Financial Times (London)
August 25, 2001, Saturday
A spaceman in the Pentagon
By EDWARD ALDEN
In April 1999 General Richard B. Myers gave a little-noticed speech in which he said that the US needed to step up its planning for the military domination of space. The US, he told an audience of aerospace industry executives, should fashion "a space control mission" that would "ensure use of space on our terms".
That same month, the US air attack to drive the Serbian army out of Kosovo showed what Gen Myers had in mind. In the battle against Serbia, American and other Nato aircraft flew more than 38,000 sorties with only two aircraft shot down and not a single allied combat casualty. Such absolute domination, said Gen Myers, came about because Kosovo was "a space-enabled war". US military satellites and the global positioning system allowed US aircraft to launch precise, guided missile attacks while keeping soldiers and airmen far out of danger. The war, he said, was "a new benchmark" for the way the US planned to fight in the future.
Three years after he was named to head the US space command division of the air force, Gen Myers will have an opportunity to make his vision of the US military's role in space into a reality. President George W. Bush yesterday nominated the four-star general as the next chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the top military ranking in the US. If confirmed by the Senate, he will become the first chairman to have served as head of space command - and the first chairman in more than a decade not drawn from the ranks of the army.
Gen Myers' appointment is the clearest signal yet of the priority that military "transformation" - the application of a new generation of technology to US war-fighting capabilities - will have during the Bush administration. It wants the Pentagon to focus on a next generation of weaponry that will closely link information technologies with battle planning.
John Pike, a defence analyst with Globalsecurity.org, a Washington think-tank, calls it "a signature appointment by this administration . . . Space weapons are the administration's most identifiable military agenda and they have here the leading uniformed proponent of it."
Missile defence has been the most visible part of that agenda but it is only one component. US air force planning documents envisage space power, in essence, as an extension of air power. By dominating space, the air force argues, the US will be able to ensure victory on the ground in everything from small, regional skirmishes to big conflicts. At space command, one of Gen Myers's highest priorities was the deployment of space-based infrared systems that are crucial not only for detecting long-range and theatre ballistic missile launches but also for determining whether conventional targets have been hit on the ground.
Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, said yesterday that the 59-year-old Gen Myers' career "is the embodiment of the transformation with which he will be charged". As a small boy growing up in Merriam, Kansas, Gen Myers is said by local press reports to have been terrified of aircraft after witnessing the crash of a training aeroplane near his home. With the help of a paediatrician, he overcame his phobia - so much so that he went on the join the air force in 1965 through an officer training programme at Kansas State University. Assigned to a US base in Thailand in 1969, he flew more than 600 hours of fighter missions over Vietnam.
From there he completed a steady climb up the US military hierarchy, completing an MBA in 1977 and commanding US forces in Japan from 1993 to 1996 and the Pacific region from 1997 to 1998.
For air power advocates, the Vietnam war was a shocking setback. In spite of dropping more bombs on North Vietnam than the US air force dropped in the entire second world war, the US was defeated on the ground.
But the war also taught US military planners another lesson that was better news for air force doctrine: that the US public would no longer accept significant casualties in a foreign war. For the past generation, air force planners have been busy developing capabilities that would allow for such low-casualty wars to be fought and, unlike that of Vietnam, won.
In the Kosovo conflict, for instance, Gen Myers pointed out last year, the US deployed only 91 people in the European theatre to support the air attacks.
As chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen Myers will be able to move beyond the more limited role of advocating US space capabilities and take responsibility for integrating space more closely with overall US defence planning, military experts say.
According to General Merrill "Tony" McPeak, who was air force chief of staff from 1990 to 1994, Gen Myers is an unusually well rounded candidate for the post. In addition to his fighter pilot experience, he has held operational commands as well as research and acquisition related posts.
"On balance, I don't think there's anybody who's better prepared," says Gen McPeak.
Philip Coyle, the former director of operational testing and evaluation at the Pentagon who was charged with assessing the feasibility of missile defences, says that Gen Myers "has been immersed in high technology throughout his career, more so than any other four-star general".
But Mr Coyle and others who have watched the general's career describe him as a pragmatist and realist who understands the limitations of the technology as well as its promise. "He understands the things that technology can do but he knows it can't do everything," he says.
Mr Coyle, who has often been a critic of the extreme claims made by missile defence advocates, says he is comforted by one other thing as well. For all his focus on the high frontier, Gen Myers appears extraordinarily down-to-earth.
"In all my time at the Pentagon," he says, "he is the only four-star general I ever saw standing in line at the Pentagon cafeteria."
