Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  It is certainly true that the Global Positioning System highlights the U.S. military’s remarkable dependence on an array of satellites that orbit the planet, held aloft by the tension between their own speed and Earth’s gravitational pull. They provide our armed forces with intelligence, communications systems of all sorts, computer displays of battlefields in real time, guidance for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as the Predator and the Global Hawk and for extremely high altitude manned spy planes such as the U-2. They also provide navigational aids, accurate weather forecasts, and numerous nonmilitary functions. The reliance American forces place on such spy and communications satellites may already constitute a militarization of space but not yet a weaponization of space. Satellites are, in a sense, the opposite of weapons—extremely vulnerable “sitting ducks” following fixed paths around the Earth and an immense boon to all mankind. Their military applications are probably among their least significant uses.

  The Global Positioning System (known in the U.S. military as the Navstar GPS) is probably the greatest advance in navigation since the discovery of the compass and the invention of the sextant. It is the general term for at least twenty-four satellites, each circling the Earth twice a day, that are positioned in a “medium Earth orbit” (12,600 to 14,760 miles above the planet). A GPS receiver on a ship, automobile, aircraft, bomb, or a hiker’s handheld navigational device decodes a time signal from four of these satellites, which carry extremely accurate atomic clocks, and then calculates a position based on the different times and distances to the various satellites. As of 2005, the GPS could determine your position at any moment within about sixteen feet (five meters), a steady improvement over the previous fifteen years.70 Although created for military use, the GPS is today available to any and all users worldwide, providing strikingly accurate information on position and time in all weather conditions. The GPS has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry in applications, including handheld guidance devices for the blind.

  The U.S. military operates over 500,000 GPS receivers, most of them on cruise missiles, precision-guided bombs, and other munitions.71 It invented the system and launched its first GPS satellite into orbit in February 1978. The cost of maintaining the system is approximately $400 million per year, including replacements for aging satellites. The air force keeps twenty-eight satellites in orbit at all times, four as backups to ones that might fail. Satellites cannot be repaired, have a limited life span, and a failure rate of about two per year. Management of the entire system is in the hands of the Second Space Operations Squadron at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado.

  The air force has not always been a good steward of the GPS, which has evolved over time into a global public utility, not just a guidance system for bombs. Until August 31, 1983, GPS was exclusively a U.S. military system. On that date, Soviet fighters shot down a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 that had drifted off its flight plan into Soviet airspace. American authorities realized that if the airliner been equipped with a GPS receiver, it could have avoided its catastrophic navigation error. So the air force slowly began making GPS available for civilian use. Today, many commercial airlines integrate GPS tracking into their TV entertainment systems so that passengers can follow the course of their flight on-screen.

  From the beginning, U.S. officials knew that they could not prevent other nations or private users from tuning in to its satellites’ signals, and they feared that sophisticated technicians might be able to adapt the GPS to provide guidance for their own cruise or ballistic missiles. The United States therefore required that commercial GPS receivers have limits on the velocities and altitudes at which GPS would supply positions. Moreover, the air force has never thought of itself as a supplier of public goods but rather as an overlord of the globe. Insisting on making civilian and foreign users of GPS dependent on the United States, it implemented something that it called “selective availability,” which degraded GPS’s accuracy by adding signal errors for civilian users—normally about ten meters horizontally and thirty meters vertically. Only the U.S. military and selected allies received the unadulterated data. The air force also retained the ability to switch off GPS on a regional basis and to jam receivers in a war zone. Needless to say, this dependency on the “goodwill” of the United States irritated a lot of people, who began to devise ways to get around selective availability.

  One rather expensive solution came to be known as “differential GPS,” useful primarily for geographic imaging, weather forecasting, mining, agriculture, and high-altitude surveying. Differential GPS involves setting up one GPS receiver—the base station—at a precisely known location. The base station then calculates its position based on GPS satellite signals and compares this location to its known location. The difference is applied to GPS data recorded by roving GPS receivers, thereby correcting the selective availability errors.72 But the more definitive answer to selective availability was, of course, a GPS system not run as a U.S. Air Force monopoly.

  The Russians already had a primitive version of GPS called Glonas (global navigation system), which as of 2004 had only twelve active satellites and was uncompetitive. On May 1, 2000, the United States unilaterally ended selective availability, magnanimously declaring it to be an American humanitarian gesture: “As part of his ongoing effort to bring the benefits of government investments in science and technology to the civilian and commercial sectors, President Clinton ordered that the intentional degrading of the civilian Global Positioning System (GPS) be discontinued at midnight tonight.”73 Nonetheless, the air force retained all its capabilities to limit service, to turn off GPS regionally, and to jam receivers. Slowly and fitfully, the European Union decided to build an alternative, which it named “Galileo.” This satellite navigation system, when operational, will be more accurate and not subject to shutdown for military purposes. When completed it will be available to all world users, civilian and military, and at its full capacity will require only a Galileo receiver. As Rene Oosterlinck, head of the European Space Agency’s Navigation Department, summed matters up, “Europe cannot accept reliance on a military system which has the possibility of being cut off.”74

  European nations at first were reluctant to put up the money for Galileo and, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the project almost died. The United States has always recognized that Galileo was intended to break its stranglehold on the use of satellites for navigational purposes, but it did not know what to do about it. The terrorism of 9/11 gave it an opportunity to act. The Bush administration wrote directly to the European Union arguing that Galileo, by ending America’s ability to shut down GPS in times of military operations, would threaten the success of the war on terror. This ploy backfired badly. By mid-2002, virtually all European Union states were on board and had overfunded the project.

  Galileo will be a system of thirty spacecraft in orbit—twenty-seven active and three spares—14,514 miles above the Earth. Each satellite has a projected lifetime of twelve years. The system aims at an accuracy of less than a meter, with greater penetration into urban centers, inside buildings, and under trees, a faster fix, and atomic clocks that are ten times better than those on board the GPS satellites. The European Space Agency plans to launch the required thirty satellites between 2006 and 2010, and the system is planned to be up and running under civilian control by 2010.

  On December 28, 2005, a Russian Soyuz rocket fired from the old Soviet Cosmodrome at Baikonur, Kazakhstan, carried the first Galileo satellite into orbit—a launch received ecstatically in France, given a hearty “wrell done” in Britain, and greeted with poorly disguised sour grapes in the United States. As far as the air force is concerned, Galileo has truly slipped the American leash. In September 2003, China joined the project, promising to invest 230 million euros in it. In July 2004, Israel signed on; India joined in September 2005; Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea all affiliated with Galileo during the winter of 2005-6, each of them paying for the privilege. There was speculation that Argentina, Br
azil, Chile, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Russia also were considering becoming involved.75

  The air force itself would be wise to start planning a transition to Galileo instead of becoming paranoid over the prospect that many countries around the world may soon meet or exceed American space-based navigational and guidance capabilities. For example, the U.S. military’s precision-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) GBU-31 bomb, which has wreaked so much nonprecision carnage in Iraq, depends on the GPS. Whether it will work with Galileo or whether the European Space Agency will allow such a militaristic use of its satellites is not known. According to the RAND Corporation, “A particularly glaring U.S. space vulnerability is the constellation of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, thanks to our extraordinary dependence on that system.”76

  Unfortunately for the United States and the prospects for peace, the Air Force Space Command takes this dependency to mean that we must actively defend the GPS and other military satellites by using antisatellite (ASAT) weapons and other space-war devices. There are ways to prepare for and protect against the inevitability of satellite sabotage or failure, but the use of active military measures surely should not be among them. About the only thing ASATs could do is create so much lethal debris in orbital space as to make it useless for all nations for a very long time, perhaps permanently.

  As of December 2005, there were approximately 800 active satellites of every sort in operation—exact numbers are not available since military secrecy hides a significant portion of the total American fleet. According to an estimate by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based private watchdog organization, 413 of these satellites belong to American companies or the United States government. The Russians operate 87, the European Space Agency about 50, and the Chinese 34.77 According to the Satellite Industry Association, revenue from both governmental and commercial customers for manufacturers and operators of satellites was $85.1 billion in 2000 and $97.2 billion in 2004, with the United States accounting for more than three-quarters of all spending.78 Since 1998, there have been more commercial satellites in orbit than military ones, and the number of commercial launches each year has exceeded military launches. According to the Center for Defense Information, the U.S. military now uses privately owned commercial satellites for about 60 percent of its communications and that “dependence is growing.”79

  These commercial satellites do many useful things, most of them taken for granted and rarely thought of as related to satellites. Low Earth orbit, just 200 to 500 miles above the Earth’s surface, is crowded with satellites reporting weather conditions, mapping the Earth’s surface (“remote sensing”), sustaining the U.S. Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and the Hubble Telescope, studying the size of the ozone hole in the atmosphere over Chile, photographing the damage done by the Southeast Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, and transmitting financial and economic news around the world in real time. Satellites in low Earth orbit are so close to the planet, they must travel at very high speeds, usually about 17,000 miles per hour, so that gravity will not pull them back into the Earth’s atmosphere.

  Much farther out in space, the world’s major television networks broadcast to their markets from large communications satellites in geosynchronous or geostationary orbits—abbreviated GEO—over the equator. These satellites orbit at the high altitude of 22,237 miles above sea level, where they are far enough from the Earth’s gravitational pull to approximate the speed of Earth itself as it rotates on its own axis in each twenty-four-hour cycle (just over 1,000 miles per hour). This speed is, of course, much slower than the speed at which the Earth travels around the Sun (67,062 miles per hour). Flying at approximately the same speed that the Earth is turning on its axis, the satellite remains in the same position in relation to the Earth even though both are in constant motion.

  In 1945, just as World War II was coming to an end but while London was still under attack from Nazi V-2 rockets fired from the Netherlands, the future science-fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke calculated the height and speed required of a satellite to remain in the same place over the Earth. He published his findings in the magazine Wireless World. No one took his idea seriously at the time, but twenty years later, on April 6, 1965, it became a reality with the launching of Intelsat I, also called “Early Bird,” the first commercial geostationary communications satellite. There are today about thirty such communications satellites covering North America and more than a hundred orbiting the planet in different GEO locations. In 2002, the so-called Clarke Orbit, that is, the band where spacecraft can maintain a geosynchronous position with relation to the Earth, held over three hundred satellites of various kinds.80 The fifteen U.S. early-warning satellites monitoring missile launches, for example, are almost entirely in GEO, which is quite crowded.81 When a satellite finally wears out and ceases to function, scrupulous satellite operators have often provided small rockets and enough fuel to move them a few hundred miles higher into a cemetery orbit, but not all operators can or are willing to assume these costs.

  One of the biggest communications satellites is the Department of Defense’s Milstar, the size of a city bus, with electricity-generating solar panels as wide as the wingspan of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. The six Milstars currently in orbit are the most secure of all the various communications satellites. They resist jamming and their electronics are hardened against the electromagnetic pulse that would accompany a nuclear attack.82 In addition to being used for direct broadcasting, these communications satellites act as relay stations, bouncing telephone calls, TV images, Internet connections, and other signals from one part of the world to another.

  Many satellite functions are quite mundane. As Richard DalBello, former president of the Satellite Industry Association, explains, “When you go to Wal-Mart to buy a pair of sneakers, the credit card goes up to the satellite, gets validated and approved. Then the same satellite tells Wal-Mart that it just sold a pair of sneakers at your neighborhood store, and Wal-Mart adjusts its inventory accordingly.”83 Our dependency on such capabilities can be starkly revealed when they are suddenly withdrawn. On May 19, 1998, the satellite Galaxy IV, owned by PanAmSat, was in geosynchronous orbit above Kansas. At 6:00 p.m. it suffered a failure of its onboard control system as well as all its backup systems and began to roll aimlessly. Some six hundred stations of the National Public Radio system, the CBS network, CNN’s Airport Channel, the Chinese Television Network in Hong Kong, and the Soldiers’ Satellite Network, which brings entertainment programs to the armed forces, were instantly knocked off the air. Many self-service gas stations found themselves unable to accept credit cards. Private business television networks operated by Aetna, Microsoft, 3M, and the Ford Motor Company shut down, as did the Ohio, Minnesota, and Texas state lotteries. Some thirty-five million personal pagers on the East Coast went dead, causing hospitals and obstetricians’ offices to try frantically to reach doctors via telephone for emergency surgeries and unexpected baby deliveries.84

  No one knows what happened to Galaxy IV—it seems likely that both the primary and backup onboard computers that navigate the spacecraft without ground intervention failed for unknown reasons. Nonetheless, it is air force doctrine that, until proved otherwise, we should assume that Galaxy IV was attacked by an antisatellite weapon operated by an unnamed hostile power.

  Major General Daniel Darnell, head of the Air Force Space Command’s Space Warfare Center at Schriever Air Force Base, has exhorted all satellite operators to assume that any disruption to their spacecraft is most likely a hostile strike.85 “The first response when something goes wrong,” he warns, “should be ‘think possible attack.’“ Actually, quite a number of events other than deliberate physical or electronic attack can cause a satellite to fail, including natural radiation emanating from galactic space (e.g., cosmic rays or solar storms), collisions with space debris, or technical malfunction.86 The problem is that the air force has no way of knowing which of these things may have caused a particular fa
ilure. As the Center for Defense Information’s Theresa Hitchens notes, “The Air Force does not have the capability at this time to ascertain on the spot whether any disruption of satellite operations is due to a malfunction, such as faulty software or space weather, or the result of some sort of deliberate interference or attack.”87 As usual, however, the military chooses to follow the worst-case scenario most useful for its future funding needs. As Lisbeth Gronlund, codirector of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, points out, its strategy for space combat is invariably “Fire, Aim, Ready” in that order.88

  In an effort to “see” what is actually going on in space at any given time, the U.S. Air Force is working on “autonomous proximity operations”—orbital maneuvers that would allow satellites to inspect other satellites, diagnose malfunctions, and perhaps provide on-orbit servicing. The problem is that research in this area is devoted primarily to producing microsatellites, weighing less than one hundred kilograms, and nanosatellites, weighing less than ten kilograms, which the air force disguises to look like space debris and hopes to use to sneak up on other nations’ satellites. These minisatellites would not, however, be on innocent inspection missions. They are designed to surround other satellites and photograph, jam, blind, or collide with them. Microsatellites are inherently dual-use and could function as lethal antisatellite weapons. The main U.S. stealth satellites are in the top-secret Misty series, first put into orbit in 1990, which, by 2005, had reportedly cost us $9.5 billion. Although the air force thought they were undetectable from Earth, the first one was spotted almost at once by amateur space observers in Canada and Europe.89