planetarium, serving on a presidential commission charged with bolstering the prospects of the US aerospace industry, writing a monthly column for Natural History magazine, and scrambling to complete the unrealistic number of other projects I’d taken on. One of my newer commitments was serving on the board of the Colorado-based Space Foundation.
The 1983 charter of the Space Foundation, a not-for-profit advocacy group, has a noble ring:
[T]o foster, develop, and promote, among the citizens of the United States of America and among other people of the world . . . a greater understanding and awareness . . . of the practical and theoretical utilization of space . . . for the benefit of civilization and the fostering of a peaceful and prosperous world.25
Two key pieces of the foundation’s work, directed at anybody and everybody who conducts business in space, are the glossy, info-crammed annual publication The Space Report: The Authoritative Guide to Global Space Activity and the Space Foundation Index of about thirty publicly traded companies. But the foundation’s longest and liveliest commitment is its annual broad-spectrum conference: the giant, jam-packed, three-decade-old National Space Symposium.26
The first symposium I attended as a member of the board was the Space Foundation’s nineteenth, held April 7–10, 2003. As usual, the venue was the venerable Broadmoor Hotel and Resort in Colorado Springs, with its acres of open, high-ceilinged display halls in which corporations, government agencies, branches of the military, and merchants display their aerospace wares in booths commonly staffed by attractive young women. Colorado Springs is a sunny, mid-sized, friendly city that happens to be home to a stunning battery of military entities, including the Peterson Air Force Base, the Schriever Air Force Base, the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), Fort Carson, the US Air Force Academy, the US Northern Command, the Air Force Space Command, the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command, the Missile Defense Integration and Operations Center, the Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense, the 21st Space Wing, the 50th Space Wing, the 302nd Airlift Wing, the 310th Space Wing, and the National Security Space Institute. It also hosts the offices or headquarters of more than a hundred aerospace and defense contractors, including giants like Ball Aerospace and Technologies, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. The region further boasts three universities with graduate programs in space sciences, and, not surprisingly, hosts the headquarters of the Space Foundation—all this in a state that ranks twenty-second in population but bobs annually between first and third in total aerospace activity.
Just three weeks before the start of the 2003 conference, the second President Bush had announced from the Oval Office the “decapitation attack” that launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, assuring the world that it would not be “a campaign of half measures” and that “no outcome except victory” would be acceptable.27
Typically, registrants at the National Space Symposium include Air Force generals, corporate executives, heads of space centers, and administrators of NASA and other government agencies. You’ll also find engineers, entrepreneurs, inventors, investors, flyboys, space weapons traders, communications specialists, space tourism mavens, and the occasional astrophysicist, as well as selected members of Congress, representatives of state government, and diplomats and scientists from the ever-growing international community of spacefaring nations. There are students. There are teachers. Most of the registrants are men. That year, many of the five thousand people gathered at the Broadmoor had some professional link to Operation Iraqi Freedom. The symposium’s organizers, in fact, had worried that the long list of military officers slated to give plenary talks would be called to war, precluding any trip to the symposium and any talk about wars yet to come. Yet they showed up in higher numbers than ever: 20 percent higher than the year before.28 Rather than thinking of the several-day symposium as a place that would take them away from their space business, everybody presumed it would be the best place in the world to conduct it—and they were right.
Anybody who needs to hear about US space assets, or state-of-the-art communications, or the future of war; any general who needs to know how corporate R & D might influence the warfighter’s vision of spaceborne weapons; any industry manager who needs to know what’s in the latest vision statement drawn up by military strategists: they’re all there, in the same place at the same time. Although academic scientists are a far less prominent part of the mix, it has long been clear to me that the space research my colleagues and I conduct plugs firmly and fundamentally into the nation’s military might.
But not everyone on the Broadmoor’s turf was enthusiastic about US military control of space. On a brief stroll from the lovely grand hotel to the brand-new conference center the first morning of the symposium, I found myself facing a dozen protesters denouncing the conference as a weapons bazaar. I’m not a fan of war. I’m somebody who imagined the naked, napalmed Vietnamese girl child running from the bathroom of my apartment. And yet, face-to-face with the protestors that day in Colorado Springs, in a shift of heart and mind I could not have foreseen, I suddenly felt I was confronting “them.”
Yes, Boeing makes thermal-kill antimissile systems. Yes, Lockheed Martin makes laser-guided missiles, Northrop Grumman makes kinetic-kill missile interceptors, Raytheon makes cruise missiles, and General Dynamics makes the guidance and weapon-control systems for nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. They all make weapons that break stuff and kill people. Some are ground-based; some are aircraft-based; others are space-based. Yes, in most directions you cared to turn at the National Space Symposium in 2003, space-inspired arms trading was going on. But to me the conference was primarily about peaceful things�
��cosmic things—and so I wasn’t ready to paint the entire enterprise as evil just because it facilitated a bit of arms trading on the side. I told myself that accountability lay with the voters and their elected officials, not with the corporations.
Treating my new vision as though it was a long-held personal conviction, I inwardly labeled the protesters as politically naive, as well as ungrateful to the defenders of the freedoms they took for granted. With a tinge of indignation, I stepped across their phalanx and walked into the events center.
The banquet hall, repurposed daily for all plenary talks, is so large you can barely see the speaker’s podium from the back rows. The ceiling is high, the thousands of red-upholstered chairs sturdy, the red-flowered azure carpeting thick. The backdrop of the stage looks like the cockpit of a spacecraft. Jumbo video screens hang along each side of the room, about halfway to the back row, so that each of the thousands of attendees can get a close view of the speakers and panelists.
General Lance W. Lord, the tall, calm, affable man who headed the Air Force Space Command, delivered the keynote address. “If you don’t have a dream, you can’t have a dream come true,” he declared, managing to echo both South Pacific and the Cold War. “If you’re not in space, you are not in the race.”29 Offstage, General Lord offered an avuncular handclasp and an engaging friendliness, at odds with both his central-casting name and my Vietnam-era stereotype of the warmongering commander.
Accessory to War Page 2
