by John Lasker
But not just the Earth, adds Gagnon. If the US were to someday dominate the heavens with Battlesats, it will have the ability to strike anywhere on Earth – at a moment’s notice. Something many officers in the Pentagon desire, considering it now takes the US at least one to two days to strike a target anywhere on the globe. Think about it – Osama bin Laden might not have gotten away (that’s if he wasn't allowed to get away, a theory even members of the US military have wondered about). But Gagnon says US plans go farther than “Global Strike” capabilities, much farther. If the US dominates Earth’s orbits, they would control the “Earth-Moon gravity well,” he says. The US would gain control of these shipping lanes of the future. Shipping lanes? Yes, says Gagnon, so to make sure the US controls Helium-3 (see next chapter).
“The US has made no secret of the fact that it considers space to be the military high ground,” he says. “If you master space you can control the world. The US is already calling itself ‘Master of Space’ [US Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado refers itself as such]. Other nations will react by considerably increasing their arsenals and many treaties will be broken or at risk. How long will it be before weapons are stationed in space – to be aimed at any target anywhere on Earth? How long before the Star Wars fantasy becomes a grim reality?”
Within the next twenty to forty years, he suggests. For starters, the US military’s plans to dominate Earth’s orbits are right out in the open, says Gagnon. For instance, take the Pentagon’s doctrine called “Full Spectrum Dominance,” he says. Officially made public in May of 2000, just a few months before the Bush administration would take office, the concept of Full Spectrum Dominance means the U.S. wishes to dominate a conflict at every level – control the Earth with conventional military forces; control the seas with the Navy; control the sky with the Air Force; and now control space with new technologies under development today. A few years later, in the Strategic Master Plan FY 2006 and Beyond, US Space Command made all of this quite clear: “While our ultimate goals are truly to ‘exploit’ space through space force enhancement and space force application missions, as with other mediums, we cannot fully ‘exploit’ that medium until we first ‘control’ it.”
According to the Center of Defense Information (CDI), a Washington-based space-weapons think tank, missile defense is the most expensive US weapons program of all time – $120 billion spent since President Ronald Reagan called for an antimissile shield in 1983. At the moment the US Missile Defense Agency or MDA is working on 12 separate programs. Some of which are ready to be deployed and can blow up targets in space. Such as the THAAD, or the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (See below for more detail of US space weapons).
Nevertheless, the Pentagon insists it is not researching space weapons – it’s researching missile defense, they contend. Thus there’s no need for a space weapons treaty, they add. Gagnon says don't play the fool. The Pentagon has spent $120 billion (and that’s just the unclassified spending) and worked countless man-hours on a weapons program that hasn't truly produced anything of value to the civilian or the warrior on the battlefield. Another reason missile defense is a Trojan Horse is because they have nothing to show for all the money they've spent, says Gagnon. What they're getting for spending $120 billion is “dual use” technology and they (secretly) know this, he adds. Missile defense technology is both defensive and offensive. Thus US taxpayers’ dollars are creating something the tax payer may not want, an arsenal of space weapons, he says, instead of paying for what they really need. New roads, bridges. and the rehabbing of countless schools.
The Center for Defense Information leans politically left, and like Gagnon, some of their arms-control experts also support the dual-use hypothesis for missile defense. “So many missile defensive capabilities have inherent, offensive applications as well,” said Theresa Hitchens for this book, director of the CDI.
For an example of dual use, take Pearl Harbor’s USS Lake Erie, a guided-missile cruiser which is armed with the Aegis missile defense system. The Aegis fires interceptors like the THAAD and has an impressive record knocking out dummy Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). In 2008, however, the USS Lake Erie and its Aegis obliterated a satellite as it orbited over Hawaii, littering low-Earth orbit for eternity, unless the mess is cleaned up. The Pentagon claimed their spy satellite had malfunctioned and needed to be taken out. The Aegis – which is the name of Zeus’ shield – has been equipped on 18 US warships, giving the US the ability to attack nearly any target in Earth’s orbits.
The desire to put weapons in space and building such weapons is not a 21st century phenomenon. Since World War II and through the Cold War both the US and the Soviet Union researched missiles, lasers and satellites that can strike in space, and be based in space or on Earth. They were being designed, for instance, to shoot down satellites or make them go deaf, dumb and blind. In fact, in 1985, the US in a test, shot down a satellite with a missile launched from an F-15. Such an event wouldn’t occur again until 2007, when the Chinese obliterated one of their own satellites with a ground-based missile. Members of Congress all of sudden were bellowing about how vulnerable US satellites are. A year later the US countered the Chinese when the USS Lake Erie and its Aegis system shot down the spy satellite.
Both shoot-downs foreshadow what the future of war will be. To win at modern warfare, you need to have eyes and ears constantly circling the globe. Battlefield communication, force location, spying, terrain recon, GPS, and guiding missiles to their target from hundreds of miles away, are just some combat functions powered by satellites within Earth's orbits. “Information superiority” they call it. The Pentagon's mantra is, it’s not that you need to have satellites to win a war, you have to have satellites to win a war. So if one warring side had the ability to make another side – especially the US – go both blind and deaf, they’re going to do it, and they’re researching this, especially Russia and China.
If China were to one day want its “Lost Province” back (known to us as Taiwan), the first thing they might do is give the order to shoot down as many US satellites as possible. China has fired ground-based lasers at US satellites before. Blinding them, and not destroying them. It would take a tremendous amount of energy to actually send a laser through the atmosphere and then damage a satellite. The US, however, is very close to having this capability.
Officially, the US military says an anti-satellite program does not exist. And while Gagnon’s theory of the US someday controlling the heavens may be a little fringe for some, experts agree: The US is secretly testing anti-satellite capabilities under the mask of missile defense.
“There’s an Air Force Counterspace Operations doctrine [published in 2004] that states they have already deployed ground-based satellite jammers. What there isn't currently, is an active, unclassified program to interfere with satellites by physically destroying them,” said Laura Grego, a space-weapons expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Note that Grego did not say “classified” or secret. “Instead of declaring a destructive anti-satellite program, there's a built-in capability for anti-satellite warfare in missile defense.” Consider the fact that if the US were to create a fleet of Battlesats, strictly for missile defense, they would have to be strung across Earth’s lower orbits so to cover large areas of the globe and space. The Union of Concerned Scientists states, “To keep at least one satellite over a missile launch site at all times, many Space Based Interceptors [Battlesats] would have to be in orbit. In a 2003 study, the American Physical Society showed that many hundreds or thousands of Space Based Interceptors would be required in orbit to provide global coverage against ballistic missiles. The study also showed that given the technology expected to be available for the next decade, each SBI would weigh a ton or more. As a result of these factors, deploying such a system would be hugely expensive.”
Many believe the first space weapon was the Nazi's V-2 rocket which terrorized the Allies. The V-2 would spend part of its journey in space
and then descend on its target, just like today’s ICBMs. The V-2, by the way, was designed by the infamous Wernher von Braun, who would escape to America and become known as the “Father of the American Space Program.” Interestingly, on his death bed, von Braun allegedly told a confidant that US space weapons would be “based on a lie,” and be up and running before the rest of the world knew what hit them. Even more intriguing: He said the US military would use extraterrestrial aliens or rogue asteroids as their lie to justify putting weapons in space. Interestingly, it is not documented whether he said “missile defense” would be the “lie” behind US space weapons.
Not long after von Braun passed away, President Reagan – the saber-rattling, terrorist-hunting Republican who wanted to bury the Soviet Union’s communist bear – would bring Star Wars to the world’s center stage in the early 1980s. Star Wars was actually a moniker given to the program which was called the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI. But what truly inspired – or forced – Reagan to call for his anti-missile shield? Was it his dream, did Lockheed Martin put a gun to his head, or was he simply following a plan that had been set in motion long before he had won the White House?
Johann Hari, a British journalist with stealth-like talent, claimed Reagan came to the idea of creating a space shield from a B-movie he starred in from the 1940s. In the movie, titled Murder in the Air, Reagan plays a secret agent who has to protect a weapon called the “Inertia Projector.” Hari wrote the weapon, “fired an electrical current at any plane or missile approaching the US, rendering it worthless”. A scientist tells Reagan this weapon “makes the US invincible in war, and promises to become the greatest force for world peace ever discovered.” Years later Reagan called for a shield over America using ground-based lasers and missiles, and space-based Battlesats. One program that his scientists envisioned and worked on (spending millions) was Brilliant Pebbles. Battlesats would release dozens of watermelon-sized interceptors that would act like a wall of bullets and fly into a group of targets so they take out everything, even a decoy ICBM. President Bill Clinton cut the Brilliant Pebbles program and it has never been revived. Clinton downgraded missile defense in general, slashing millions in funds. But a small number of senior office holders were determined to keep missile defense alive during the 1990s, one of those being Sen. Inouye of Hawaii, who is a Democrat and also a WWII war hero. Inouye claimed he needed to protect the Islands from the North Koreans, who have a hard time feeding their own people, let alone building ICBMs.
Also waiting during the 1990s was an entire new generation of missile defense proponents. They waited in conservative think-tanks and in military academies, working quietly to keep missile defense in the minds of those who could make it happen – those who had an office on Capitol Hill. This new generation, as it grew stronger and took power, was then tagged with their appropriate nickname – the “Space Hawks.” Some of them took power in 1994, a year when the Republicans re-took the House with their “Contract With America.” This so-called Contract called for, among other things, to severely cut funding to PBS, but also pledged to renew America’s commitment to missile defense. Newt Gingrich, the architect of this Contract, was persuaded by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy to include a missile defense provision. This right-wing think-tank was a nest of missile defense and space weapons advocates. Including Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Bennett and many Lockheed Martin corporate officers.
To fully grasp how this arms race got so hot during the 2000s, you have to understand a very familiar three-way partnership. Defense contractors, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, along with Congress and the Pentagon, all depend on each other in a big, big way. A relationship that has come to an “Eisenhower fruition.” Eisenhower, at the end of his presidency in 1961, made the timeless plea to beware of the “Military Industrial Complex.” And when it comes to missile defense, he was dead on. Lockheed Martin and Boeing remain the Pentagon’s first and second highest-paid defense contractors respectively and they want it to remain this way. To do so, they spend millions lobbying the US Congress trying to convince office holders there is a need for such weapons. And thus keep billions of dollars flowing on a yearly basis for decades to come.
The Pentagon, the US Space Command and the Air Force also lobby Congress, begging them for their new toys. It is this group that is the creative force behind space weapons. This is the group in need of a Space Bomber that can strike a target anywhere on the globe within one hour and fly in and out of the atmosphere at will. But it is the civilian missile defense contractors that need the billions to engineer and build such a craft. Allowing this money to flow in a deluge to missile defense contractors, are of course, those members of Congress who have the keys to the nation’s safes. It shouldn’t come a surprise than, that missile defense contractors are some of the biggest campaign financiers out there.
And at the start of the Bush administration, missile defense contractors broke out buckets of Crisco so to grease their large cash intake pipes. Because Bush was prepared to pump billions of extra dollars into missile defense research and development.
Jokes aside, the Bush years would be a “Golden Age” for Lockheed Martin, Boeing and many other missile-defense contractors, and also for those politicians in these defense contractor pockets. Consider the two current Senators of Alabama: Democrat Richard Shelby and Republican Jeff Sessions. Between 2001 and 2006, they ranked first and second when it came to receiving campaign contributions from the likes of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Both are high-ranking members of Senate defense-funding related committees. And in return for a several-hundred thousand dollars in campaign contributions, they have approved billions in funding for missile defense research in northern Alabama, home to Huntsville, Alabama, known as “Rocket City”; or the city Wernher von Braun built. The city claims to have 50 civilian companies working on missile defense, including all the giants, i.e., Lockheed Martin. By 2010, over 6,000 missile defense scientists and researchers will be working in and around Huntsville, a region of 380,000 people.
Besides the Crisco, also coming out during the early days of the Bush administration were the Space Hawks.
Before Bush even was raced through Washington streets so to be sworn in as quickly as possible on inauguration day January, 20th, 2001, his Space Hawks were giving birth to the “Son of Star Wars.” That same month, the now disgraced Donald Rumsfeld released a report that warned a “Space Pearl Harbor” or a colossal space-combat sneak attack from an enemy could cripple the nation. This meant the US needed to build space weapons so to protect satellites. Rumsfeld’s report also stated the US needed “power projection in, from and through space.” What that means is, the US should someday be able to maneuver a satellite over a target on Earth’s surface and melt it with a future particle beam. At the time, Rumsfeld hadn't even been appointed Bush’s Secretary of Defense yet.
Apparently, Rumsfeld was certain the enemies of the free world could wipe-out the US’s 400-plus number of satellites. Nuclear detonations in Earth’s orbits are plausible. It is a space-combat related strategy both Russia and the Chinese have prepped for, but would they ruin the orbits surrounding Earth for centuries to come? Or was Rumsfeld in many a defense contractor’s pocket? The Rumsfeld report indeed had major corporate influence: 7 of the 13 commissioners of the report were either working for defense contractors, or used to work for the defense industry.
As mentioned earlier, the US military contends in no way, shape or form is it developing space weapons. But what was so blatant at the start of the Bush era, was the Pentagon’s call for commencing the era of space combat. In 2000, the Air Force’s “Transformation Plan” asserted more firmly than ever that the Air Force intends to weaponize space. Indeed, all sorts of high-profiled US military officers and their commission studies were pushing for space weapons during the early days of the Bush administration. “In my view it will not be long before space is a battleground,” said in 2003 Lt. Gen. Edward Anderson, who at the time was head of US North
ern Command.
Others weren’t willing to wait another second. “The time to weaponize and administer space for the good of global commerce is now, when the United States could do so without fear of an arms race there,” said Everett Dolman, Associate Professor of Comparative Military Studies, at Maxwell AFB in Alabama, during a 2004 interview with Space.com. “Space weaponization can work. It will be very expensive. But the rewards for the state that weaponizes first and establishes itself at the top of the Earth's gravity well, garnering all the many advantages that the high ground has always provided in war – will find the benefits worth the costs.” Dolman also made this statement in his book: “Who controls Low-Earth Orbit controls Near-Earth space. Who controls Near-Earth space dominates Terra. Who dominates Terra determines the destiny of humankind.”
Even at the end of the Bush administration, considered by many to be one of America’s worst, the MDA was still pushing for weapons in space. A constellation of killer satellites would just “be another layer in the missile defense,” said MDA’s leader Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering in 2008. The Pentagon during the Bush administration once even planned for a constellation of 50 to 100 killer satellites to begin production in 2016. If such a plan were ever approved by Congress it would mean billions for Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Full Spectrum Dominance in pace is still being championed by many factions in the Air Force and the Pentagon. But not everyone, said Hitchens of the Center for Defense Information. Yet because China has publicly admitted it’s developing anti- satellite capabilities and then shot down its own satellite in 2007, “these Space Hawks are emboldened now,” said Hitchens. But the outcome of their space desires is nowhere close to being decided, she said. Because there are some factions within the Air Force, the Pentagon, against space domination, she said.
“There is a debate ongoing about the wisdom, the affordability and the do-ability about implementing a full-up space-war fighting strategy,” she said. The cost to create, launch, and maintain a Full Spectrum Dominance program in space would run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, she said. First you would have to build hundreds of Battlesats or killer satellites; then you have to launch them, which is also an incredibly expensive endeavor.