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Colorado
By Loring Wirbel
The danger is that often the biggest, baddest and scariest weapons leave the drawing boards fairly quickly as soon as folks realize that they’re unrealizable. We should have learned that lesson during Reagan’s Star Wars era when the x-ray laser never came close to testing despite all the magic words uttered by Edward Teller. Yet, we still see this tendency with the space-based laser, which a lot of activists continue to mention some nine months after the space-based laser office was closed down. The Pentagon pretty much conceded that they couldn’t even build a test platform by 2012 and certainly couldn’t put any laser battle stations in place by 2030 or 2040. There’s been the same tendency with the space-based kinetic kill weapons, which hope to use kinetic energy to slam one object against another to stop a missile in boost phase. Most of these weapons have been dropped as they realize that it’s not as easy as it sounds. The problem in looking only at the scariest types of weapons is that incremental systems which are far scarier to real life sneak in under the radar, when no one notices, and at first, no one cares. The missile defense agencies planned a very quick rollout of ground-based kinetic kill weapons when the ABM treaty ended. I should mention that everything in missile defense doesn’t work anyway. It’s not intended for any kind of missile defense; it’s all part of first-strike warfare. Several physicists came out last week saying that any kind of boost phase weapon that hits a missile in its early states of launch, whether it’s the space based, airborne laser, etc, probably won’t work. And those same scientists, many of whom are establishment government scientists, say that any terminal-phase weapon, like a ground-based weapon, won’t work either. They can be overwhelmed by countermeasures. This means that no form of missile defense works, which means that it doesn’t make sense why we’re spending $10 billion a year on it. In response, they rolled out the ground-based weapons saying, “By the way, we don’t need to test them because the weapons don’t need to work, just scare people. We’re going to classify all the results, not only for the public at large, but for the Defense Department’s office of tests which now cannot get access to the test results. From Dumb
to Smart Bombs We would also argue that a space weapon has been used when an unpiloted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fires a Hellfire missile at a car of alleged Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen, violating the CIA ban on assassinations. That UAV could not fire that Hellfire missile without the support of the Milstar communication satellite system and a two-way intelligence system called the global broadcast system. So real space weapons are proliferating all over the place while we pay attention to these imaginary weapons in space. The civil liberties community has an equal fascination with the big and scary. They look at the nation’s intelligence agencies and focus on the ones with the biggest public budgets, such as the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which spends $7 billion a year on spy satellites. Many civil libertarians focus on the biggest satellites like Mentor, Mercury and Orion, which have antenna systems as big as three football fields. In Europe, people look at the nation’s second biggest agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), the great listeners who work with the NRO to put those big satellites in space at a cost of $1-2 billion apiece. But they miss the fact that the largest element of the intelligence budget doesn’t go to an agency at all. It goes to tactical applications of existing systems set up during the Cold War, which are now re-targeted for real-time warfare. These programs are funded to the tune of $12 billion a year under names like “TEMCAP” or “TIARA” (Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities). I want to conclude with a teaser as to what’s coming in the near future that we should be paying attention to, but won’t get a whole lot of press soon. The Air Force’s Space Command has the Operationally Responsive Spacelift (ORS). Among the goodies coming out of ORS are a hypersonic space drone called Falcon that will be able to deliver bombs, sensors or small robots to any point of the earth’s surface within two hours. During the Iraq war, many B-2 planes took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri early in the morning, bombed Baghdad, and came back to Missouri the same day, without having to land anywhere else. The Falcon drone will increase that capability tenfold. ORS’s National Aerospace Initiative is working on trying to create swarms of micro-UAVs, ranging in size from a dragonfly to a model airplane, swarms of mini-satellites, micro satellites, or any combination of the above. These would practice what is called hive intelligence; if the swarms of robots act together, they would have an intelligence greater than the sum of the parts. If we are letting robots violate the CIA ban on assassination already as they did in Yemen, imagine what swarms of robots exhibiting hive intelligence will do. Last November, NRO started a new program with NASA and the Defense Information Systems Agency called the Transformational Communications Office. This means from now on, NRO and NASA will work together on combined satellite networks, which will create an entire web of classified Internet-quality superbroadband capability. What will this be used for? Space negation: They say so in public. Negation means you deny both your adversaries and your close friends any use of space. Just as the British controlled sea lanes one century ago, we are going to absolutely control space lanes and deny our allies and our adversaries any use of space. As Air Force Secretary James Roach said in April, “The space war has already begun.” Contact: GANA, PO Box 90083, Gainesville, FL 32607; (352) 337-9274, www.space4peace.org; globalnet@mindspring.com, and Citizens for Peace in Space, POB 915, Colorado Springs, CO 80901; (719) 389-0644. Loring Wirbel is part of Citizens for Peace in Space in Colorado and also part of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. |
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lot of people in the peace-in-space community like to focus on the biggest,
baddest and scariest weapons which might be on the drawing boards at Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This is understandable. If
we can marry George Bush’s national security strategy/pre-emptivity doctrine
with a good picture reminiscent of Star Trek’s Klingon empire, you have
a great PR shtick for getting people to understand disarmament concepts.