Handing Our Enemies The Advantage In Space

The Obama Administration is pushing the idea of banning “space weapons.”

This proposal sounds lovely, but like nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, would be a unilateral effort on the part of the United States and Europe. Countries which regard the West as their enemies or obstacles will almost surely do as India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea have done in developing their nuclear programs: deny, negotiate, and present the world with a fait accompli.

What counts as weaponizing space? Will we disable the eye-in-the-sky satellites that our military and intelligence community have spent billions upon billions of dollars developing and deployingÑand on which they've come to rely (arguably excessively)? No. Will we give up our ICBM arsenal since they travel through the exosphere (higher than the Space Shuttle orbits, and almost twice as far from earth as the International Space Station)? Not likely. As the opening paragraph of the Reuters story states, when it comes to satellites and the like, the question of “what makes a weapon” is fairly metaphysical.

What is the benefit? One argument posits that our mere example will dissuade countries from seizing the advantage we give them by surrendering the high ground of space. Why this is so is never made clear, particularly when the nations most inclined to challenge the West do so in part because they do not share (and often do not esteem) Western culture, out of which these multilateral, legalistic schemes spring.

As Washington celebrated last Tuesday, the following document mentioning a particular military’s space-warfare capabilities came out [emphases added].

• With the focus of attention on performing the historical missions of the armed forces for the new stage in the new century and with raising the capability to win local wars in conditions of informationization at the core, it works to increase the country's capabilities to maintain maritime, space and electromagnetic space security and to carry out the tasks of counter-terrorism, stability maintenance, emergency rescue and international peacekeeping.

• Progress has been made in the building of command and control systems for integrated joint operations, significantly enhancing the capability of battlefield information support. IT-based training methods have undergone considerable development; surveying and mapping, navigation, weather forecasting, hydrological observation and space environment support systems have been further optimized…

• Major breakthroughs have been made in developing the international market for space products.

The document is the Chinese government's own 2008 report on its military, which they puckishly released on the day of President Obama’s inauguration.

Some of you will surely object that they also included this aggressively ironic statement:

Prevention of the Introduction of Weapons and an Arms Race in Outer Space

The Chinese government has all along advocated the peaceful use of outer space, and opposed the introduction of weapons and an arms race in outer space. The existing international legal instruments concerning outer space are not sufficient to effectively prevent the spread of weapons to outer space. The international community should negotiate and conclude a new international legal instrument to close the loopholes in the existing legal system concerning outer space.

In February 2008 China and Russia jointly submitted to the CD a draft Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and the Threat or Use of Force against Outer Space Objects. China hopes that the CD will start substantial discussions on the draft as soon as possible, and negotiate and conclude the Treaty at an early date.

It is up to the reader to decide if Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao are likely to be advocating a no-weapons-in-space policy because they care deeply for peace in the world, or because they wish to hamstring the power they see as the major obstacle to their freedom of action as regional hegemons.

Given that China has already demonstrated the basics of multifaceted anti-satellite warfare capabilities, and Russia “is commonly believed to have acquired four basic ASAT systems with varying degrees of effectiveness,” it seems naïve to believe that they will abandon their efforts. As the author of the last-linked article, an Australian defense expert, has argued based on the PLA’s 2007 anti-satellite ballistic-missile test:

China has been a prominent advocate of the 'prevention of an arms race in outer space' (PAROS). In one move, albeit fairly primitive, it has provided a major stimulus to such a race. The PLA can only have calculated that the inevitable reactions were worth risking for a demonstrable capability to threaten a relatively few valuable LEO imaging and ELINT satellites in some critical contingency.

The question for serious policymakers is: Are the perceived gains of a unilateral abandonment of very-high-altitude military technologies (PR? Budget? Sincere belief in its efficacy?) worth the risks of allowing potential adversaries, some of whom have demonstrated interest and capability in the technology, to take it over, and to forgo a potential advantage which could save American lives in the event of war? The fact that the “impossibly broad” language the administration has proposed has left a lot of “wiggle room,” allows for some hope that more hard-headed calculations of American national interests will replace what seems to be the idea of establishing “some sort of cooperative measure” based in legalistic, multilateralist, pacifist idealism.

Such a regime would be catnip to the European allies with whom the president has pledged to reingratiate us, but it’s not obvious that a ban on space-based weaponsÑhowever they’re definedÑis in the American national interest or that of the allies who rely on our protection.