Space News February 23, 2004
Air Force Document Envisions Variety of Anti-Satellite Weapons
By Jeremy Singer
The U.S. Air Force envisions using a variety of ground-, air-, and space-based weapons that could destroy enemy satellites at some point after 2015, according to a recently released service planning document.
Those weapons include air-launched missiles, ground-based lasers and space-based radio frequency transmitters powerful enough to disrupt, disable or even destroy enemy spacecraft, according to the "Transformation Flight Plan," which was circulated within the Pentagon in November and released publicly Feb. 13.
Air Force Capt. Peter Kerr, a spokesman for the service, said each of the U.S. military services was directed by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to submit plans for dealing with future threats. The Air Force's plan is not an unconstrained wish list but rather is designed to reflect fiscal realities, he said.
"It's a very significant document as it conveys what we see as being the future of the Air Force," Kerr said.
While threats and the means to address them likely will continue to evolve, the Air Force is moving toward fielding systems based on the concepts outlined in the plan, Kerr said.
The Air Force has publicly acknowledged some of these development efforts, including work on ground-based systems intended to temporarily disrupt communications and reconnaissance satellites.
Other anti-satellite concepts, such as the air-launched missile and ground-based laser, have been demonstrated in the past. The Air Force test-fired an anti-satellite missile from an F-15 aircraft in the 1980s, and the U.S. Army in 1997 fired its ground-based Mid Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser against a satellite that had fulfilled its mission.
However, those tests were carried out with technology that is obsolete today, said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, a defense advocacy group based here.
The Air Force plan also envisions a space-based radio frequency energy weapon, described as a constellation of satellites that would "disrupt/destroy/disable a wide variety of electronics and national level command and control systems." Such a system would "typically be used as a non-kinetic anti-satellite weapon," the plan said.
Fielding such weapons will be critical to ensuring that the U.S. military in the future can dominate space as it does the air and sea today, said Gaffney, a former assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. But their inclusion in the plan is no guarantee that they will become reality, he said.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va., group that tracks military affairs, said it is difficult to determine which of the weapon systems discussed in the plan have moved beyond paper concepts and into development at some level.
"Some of them are probably PowerPoint, and some of them are probably funded at a higher level in the classified world, but which is which, I don't know," Pike said.
The detailed descriptions of anti-satellite weapons in the Air Force planning document could create a backlash among U.S. allies who are against the concept, said Theresa Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information, a think tank here.
Hitchens has argued that developing anti-satellite weapons could trigger an arms race in space. Destroying satellites with missiles and lasers also could create debris in low Earth orbit that may harm other satellites, Hitchens said.
The anti-satellite weapons described in the report are likely to draw interest on Capitol Hill, where members of Congress and their staffs are generally divided along partisan lines on the issue.
Republicans on the committees that oversee the Pentagon tend to believe that anti-satellite weapons will be needed to ensure that enemy nations do not use space to the same advantage that the U.S. military did in Afghanistan and Iraq, one staffer said.
However, Democrats have generally raised objections to the use of weapons against satellites.
The Air Force Research Laboratory is doing early development work on lasers that eventually could be used as anti-satellite weapons, said Eva Hendren, a spokeswoman for the lab's directed energy group at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M.
Hendren referred questions on research into radio frequency-based weapons to the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles. Joe Davidson, a spokesman for Space and Missile Systems Center, was unable to comment by press time.
© Copyright 2004, Space News
