Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) October 16, 2003
Space race today is mostly about weapons research
By Elizabeth Sullivan
Lt. Col. Yang Liwei got more than just the "extremely splendid" view he reveled in yesterday to his 8-year-old son from his space capsule.
The Chinese fighter pilot's starward journey also puts China into a more elite club than the nuclear one. At least nine nations have The Bomb. Just three now have the capability to put a human into orbit.
Yet in taking China into that exclusive club, Yang also brought closer the day when war may be fought in or over outer space.
It's a potentially devastating development, and not just for hopes to keep space exploration a peaceful endeavor for the benefit of all humankind.
Space warfare could alter the balance of power in the world by favoring technologically weaker attackers - say, China. A space attack could come without warning and damage satellite and communications systems critical to U.S. war-fighting capability.
It also could make utterly obsolescent the early-warning systems that have reassured us we will have time to respond to missile attack.
Such issues preoccupied Pentagon planners long before George W. Bush got to the White House.
Much as space weaponization has been lamented, many experts regard it as inevitable given China's rapid military progress in space and the secrecy with which anti-satellite weapons like ground-based lasers can be developed.
China already could have a laser prototype. We just don't know.
Yet no recent administration has been more outspoken than the Bush team about its intent to pursue outer-space defenses and space weapons. That clearly pushes potential adversaries like China to accelerate their own research in an attempt to keep up. It also makes far more unlikely any return to the old arms-control approaches that brought strategic stasis during the Cold War.
Right up until he was named Bush's defense secretary in December 2000, Donald Rumsfeld led a special commission that warned of a "Space Pearl Harbor" if more wasn't done by the United States to deny space control to our enemies.
Since taking office, the Bush team has encouraged the Pentagon to be more aggressive in seeking to deny the edge to adversaries, including China.
To do that, war planners have begun to blur the edges of what we know - and what we can't know. What is China up to, exactly? We've decided to assume the worst.
"One of the things that has changed in this administration is that they have changed the standard of proof in intelligence estimates," says longtime national security analyst John Pike of the watchdog group GlobalSecurity.org.
"If you think the intelligence on Iraqi WMD is thin, you should look at the stuff on the Chinese," he added.
At the same time, no recent administration has hidden the extent and intent of its space-weapons research with more zeal or shrouded its spending as assiduously.
Pike says he no longer tries to track the military "black budget" - not only because it has grown substantially under Bush, but also because the program labels have been shuffled to mask the true intent, he says.
Jeffrey Lewis, a graduate research fellow at the University of Maryland, says half the current $300 million for "enhancing space operations," covering only a portion of space-weapons research, is classified. Looking out to 2009, when many of the research projects will be nearing deployment, Lewis says he can account for only $200 million of a $1.4 billion spending projection. That's a lot of black ink.
In a way, it's deeply ironic. We now know that candidate Bush was not wedded to the "humble" foreign policy he promised us from the campaign hustings. We've immodestly taken over both Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the other hand, the Bush administration officials came into office being brutally honest about their mania for missile defenses and outer-space weapons. Now they're hiding what they're doing by not providing needed data on missile-defense tests or telling taxpayers what is being spent on space weapons.
With so much at stake, this "black" effort should be made light, so that we all may debate its implications.
Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages.
© Copyright 2003, Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
