Nonetheless, of all the high-frontier weapons into which R&D money has been poured since President Reagan’s speech, only one—the distinctly Earth-bound “defensive shield”—has come into even partial being. That is the modest antiballistic missile (ABM) defense system being installed at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. It is no longer—as Reagan envisioned—focused on defending against a massive nuclear strike by a major enemy but on a tiny strike or even an errant missile from a “rogue state” like North Korea.
How this came to pass, after the Soviet Union disappeared and the threat of a missile attack receded, is a tale about the military-industrial complex at its most persistent. As the Pentagon commentator Alexander Zaitchik has observed, “The line connecting missile defense and space weapons is direct, thick, and no secret.”5 In the 1990s, neoconservative lobbyists joined with big arms manufacturers and ambitious military officers, none of whom actually cared whether a national missile-defense system could stop a nuclear attack. Their interest was in the staggering sums such a project would require. By manipulating a Republican Congress and creating a missile defense lobby in both houses, they achieved all their goals, although actual missile defense remained as distant as ever. General Eugene Habiger, head of the U.S. Strategic Command in the mid-1990s, said, “A system is being deployed that doesn’t have any credible capability.” Philip Coyle, former assistant secretary of defense for test and evaluation in the Clinton administration, concluded that the United States had squandered over $100 billion dollars of taxpayers’ money on a “high-tech scarecrow.”6
The neoconservative mind-set that brought this project to fruition also had its origins in the Reagan years, when many young strategists, usually with neither military service nor war experience on their resumes, became impatient with the influence of internationalists and realists—the people who had dominated U.S. foreign policy making since World War II. They were also convinced that the collapse of the Soviet Union had been significantly due to U.S. technological prowess and that pouring more money into advanced technology was a sure way to achieve perpetual domination of the world. The only real debate among them was over whether American hegemony “would be welcomed as the cutting edge of human progress,” or overwhelming American power—”shock and awe”—would be enough to terrify others into submission.7 They were committed to ending all arms control treaties that constrained U.S. power, to a vast expansion of spending on armaments as well as futuristic armaments research, and to a belief that the planet could easily be mastered from the high frontier of outer space. A typical member of this group was Frank Gaffney Jr., founder of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), creator of the congressional missile defense lobby, and behind-the-scenes player in the policy shifts of the 1990s that would lead to the near-weaponization of space.
Gaffney’s views are close to those of the neocon polemicist Richard Perle, with whom he worked in the late 1970s in the office of the Democratic senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, from Washington State, home of the Boeing Corporation. Jackson influenced both men through his passionate anticommunism and his easy acceptance of the title “senator from Boeing.” Gaffney went on to become a staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee from February 1981 to August 1983. President Reagan then appointed him deputy assistant secretary of defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy, under his mentor Richard Perle. Rather like John Bolton in the second Bush administration, Gaffney distinguished himself at the Pentagon by his hostility to all arms control agreements. In 1987, the new secretary of defense, Frank Carlucci, let both Perle and Gaffney go, and Gaffney set out on his new career as a promoter of space weaponry.
When Gaffney returned to civilian life, he created the CSP, which set out to challenge the government’s intelligence on the dangers of future nuclear missile threats from “rogue nations” and to promote the defense of our space assets. The CSP is funded primarily by the major weapons manufacturers in the missile defense field—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and others—and by conservative donors such as the Coors family, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the Colorado heiress Helen Krieble.8 CSP has received well over $3 million in corporate donations since its founding in 1988.
The first major success of Gaffney’s special-interest-funded think tank came in 1994, when Republican representatives Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey released their “Contract with America”—a political platform with which the Republican Party hoped to regain control of Congress. It contained a plank that called for “renewing Americas commitment to an effective national missile defense system by requiring the Defense Department to deploy anti-ballistic missile systems.”9 An American ABM was the only weapons program included in the contract, and Gaffney took credit for having persuaded Gingrich and Armey to include it.
After the Republicans became the majority party in Congress in 1994, their leaders discovered that they still could not move decisively on missile defense because many of the members were suffering from “sticker shock.” The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a basic ground-based system against only a minimally armed “rogue state” would cost up to $60 billion. Republican representative Curt Weldon, an advisory board member of CSP, decided that the best and most time-honored way to rouse the American people and their representatives to action would be to scare them to death. As a result, he obtained passage of a resolution calling for the creation of a special commission to assess the rogue-nation ballistic-missile threat to the United States. This commission, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, issued its report in July 1998. Crucially, it disputed the CIAs estimate that any nation without a large and advanced industrial base would need at least ten years to fifteen years to build a ballistic missile, claiming instead that a mere five years would be sufficient.
In an incisive analysis, Michelle Ciarrocca and William D. Hartung, weapons experts at the World Policy Institute, pointed out that the congressionally mandated commission was anything but impartial on such matters. Most of its members were affiliated with the CSP and were eager to opt for a worst-case scenario by systematically ignoring the difficulties involved both in missile development and in the miniaturization of the nuclear warhead to be fitted to it. “The five year estimate was based in significant part on briefings from missile engineers at major U.S. defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing—hardly unbiased sources, given the billions their firms stand to gain from building a missile defense system to thwart the alleged threat posed by Third World ICBMs.”10
The Rumsfeld report, unbalanced and deceptive though it was, achieved what the high-frontier congressmen, militarists, and industrialists behind it wanted. In mid-March 1999, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly passed the National Missile Defense Act, which declared: “It is the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense.” Just before the House voted, Donald Rumsfeld, then a civilian who had served as secretary of defense over twenty years earlier, gave a ninety-minute briefing to some 250 of its members.11 In recognition of his services, Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy later bestowed its Keeper of the Flame Award on him at a gala fund-raising dinner.
There was still one major obstacle—the president himself. Bill Clinton was by then adept at capitulating to right-wing pressures from both parties as part of a strategy of co-opting Republican positions and then not implementing them. He had already allowed several billion dollars to be spent on national missile defense, but on September 1, 2000, he decided not to deploy the ABM system. “I simply cannot conclude with the information I have today that we have enough confidence in the technology, and the operational effectiveness of the entire NMD [national missile defense] system, to move forward to deployment.” He would, he declared, leave to his successor the decision whether or not to build it.12 Unfortunately for the country and the world, five months later George W. Bush became president and Donald Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon.
&
nbsp; In addition to the missile defense commission s report of 1998, Rumsfeld brought with him a second report that urged the secretary of defense to prepare for possible warfare in space. He had chaired the group that wrote this inflammatory report just as he had the first missile-defense commission. The Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization delivered its final report to Congress on January 11, 2001, a few days before Bush was sworn in and Rumsfeld took over the Department of Defense. The report was the brainchild of the congressional missile defense lobby, which got it through Congress as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2000 and stacked the commission with seven—out of thirteen—members from aerospace companies that would benefit directly from any expanded space weapons programs. Many of them were former admirals and generals who had retired into highly compensated positions as executives or board members of munitions companies. The 2001 report they produced famously warned that the United States “is an attractive candidate for a ‘space Pearl Harbor,’“ and went on to state:
The United States must develop, deploy, and maintain the means to deter attack on and to defend vulnerable space capabilities. Explicit national security guidance and defense policy is needed to direct development of doctrine, concepts of operations, and capabilities for space, including weapons systems that operate in space and that can defend assets in orbit and augment air, land, and sea forces. This requires a deterrence strategy for space, which in turn must be supported by a broader range of space capabilities.13
Statements of congressional commissions usually go unread and have little lasting influence. But the two Rumsfeld documents—the one from 1998 on missile defense and the 2001 report on protecting space assets— have assumed the status of holy writ even though both are biased and partisan in the extreme. As Michael Dobbs reported in the Washington Post, “Since the beginning of the Bush administration ... and Rumsfeld’s reappointment as Defense Secretary, the conclusions of the Rumsfeld Commission have been elevated to quasi-doctrinal status within the government, according to several officials. ‘Nobody dares say a word against Rumsfeld, at least in public,’ said one government nonproliferation expert.”14 The country was thus finally committed to building and deploying a system to destroy nuclear weapons delivered by missiles and ultimately to place weapons in outer space.
It is important to stress that at present no country has antisatellite weapons in space, that the only country talking about a possible space war is the United States, and that the only threat ever uncovered to U.S. space assets was six handheld Global Positioning System ground-jammers that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed. Nonetheless, air force spokesmen have used the 2001 report to insinuate that a space war is both inevitable and now a settled part of military doctrine.15 They have enthusiastically manufactured threats that serve their own institutional interests, not the security of the United States.
The head of the Air Force Space Command, General Lance Lord, has led the charge. “Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny,” he told an air force conference in September 2004. “Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future.” “Simply put,” he said to Congress, “it’s the American way of fighting.” We must have “freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack” in space.16 The former secretary of the air force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office Peter B. Teets, once the president and chief operating officer of the nation’s biggest arms manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, assured the Air Force Association in a January 2003 speech, “If America doesn’t weaponize space, an enemy will.”17 Keith Hall, Clinton’s assistant secretary of the air force for space, whom the George W. Bush administration retained, commented, “With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we’re going to keep it.”18
On August 2, 2004, the air force for the first time issued a new statement of official doctrine on what it calls “counterspace operations.” According to General John Jumper, air force chief of staff, “Counterspace operations are critical to success in modern warfare.... Counterspace operations have defensive and offensive elements.... These operations may be utilized throughout the spectrum of conflict and may achieve a variety of effects from temporary denial to complete destruction of the adversary’s space capabilities.”19
None of these military officers shows any interest in the arms race in space that their policies are guaranteed to elicit. Yet, it is inconceivable, observes Theresa Hitchens, an authority on weapons in space and vice president of the independent Washington research organization Center for Defense Information, “that either Russia or China would allow the United States to become the sole nation with space-based weapons.” She quotes a 1998 article in Airpower Journal, by Lieutenant Colonel Bruce M. DeBlois, “Once a nation embarks down the road to gain a huge asymmetric advantage, the natural tendency of others is to close that gap. An arms race tends to develop an inertia of its own.”20 The air force, however, has an answer to such thinking. Everett Dolman, a neoconservative and a professor in the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, the air force’s graduate school for airpower and space power strategists at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, argues, “The time to weaponize and administer space for the good of global commerce is now, when the United States could do so without fear of an arms race there. The short answer is, if you want an arms race in space, do nothing now.”21 Dolman thinks it is our destiny to “seize military control of low Earth orbit. Only the United States can be trusted to regulate space for the benefit of all.”22
Virtually all of the air force’s rhetoric about a future space war is ideological posturing, similar to the propaganda it put out at the end of the Eisenhower administration and the beginning of the Kennedy years about a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union. The purpose then was to beef up the air force’s budget and carve out turf justifying its continued growth as an organization. There was no missile gap, as the leaders of the American government knew from U-2 flights over the USSR and photographs from the first Corona spy satellites.23 Similarly today, there can be no rationale for a space war because one unintended but unavoidable consequence would be to destroy our own preeminent position in space. A major but little-noticed reason for this is because a conflict in space using antisatellite weapons of any kind would vastly increase the amount of orbiting garbage, which would threaten our whole network of military and commercial spacecraft. That, in turn, would threaten the whole American— even planetary—way of life. Yet space debris is a subject that the air force’s “counterspace doctrine” never so much as mentions.24
Space, particularly in low Earth orbits (LEO), is anything but empty. The space age is hardly forty-five years old and we have already filled its most critical zones with thousands of pieces of lethal junk. The radars of the air force’s Space Surveillance Network can see objects as small as ten centimeters—the size of a baseball—in low Earth orbit and to about one meter in higher geosynchronous orbits, where most of the world’s communications and broadcast satellites reside. The air force is currently tracking some 13,400 man-made objects in space, of which only a few hundred are active satellites. It acknowledges that there are more than 100,000 pieces of smaller, untrackable debris, each about the size of a marble (one centimeter) and millions of still smaller fragments. NASA officials have estimated that there may be about four million pounds of space junk in LEO alone.25 This debris includes dead or dying satellites, pieces of spent rocket boosters, all manner of metal shrouds and fairings, tools, nuts, bolts, and clamps of every size and description, lens caps, and even frozen sewage. In LEO they are traveling at the same speed as the space shuttle—17,500 miles per hour—or they would fall into the Earth’s atmosphere and be burned up.
Astronaut Sally Ride, the first woman in space aboard the Challenger space shuttle in 1983 and 1984, a member of the presidential commission that investigated the Challenger’s explosion in 1986, and a professor of physics at the Unive
rsity of California, San Diego, has been adamant that the use of antisatellite weapons would be “disastrous” because of the debris they would be likely to create. On her inaugural mission in June 1983, an incident fixed her opinion on this subject: “About halfway through the flight there was a small pit in the window of the space shuttle and we didn’t know what it was. An awful lot of analysis was done while we were in orbit to make sure that the strength of the window would sustain reentry. It did. We were all fine. But the analysis afterward showed that our window had been hit by an orbiting fleck of paint, and the relative velocities were enough that the paint actually made a small but visible gouge in the window. Well, a fleck of paint is not the same as a small piece of metal travelling at that same speed. So, as soon as you start increasing the amount of junk in a low Earth orbit, you have an unintended byproduct that starts putting some of your own quite valuable satellites at possible risk.”26
Joel Primack, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, agrees: “Weaponization of space would make the debris problem much worse, and even one war in space could encase the entire planet in a shell of whizzing debris that would thereafter make space near the Earth highly hazardous for peaceful as well as military purposes.... Every person who cares about the human future in space should also realize that weaponizing space will jeopardize the possibility of space exploration.”27 Primack observes that the density of debris is already so great at the 900-to 1,000-kilometer altitude (563 to 625 miles) and at the 1,500- to 1,700-kilometer altitude (938 to 1,063 miles) that pieces of junk colliding with each other could set off a chain reaction or cascade of collisions—the Kessler Effect, predicted mathematically in the 1970s by the NASA scientist Donald Kessler—that would make the zones useless.28 The Council on Foreign Relations Study Group on Space Weapons defines space debris as “unguided, hyper-velocity kinetic-energy weapon[s]” and concludes, “Because the United States owns a significant majority of the world’s satellites, it would suffer disproportionately from any increase in the amount of space debris.” Its overall conclusion is that “space weapons are not suited to the threats currently facing the United States in space or are outpaced by terrestrial alternatives.”29 All forms of space weapons, it noted, cost much more than terrestrial weapons systems, which of course do not have to be boosted into orbit, a cost that commercial operators put at between $300 million to $350 million per satellite.30 Earth-based weapons such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), cruise missiles, ICBMs, or submarine-launched intermediate-range ballistic missiles can do anything space-based weapons can, and a Tomahawk cruise missile costs a mere $600,000.
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic Page 28
