The Rumsfeld report, unbalanced and deceptive though it was, achieved what the high-frontier congressmen, militarists, and industrialists behind it wanted. In mid-March 1999, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly passed the National Missile Defense Act, which declared: “It is the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense.” Just before the House voted, Donald Rumsfeld, then a civilian who had served as secretary of defense over twenty years earlier, gave a ninety-minute briefing to some 250 of its members.11 In recognition of his services, Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy later bestowed its Keeper of the Flame Award on him at a gala fund-raising dinner.
There was still one major obstacle—the president himself. Bill Clinton was by then adept at capitulating to right-wing pressures from both parties as part of a strategy of co-opting Republican positions and then not implementing them. He had already allowed several billion dollars to be spent on national missile defense, but on September 1, 2000, he decided not to deploy the ABM system. “I simply cannot conclude with the information I have today that we have enough confidence in the technology, and the operational effectiveness of the entire NMD [national missile defense] system, to move forward to deployment.” He would, he declared, leave to his successor the decision whether or not to build it.12 Unfortunately for the country and the world, five months later George W. Bush became president and Donald Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon.
In addition to the missile defense commission s report of 1998, Rumsfeld brought with him a second report that urged the secretary of defense to prepare for possible warfare in space. He had chaired the group that wrote this inflammatory report just as he had the first missile-defense commission. The Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization delivered its final report to Congress on January 11, 2001, a few days before Bush was sworn in and Rumsfeld took over the Department of Defense. The report was the brainchild of the congressional missile defense lobby, which got it through Congress as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2000 and stacked the commission with seven—out of thirteen—members from aerospace companies that would benefit directly from any expanded space weapons programs. Many of them were former admirals and generals who had retired into highly compensated positions as executives or board members of munitions companies. The 2001 report they produced famously warned that the United States “is an attractive candidate for a ‘space Pearl Harbor,’“ and went on to state:
The United States must develop, deploy, and maintain the means to deter attack on and to defend vulnerable space capabilities. Explicit national security guidance and defense policy is needed to direct development of doctrine, concepts of operations, and capabilities for space, including weapons systems that operate in space and that can defend assets in orbit and augment air, land, and sea forces. This requires a deterrence strategy for space, which in turn must be supported by a broader range of space capabilities.13
Statements of congressional commissions usually go unread and have little lasting influence. But the two Rumsfeld documents—the one from 1998 on missile defense and the 2001 report on protecting space assets— have assumed the status of holy writ even though both are biased and partisan in the extreme. As Michael Dobbs reported in the
It is important to stress that at present no country has antisatellite weapons in space, that the only country talking about a possible space war is the United States, and that the only threat ever uncovered to U.S. space assets was six handheld Global Positioning System ground-jammers that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed. Nonetheless, air force spokesmen have used the 2001 report to insinuate that a space war is both inevitable and now a settled part of military doctrine.15 They have enthusiastically manufactured threats that serve their own institutional interests, not the security of the United States.
The head of the Air Force Space Command, General Lance Lord, has led the charge. “Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny,” he told an air force conference in September 2004. “Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future.” “Simply put,” he said to Congress, “it’s the American way of fighting.” We must have “freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack” in space.16 The former secretary of the air force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office Peter B. Teets, once the president and chief operating officer of the nation’s biggest arms manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, assured the Air Force Association in a January 2003 speech, “If America doesn’t weaponize space, an enemy will.”17 Keith Hall, Clinton’s assistant secretary of the air force for space, whom the George W. Bush administration retained, commented, “With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we’re going to keep it.”18
On August 2, 2004, the air force for the first time issued a new statement of official doctrine on what it calls “counterspace operations.” According to General John Jumper, air force chief of staff, “Counterspace operations are critical to success in modern warfare.... Counterspace operations have defensive and offensive elements.... These operations may be utilized throughout the spectrum of conflict and may achieve a variety of effects from temporary denial to complete destruction of the adversary’s space capabilities.”19
None of these military officers shows any interest in the arms race in space that their policies are guaranteed to elicit. Yet, it is inconceivable, observes Theresa Hitchens, an authority on weapons in space and vice president of the independent Washington research organization Center for Defense Information, “that either Russia or China would allow the United States to become the sole nation with space-based weapons.” She quotes a 1998 article in
Virtually all of the air force’s rhetoric about a future space war is ideological posturing, similar to the propaganda it put out at the end of the Eisenhower administration and the beginning of the Kennedy years about a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union. The purpose then was to beef up the air force’s budget and carve out turf justifying its continued growth as an organization. There was no missile gap, as the leaders of the American government knew from U-2 flights over the USSR and photographs from the first Corona spy satellites.23 Similarly today, there can be no rationale for a space war because one unintended but unavoidable consequence would be to destroy our own preeminent position in space. A major but little-noticed reason for this is because a conflict in space using antisatellite weapons of any kind would vastly increase the amount of orbiting garbage, which would threaten our whole network of military and commercial spacecraft. That, in turn, would threaten the whole American— even planetary—way of life. Yet space debris is a subject that the air force’s “counterspace doctrine” never so much as mentions.24
Space, particularly in low Earth orbits (LEO), is anything but empty. The space age is hardly forty-five years old and we have already filled its most critical zones with thousands of pieces of lethal junk. The radars of the air force’s Space Surveillance Network can see objects as small as ten centimeters—the size of a baseball—in low Earth orbit and to about one meter in higher geosynchronous orbits, where most of the world’s communications and
