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Further Reading

Command Control Military Space

SOVIET MILITARY SPACE ACTIVITIES

By Charles S. Sheldon II*

1971-1975

SPACE RELATED CONTROL SYSTEMS

A. TRAFFIC CONTROL There is no evidence yet that the Russians have advanced to applying either their passive navigation system or any active system to traffic control. The general principles of an active control system were described under the section on navigation.

Other countries of the world are talking about both maritime and aviation systems which will give position information in the first generation, and then later permit traffic control, especially important both to such busy air corridors as the North Atlantic , and to sea corridors such as channels and approaches to major ports.

The Russians have acknowledged the importance of space technology to such systems in the future. It is not clear whether they will join at an early date in the civilian international systems being formed today, or whether they will earlier develop their own systems within their military services and then use the bargaining tools of hardware and systems to gain a bigger place in any later international system. They have made reference to a traffic control system which would use 24 satellites properly deployed.

B. MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL

Although the word "control" appears in this heading, the needs and functions are somewhat different from what is entailed in traffic control. Command and control has always been a feature of mass military operations headed by a commander and staff. But development of systems to provide timely and reliable command and control has received great impetus since World War II. This is not the place to explore the history of general staffs or the systems by which missions, plans, and tasks were carried out in combined staffs and theaters of operations in World War II. The big postwar change was the absolute necessity for controlling the use of nuclear weapons. The concept was that when the strategic bomber fleets of one side took off to begin hostilities, early warning radars and other sources would alert the opposite forces to get airborne and start toward their targets of retaliation. If the enemy turned back, or the alert was a false alarm, then a fail-safe system was supposed to turn back the responding airborne forces. Such systems provided horrendous problems of achieving close to absolute reliability to prevent the unnecessary use of nuclear weapons. These problems were multiplied many-fold when the subsonic aircraft and even the supersonic aircraft were replaced by ballistic missiles. Instead of hours for verification, the theory was that any missiles in soft launch sites would have to be on their way before they were themselves destroyed in less than an hour after launch by the enemy and there would be many minutes less warning if the first alerts came from the ballistic missile early warning system (BMEWS) installations in Alaska, Greenland, and England rather than from sensors close to the enemy launch sites. The notion of sure commands, proper authentication, and high speed response could only be carried out with the aid of computers and carefully thought out systems. But in some cases, high speed was not the only need. If a Moscow or a Washington were to be obliterated through missile attack, it might be necessary to have the necessary second strike kind of information travel to hardened silos and to hidden submarines in many oceans, regardless of what happened to the normal command structure. This suggested to military planners a place for space communications specialized for these command and control purposes. It also raised many issues which go beyond civilian communications satellite needs. Essentially, the added need was survivability. This might be achieved by hiding the satellites in high orbits where they were harder to locate and track especially if given the right radar-absorbing exteriors. It might also involve heavy shielding against radiation. It might involve use of wider frequency bands not to carry many channels of messages simultaneously, but the few key messages certainly, dodging around normal electronic countermeasures such as Jamming. It might involve having many satellites so that some would survive even if others were destroyed. Command and control systems rarely rely upon any single link, since the basic concept must remain functional if all the rest of the investment in expensive weapons is to pay off in believable deterrence, or, in the ultimate, in successful combat. Presumably the U.S. Navy's continuing interest in Project Sanguine, an extensive long wave, low frequency broadcasting system that would reach submarines completely under water is symptomatic of the need to have alternative channels of communication.

The exact nature of command and control systems is highly protected by security in any country, lest an enemy try to overcome it or to spoof it with false signals. Hence, we cannot expect the Russians to disclose what is the extent and the technology of their command and control system, which probably uses space for part of it. Presumably the Molniya 1 or other Molniya satellites provide the most obvious link, but would not be enough. Whatever more protected systems exist presumably would use encrypted messages, perhaps buried in other traffic to be non-conspicuous, or they might be sent on unusual frequencies less likely to be as easily monitored. They might use highly directional signals to minimize interception. These might come in short bursts to minimize the chance of monitoring. All these techniques are well known from articles in the international literature. In essence, the big difference is that ordinary traffic moves in large volume whether in plain language or encrypted, and if changing levels of activity are to be hidden, then dummy traffic is used regularly to disguise the real rising and falling of activity. By contrast, command and control traffic tends to be quite brief, but must be instantly recognized and understood by its intended recipients, to whom it is covertly or securely addressed.

Again, in the absence of any Soviet publicity, this study can only make some inferential guesses about command and control satellites in the Soviet military space stable.

A. SOVIET SPACE PROGRAMS, 1971-75, OVERVIEW, FACILITIES AND HARDWARE MANNED AND UNMANNED FLIGHT PROGRAMS, BIOASTRONAUTICS CIVIL AND MILITARY APPLICATIONS PROJECTIONS OF FUTURE PLANS, STAFF REPORT , THE COMMITTEE ON AERONAUTICAL AND SPACE .SCIENCES, UNITED STATES SENATE, BY THE SCIENCE POLICY RESEARCH DIVISION CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE, THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, VOLUME – I, AUGUST 30, 1976, GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE, WASHINGTON : 1976,

* Dr. Sheldon, is Chief, Science Policy Research Division, Congressional Research Service, The Library of Congress.