Washington Post
August 2, 2001
Pg. 17
Air Force's Chief Backs Space Arms
U.S. Must Protect Satellites, He Says
By Vernon Loeb, Washington Post Staff Writer
The Air Force's top general yesterday endorsed the deployment of space-based weapons to protect the nation's satellites and predicted that the United States would develop the capacity to shoot down other countries' orbiting spacecraft.
Gen. Michael E. Ryan, the Air Force chief of staff, noted that there are "huge policy implications" in any move to "weaponize" space. But he said the United States has critical assets in space -- an estimated 100 military satellites and 150 commercial satellites -- that are increasingly vulnerable.
"We have to in some way be able to protect those assets, at least defensively," Ryan said in a breakfast interview with defense writers. "I would suggest that sometime in the future here, we're going to have to come to a policy decision on whether we're going to use space for defensive and offensive capabilities."
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and other critics of the Bush administration's missile defense agenda argue that its plans to experiment with a space-based laser could cross a dangerous threshold and trigger an arms race in space, where no nation currently has weapons.
"I think it's going to be increasingly controversial as the implications of this policy play out," said John Pike, a space expert who runs Globalsecurity.org, a think tank. "It runs fundamentally against the main theme of our space policy for the last half century -- to demonstrate America's power in space in a nonthreatening way."
But Ryan and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, have argued that the nation's dependence on satellites for military operations and commercial communications makes the development of space defenses -- if not space weapons -- an imperative over the next 25 years.
A commission on space headed by Rumsfeld before he became defense secretary called for the development of anti-satellite weapons as well as a doctrine for space combat, concluding that the weaponization of space is inevitable.
The United States has already experimented with anti-satellite weapons, including a giant chemical laser fired in 1997 from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico that successfully disabled sensors on its target, an aging U.S. military satellite. The Soviet Union also deployed a ground-launched satellite interceptor in 1971, and it remained operational through the end of the Cold War.
Ryan said the Air Force and the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization could be in position to fire an experimental, satellite-based laser at a missile in its "boost" or ascent phase between 2010 and 2012.
Beyond that, Ryan said, some U.S. military aircraft could be capable of operating in space, including a futuristic "space bomber" being contemplated by the Pentagon's long-range planners.
But the actual deployment of space weapons may still be decades away. A report by the nonprofit Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments concluded in February that the U.S. military would most likely continue using space only for communications, reconnaissance, intelligence and guidance of precision munitions until at least 2020. For the next two decades, space will not be "an arena of overt military competition, much less an actual battleground," it predicted.
Nonetheless, the report's author, Barry D. Watts, who recently became the director of program analysis and evaluation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, wrote that "it is not difficult to imagine trigger events" that could hasten the weaponization of space.
In fact, Watts wrote, space arguably has been weaponized already if the term "is construed broadly enough to include terrestrial-based applications of military force aimed at affecting orbital systems and their use" -- meaning weapons capable of disrupting satellites.
One senior Air Force official said technology is readily available to jam signals from satellites in the Pentagon's global positioning system.
Watts also wrote that the Air Force came "very close" to employing space-based offensive capabilities during NATO's bombing of Yugoslav forces in Kosovo in 1999, when B-2 bombers launched Joint Direct Attack Munitions guided by signals from global positioning satellites.
The success of the B-2 "unquestionably reinforces the view that the United States is far ahead of other nations in its ability to enhance terrestrial military operations with space systems," Watts wrote.
Whatever the result of the debate over weaponizing space, Ryan's Air Force is heavily engaged in what it calls "space control," a mission that includes everything from protecting U.S. satellites against attack to tracking 8,000 objects orbiting Earth, including 400 to 500 active satellites.
Copyright 2001 / Los Angeles Times
