Posted on 06/20/2005 5:43:55 PM PDT by KevinDavis
On May 18th an article in the New York Times set off a thunderstorm of controversy over “space weaponization.” The Air Force is seeking some changes and clarifications to the soon-to-be-released updated version of the 1996 national space policy. This, in fact, left open the door for US space weapons but didn’t do much else. The space weapons fight may have more to do with the politics of liberal think tanks and their fundraising skills than with anything the Pentagon is actually planning to do, at least in the near term.
In early 2001, the Rumsfeld Commission, established before he was named Secretary of Defense, warned that America was vulnerable to a “space Pearl Harbor.” Since then, little has been done to protect the US government’s space assets while our forces have, more and more, come to rely on satellites for navigation, communications, and intelligence. Our potential foes have come to see these systems not just as vulnerable but, essentially, defenseless.
Currently, the US has between sixty and seventy major military satellites in orbit. Thirty of these make up the GPS navigation constellation that is vital for missiles, bombs, lost drivers, yachtsmen who never learned to use a sextant and, more recently, robots in factories and warehouses. The Pentagon has a wide variety of special communications satellites but these have never been able to fill the huge bandwidth demands of modern warfare. The DoD is the world’s number one purchaser of commercial communications satellite capability. There are also about a dozen remote sensing spacecraft—for missile launch warning, weather forecasting, and intelligence gathering.
(Excerpt) Read more at thespacereview.com ...
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