in science fiction novels, including the aptly nicknamed “Rods from God,” officially known as “Hypervelocity Rod Bundles.” These are meant, according to reporter Tim Weiner of the
Far closer to actual deployment is the CAV, or Common Aero Vehicle. According to Walter Pincus of the
Although, as far as we know, the Bush administration has not officially issued a presidential directive that would allow the deployment of U.S. weaponry in space, Weiner reports that the air force has been pushing hard for such a directive. Whether made official or not, the militarization of space has clearly been on the secret agenda for some time. Somewhere between boondoggle and imperial venture, the program to conquer the “high frontier” is also essentially a program for creating the equivalent of bases in space where, once the issue of militarization is settled, no SOFAs would be necessary. There would be no foreign governments to negotiate with, pay off, or placate; no issues of crime and justice to sort out. Best of all, the weaponizing of space enables us to project power anywhere in the world from secure bases of operation. It is, by definition, the global high ground.
Nonetheless, of all the high-frontier weapons into which R&D money has been poured since President Reagan’s speech, only one—the distinctly Earth-bound “defensive shield”—has come into even partial being. That is the modest antiballistic missile (ABM) defense system being installed at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. It is no longer—as Reagan envisioned—focused on defending against a massive nuclear strike by a major enemy but on a tiny strike or even an errant missile from a “rogue state” like North Korea.
How this came to pass, after the Soviet Union disappeared and the threat of a missile attack receded, is a tale about the military-industrial complex at its most persistent. As the Pentagon commentator Alexander Zaitchik has observed, “The line connecting missile defense and space weapons is direct, thick, and no secret.”5 In the 1990s, neoconservative lobbyists joined with big arms manufacturers and ambitious military officers, none of whom actually cared whether a national missile-defense system could stop a nuclear attack. Their interest was in the staggering sums such a project would require. By manipulating a Republican Congress and creating a missile defense lobby in both houses, they achieved all their goals, although actual missile defense remained as distant as ever. General Eugene Habiger, head of the U.S. Strategic Command in the mid-1990s, said, “A system is being deployed that doesn’t have any credible capability.” Philip Coyle, former assistant secretary of defense for test and evaluation in the Clinton administration, concluded that the United States had squandered over $100 billion dollars of taxpayers’ money on a “high-tech scarecrow.”6
The neoconservative mind-set that brought this project to fruition also had its origins in the Reagan years, when many young strategists, usually with neither military service nor war experience on their resumes, became impatient with the influence of internationalists and realists—the people who had dominated U.S. foreign policy making since World War II. They were also convinced that the collapse of the Soviet Union had been significantly due to U.S. technological prowess and that pouring more money into advanced technology was a sure way to achieve perpetual domination of the world. The only real debate among them was over whether American hegemony “would be welcomed as the cutting edge of human progress,” or overwhelming American power—”shock and awe”—would be enough to terrify others into submission.7 They were committed to ending all arms control treaties that constrained U.S. power, to a vast expansion of spending on armaments as well as futuristic armaments research, and to a belief that the planet could easily be mastered from the high frontier of outer space. A typical member of this group was Frank Gaffney Jr., founder of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), creator of the congressional missile defense lobby, and behind-the-scenes player in the policy shifts of the 1990s that would lead to the near-weaponization of space.
Gaffney’s views are close to those of the neocon polemicist Richard Perle, with whom he worked in the late 1970s in the office of the Democratic senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, from Washington State, home of the Boeing Corporation. Jackson influenced both men through his passionate anticommunism and his easy acceptance of the title “senator from Boeing.” Gaffney went on to become a staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee from February 1981 to August 1983. President Reagan then appointed him deputy assistant secretary of defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy, under his mentor Richard Perle. Rather like John Bolton in the second Bush administration, Gaffney distinguished himself at the Pentagon by his hostility to all arms control agreements. In 1987, the new secretary of defense, Frank Carlucci, let both Perle and Gaffney go, and Gaffney set out on his new career as a promoter of space weaponry.
When Gaffney returned to civilian life, he created the CSP, which set out to challenge the government’s intelligence on the dangers of future nuclear missile threats from “rogue nations” and to promote the defense of our space assets. The CSP is funded primarily by the major weapons manufacturers in the missile defense field— Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and others—and by conservative donors such as the Coors family, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the Colorado heiress Helen Krieble.8 CSP has received well over $3 million in corporate donations since its founding in 1988.
The first major success of Gaffney’s special-interest-funded think tank came in 1994, when Republican representatives Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey released their “Contract with America”—a political platform with which the Republican Party hoped to regain control of Congress. It contained a plank that called for “renewing Americas commitment to an effective national missile defense system by requiring the Defense Department to deploy anti-ballistic missile systems.”9 An American ABM was the only weapons program included in the contract, and Gaffney took credit for having persuaded Gingrich and Armey to include it.
After the Republicans became the majority party in Congress in 1994, their leaders discovered that they still could not move decisively on missile defense because many of the members were suffering from “sticker shock.” The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a basic ground-based system against only a minimally armed “rogue state” would cost up to $60 billion. Republican representative Curt Weldon, an advisory board member of CSP, decided that the best and most time-honored way to rouse the American people and their representatives to action would be to scare them to death. As a result, he obtained passage of a resolution calling for the creation of a special commission to assess the rogue-nation ballistic-missile threat to the United States. This commission, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, issued its report in July 1998. Crucially, it disputed the CIAs estimate that any nation without a large and advanced industrial base would need at least ten years to fifteen years to build a ballistic missile, claiming instead that a mere five years would be sufficient.
In an incisive analysis, Michelle Ciarrocca and William D. Hartung, weapons experts at the World Policy Institute, pointed out that the congressionally mandated commission was anything but impartial on such matters. Most of its members were affiliated with the CSP and were eager to opt for a worst-case scenario by systematically ignoring the difficulties involved both in missile development and in the miniaturization of the nuclear warhead to be fitted to it. “The five year estimate was based in significant part on briefings from missile engineers at major U.S. defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing—hardly unbiased sources, given the billions their firms stand to gain from building a missile defense system to thwart the alleged threat posed by Third World ICBMs.”10
