The Invisible Arms Race

[Valin]

The American Interest:

We’ve finally admitted that the space race is on. Time for bold steps to compete.

Roger Gran Harrison

April 29, 2016

 

An arms race is under way in space—insidious, invisible, and at this point probably inevitable. The Bush Administration’s dream that the United States could control access to earth orbit as the British had once controlled sea lines of communication has been, as the bureaucrats say, overtaken by events. So has the Obama Administration’s emphasis on international “cooperation” (the word appears 13 times in the first few pages of the Administration’s 2010 National Space Policy document), an approach that served chiefly to demonstrate that no international consensus on the future of space exists, and that none is likely. Even the sensible, if vague and entirely voluntary, “Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities” floated by the European Union and pushed hard by the State Department for most of a decade found only tepid support. It was easy for the Chinese and Russians to portray it all as just the latest example of Western imperialism. Earlier this year, the Code was quietly put to rest. Leading from behind on space, the United States has been outmaneuvered and left for dead.

 

Not so the Chinese and Russians, who occupy the diplomatic high ground with their Treaty on Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space (PPWT), all the time working feverishly to put their own weapons in space, and anywhere else they might do some damage, including, we can safely assume, in the cyber domain. Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation describes a recent reorganization of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) structure to emphasize “information dominance,” defined as the ability to exploit battlefield information while denying the enemy that same capability. The information satellites provide is key to power projection; there can be no “pivot” to Asia without satellites; so disabling or dismantling our space infrastructure is a high priority for Beijing. Kinetic hit-to-kill weapons like the one China tested in 2007 and again in recent years are one way of doing this, but hardly the most efficient. Far better in an “informationalized” war to ensure that the data satellites gather and transmit never makes it to the end user—or that it arrives there in a form that looks reliable but isn’t. It’s the perfect way for a country like China to leap over the present imbalance and arrive as a fully fledged and dangerous adversary at the next stage of conflict in space. The key words on this new battlefield are hack, dazzle, jam, and spoof.

 

For their part, the Russians recently tested a small, maneuverable “Luch” satellite dangerously near a commercial communication satellite operated by Intelsat Corporation in geosynchronous orbit. Satellites that can maneuver freely in space have several legitimate functions; they can serve as space tugs, moving satellites from orbit to orbit, or refuel, inspect, or repair them. They might also be used to shadow national security satellites, modify their orbits, hit them with a burst of electromagnetic energy, collide with them or perhaps plant listening devices or limpet mines on them. Ten years from now, space will be filled with small, highly mobile satellites like this, many of them put into orbit by commercial operators for legitimate purposes, but many others by states for other, less benign reasons.

 

Time to run up the white flag? Some Pentagon officials don’t think so, in large measure because the White House has quietly changed course in the face this evolving strategic challenge, first by admitting the problem (there isn’t enough international support for rules of order in space, and meanwhile the bad guys are catching up) and then by taking steps to do something about it. The vehicle for this change was the 2014 “Strategic Portfolio Review,” a bottom up reassessment of space policy that spawned dozens of action items now in the process of implementation. The Obama Administration hopes its revamped approach to space will provide a sound legacy for the next Administration and is working hard to build bipartisan support for its continuation and completion. The White House has forbidden talk of space weapons or space war, so Space Command commander John Hyten speaks instead of a more “muscular defense.” Particulars are highly classified, but enough hints have leaked into the public domain to indicate that muscular defense will include good deal of kinetic, electromagnetic, and cyber offense —enough, it would seem, to satisfy congressional hawks, at least for the moment.

 

(Snip)