(This is the second part of an article originally published by the Centre for Defence and International Security Studies, UK, in May 2005)
New Geography, New Missions
In the 1940s and 1950s, the US and the Soviet Union coveted space as the ultimate High Ground from which to conduct surveillance and reconnaissance, especially to watch each other as they raced on earth to build and test bigger nuclear warheads and intercontinental missiles. In the 1960s, the first military communication, weather and navigation satellites were launched into higher orbits. The two militaries started to use satellites for nuclear command, control and communications and later for missile guidance. Attempts were made during the late 1960s and early 1970s to build orbital anti-satellite weapons and missile defences, but these were negotiated away. A combination of technological infancy and military and political prudence limited the purpose of space to being just the High Ground, and a mutually open and shared one at that. Sustained military presence was limited to the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and the military mission was restricted to Space Support - that is, to launch space vehicles and manage the satellites in orbit.
In the 1980s, the US military started to use space-based assets across the range of military activities and geographies due to three interrelated developments: one, the development in the 1970s of the ability to network computers; two, the ability to launch and utilise communications and navigation technology had matured; and three, advances in computing technology gave missile makers the ability to put fast onboard computers that gave missiles in flight the ability to react quickly to guidance signals from satellites. These technologies together made it possible for the US military to interact with US warfighters across the globe in near-real time. They also made possible precision, stand-off warfighting. The 1991 Gulf War demonstrated the power of what came to be called the first Space War. As the US military realised its benefits, it added a second military space mission: Space Force Enhancement - the use of space to enhance warfighting capability on the ground, sea and air.
The Gulf War demonstration of high-tech warfare made the Chinese sit up and worry about what they would have to encounter if they attempted to take Taiwan by force, as well as about increasing American hegemony in the post-Cold War era. Since then, the Chinese have keenly studied US high-tech warfare. The PLA has reformulated the Mao-era Local War doctrine to Local War under High-Tech Conditions. As a direct consequence of that reformulation, China has expanded and accelerated its space programme to include navigation, remote sensing and increased surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to gain information advantage. More importantly, since 1998, China has focused intensely on developing micro-satellite capabilities with an intent to build orbital anti-satellite weapons. In Chinese calculus, the opening shots in a US-China confrontation, possibly over Taiwan, would have to be its anti-satellite weapons destroying America’s eyes and ears in the sky and thus deny it information dominance, the very foundation of US conventional military superiority.
The flattering attention bestowed by the Chinese on their Space War made American military and civilian strategists aware of both America’s dependence on space as well as the vulnerability of its space assets. In their book War and Anti-War, the Tofflers quote Eliot Cohen: In the Gulf War, we faced no attempts to blind or disable our satellites. In the not-so-distant future this may change. In 1993, the Chief of Air Staff told the US Congress that ‘‘We simply must find a way to get on with the construction of capabilities aimed at ensuring that no nation can deny us part of our hard-won space superiority. We can limit our adversaries’ ability to use space against us’’.
The Clinton administration’s National Space Policy statement in 1996 formalised this quest into a third military space mission: Space Control - the Department of Defense would maintain space control capabilities to ensure freedom of action in space and, if directed, deny such freedom to adversaries.
New Technologies, New Doctrines
But the Clinton administration did not put the plan into action for two reasons. First, it preferred to treat China as a potential strategic partner. In fact, through the Clinton years, China acquired technology not only clandestinely through espionage, but the American administration itself opened wide the technology pipe hoping that that would help America engage China as a partner. And, second, the Clinton administration also believed that the US could continue to maintain its dominance in space by simply keeping afloat the threat that if any other power sought to weaponise space or use space against US interests in general, America would respond by weaponising it on an unmatched scale.
In any case, the US military did not have an acceptable plan that could be put into action in a time of declining military budgets. Like much else concerning the US military, its space programme too was heavily invested with Cold War attributes. It could readily be described by the words big, heavy, multi-mission, complex, mission-critical, long-lasting and costly. Heavy, long-lasting and multi-functional satellites would be launched into fixed, high and less-vulnerable orbits using heavy launchers. The satellites would then be constantly monitored and controlled throughout their life period from expensive, heavily manned, ground stations. Both the launch vehicles and the satellites would have to undergo several months of tests before they could be launched. Indeed, the planning for all this activity itself had to begin years ahead. A Space Control capability with these attributes could not be built within the $250 billion military budget of the Clinton era. Even if it could be built, it would not work -- in space, where one cannot man and protect assets continuously and permanently, agility and adaptability of launch and orbital systems and spacecraft autonomy are crucial to the protection of space assets, and the US space programme lacked these attributes.
Things have changed since then. In March 2004, retired Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, Donald Rumsfeld’s Director of Force Transformation, proposed that the US military should change the way it operated its space programme. Cebrowski’s new ‘business model’ is called Operationally Responsive Space(ORS). The logic of ORS is that space operations should move away from Cold War-era attributes of massive size and gold-plated technology towards ‘‘the small and the fast and the many’’. Massive, multi-function satellites lifted by massive launch vehicles after long planning, production and testing phases would be replaced by single-function micro- and nano-satellites lifted into low earth orbits by small rockets that could be launched within days, and ultimately within hours, of a military request. That request itself would come from a tactical level commander rather than from the highest military and political officers. In short, every theatre commander gets his own micro- or nano-satellite whenever he needs one.
If realised, this business model for the ORS Space Support mission would bring multiple benefits to the US military: first, it would reduce cost and time of maintaining access to and utility of space; second, it would ensure availability of space-based assets to theatre commanders whenever needed and thus serve the Space Force Enhancement mission; and third, it would serve to protect US space-based assets from enemy action in space since the US would launch these mission-specific satellites only just in time for the mission. Moreover, they would be so cheap and quick to replace that the enemy would have no incentive to expend effort to destroy them. Thus, it would serve one part, called Defensive Counterspace, of the Space Control (or Space Superiority) mission - that is, to ensure for the US military its freedom of action in space.
To achieve such capability, DARPA awarded contracts to nine companies in April 2004 to study if they could come up with a service to launch 1000-pound class satellites into orbits 115 miles high with just 24-hours notice and at $5 million or less. In September 2004, four of those companies - AirLaunch, Lockheed Martin, Microcosm and SpaceX, were given follow-on contracts to make preliminary vehicle design and demonstrations by 2007.
The second part of the Space Control mission is the ability to deny freedom of action in space to adversaries, Offensive Counterspace. The Air Force Space Command is deploying technology and systems rapidly to achieve such capability. In April 2005, for instance, the US Air Force launched an experimental micro-satellite, XSS-11. Its declared task was to rendezvous with satellites already in orbit, inspect them and repair any defects during its orbital life of 12-18 months. XSS-11 only needs to be told where the target satellite is. It then burns its own engines to scoot to the target, inspects it and takes action on its own. Clearly, such a satellite is more than a mobile repair service. It is a scoot-and-destroy anti-satellite weapon. It can destroy enemy satellites by simply bumping into them, by shooting an electromagnetic pulse to fry the target’s electronics, or by shooting kinetic weapons.
In May 2005, the United States Air Force awarded a $123 million contract to Integral Systems to build a Rapid Attack Identification Reporting System (RAIDRS). The system will detect interference with American satellites - both military and commercial - and geolocate the source of the interference so that countermeasures can be taken. The Air Force intends to follow this contract up with a second larger contract to build a full-fledged system to monitor and protect its space assets.
The Department of Defense has given a $5 million grant to a robotics laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania to develop large swarms of tiny autonomous robots that could work together to search large areas of the sky or ground. On the ground, they could be supervised to move over unfamiliar and complex terrain; in space, they could be directed by a ground operator to find and swarm towards a target.
The ability to identify the source of attack on one’s satellites, on-demand spacecraft launch capability, spacecraft autonomy and scoot-rendezvous-inspect-destroy capability, and swarming robots that can be directed to surround and destroy a target are only some components of the Space Control capability that the US is currently developing. It is doing so in anticipation of a future when battles for supremacy on the earth will be fought in space as well - just as, earlier, the European powers fought their battles for European supremacy not only on that continent but over distant lands in Asia and Africa, colonising them in the process.
