President Bush is, in this sense, the fear-monger-in-chief. In a speech to the cadets of The Citadel on December 11, 2001, exactly three months after 9/11, the president said, “The attacks on our nation made it even more clear that we need to build limited and effective defenses against missile attack. (Applause) ... Suppose the Taliban and the terrorists had been able to strike America or important allies with a ballistic missile. Our coalition would have become fragile, the stakes in our war much, much higher. We must protect Americans and our friends against all forms of terror, including the terror that could arrive on a missile.” But neither the Taliban nor the 9/11 terrorists had missiles or the knowledge or industrial base to build one. And there are other, far cheaper, more accessible, and more effective ways to deliver a weapon of mass destruction than by missile. For example, one could be secretly imported in a cargo container on a transport ship, or fired from an offshore vessel using a short- range cruise missile, or constructed domestically as did the bombers of the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building in 1995, or sent as a priority package via FedEx.
But what if some terrorists really had access to an intercontinental missile? Given that we have in continuous orbit the world’s most effective intelligence satellites devoted to tracking missile launches, as soon as we had determined that such a launch was not an error, we would retaliate instantly and catastrophically against whatever nation had allowed a missile to be fired against us. The government’s own experts agree that a long-range ballistic missile is the least likely way a hostile state or terrorist group would choose to deliver a weapon of mass destruction against a U.S. target.
Why then did the Bush administration increase spending on missile defense in fiscal year 2002 by 43 percent? The answer lies in a complex amalgam of neoconservative ideology, the influence of right-wing think tanks, air force desires to protect what it sees as its “turf” while expanding its share of the DoD budget, powerful congressmen devoted to enriching their districts, lobbies of arms manufacturers who supply virtually unlimited funds to re-elect their friends, and the interests of places like Huntsville, Alabama, which has lived off missiles ever since rocket scientist and former Nazi SS major Wernher von Braun arrived there after World War II to lead the U.S. Army’s rocket development team.66
Missile defense has almost nothing to do with defense and nothing whatsoever to do with the war on terrorism. ABM weapons may actually prove to be useless against incoming ICBMs, but they might be highly effective offensive weapons against other nations’ satellites, and this is why almost nothing said officially by the administration, the Pentagon, or the Congress on the subject of missile defense can be taken at face value. These dual-use weapons are less likely to be employed for missile defense than as a stealthy way to introduce weapons in outer space with the intent of dominating the globe.
On December 14, 2004, General Lance Lord, head of Air Force Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, repeated to the press what has become an air force mantra: “The war in space began during Operation Iraqi Freedom.”67 This overstatement is based on the claim that, at the outset of our invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein attempted to jam the reception of radio signals from U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. His men allegedly used six commercially available jammers based on Russian designs and available for purchase on the Internet to try to interfere with our “precision-guided” bombs.68 The U.S. military has many uses for the GPS, a system of satellites capable of precisely locating any object or spot on Earth. It is ideal for guiding so-called smart bombs to their targets. Iraq’s handheld jammers turned out to have no influence on the GPS satellites or ground stations and were quickly taken out using GPS-guided munitions. (Jamming instantly reveals the location of the jammer, painting a bull’s-eye on him.) Even if jamming had been successful, the U.S.’s munitions have backup systems, which deliver the bombs only slightly less efficiently to their targets.
“To get big-bucks Congressional funding for space-control schemes,” comments Mike Moore, former editor of the
It is certainly true that the Global Positioning System highlights the U.S. military’s remarkable dependence on an array of satellites that orbit the planet, held aloft by the tension between their own speed and Earth’s gravitational pull. They provide our armed forces with intelligence, communications systems of all sorts, computer displays of battlefields in real time, guidance for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as the Predator and the Global Hawk and for extremely high altitude manned spy planes such as the U-2. They also provide navigational aids, accurate weather forecasts, and numerous nonmilitary functions. The reliance American forces place on such spy and communications satellites may already constitute a militarization of space but not yet a weaponization of space. Satellites are, in a sense, the opposite of weapons—extremely vulnerable “sitting ducks” following fixed paths around the Earth and an immense boon to all mankind. Their military applications are probably among their least significant uses.
The Global Positioning System (known in the U.S. military as the Navstar GPS) is probably the greatest advance in navigation since the discovery of the compass and the invention of the sextant. It is the general term for at least twenty-four satellites, each circling the Earth twice a day, that are positioned in a “medium Earth orbit” (12,600 to 14,760 miles above the planet). A GPS receiver on a ship, automobile, aircraft, bomb, or a hiker’s handheld navigational device decodes a time signal from four of these satellites, which carry extremely accurate atomic clocks, and then calculates a position based on the different times and distances to the various satellites. As of 2005, the GPS could determine your position at any moment within about sixteen feet (five meters), a steady improvement over the previous fifteen years.70 Although created for military use, the GPS is today available to any and all users worldwide, providing strikingly accurate information on position and time in all weather conditions. The GPS has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry in applications, including handheld guidance devices for the blind.
The U.S. military operates over 500,000 GPS receivers, most of them on cruise missiles, precision-guided bombs, and other munitions.71 It invented the system and launched its first GPS satellite into orbit in February 1978. The cost of maintaining the system is approximately $400 million per year, including replacements for aging satellites. The air force keeps twenty-eight satellites in orbit at all times, four as backups to ones that might fail. Satellites cannot be repaired, have a limited life span, and a failure rate of about two per year. Management of the entire system is in the hands of the Second Space Operations Squadron at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado.
The air force has not always been a good steward of the GPS, which has evolved over time into a global public utility, not just a guidance system for bombs. Until August 31, 1983, GPS was exclusively a U.S. military system. On that date, Soviet fighters shot down a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 that had drifted off its flight plan into Soviet airspace. American authorities realized that if the airliner been equipped with a GPS receiver, it could have avoided its catastrophic navigation error. So the air force slowly began making GPS available for civilian use. Today, many commercial airlines integrate GPS tracking into their TV entertainment systems so that passengers can follow the course of their flight on-screen.
From the beginning, U.S. officials knew that they could not prevent other nations or private users from tuning in to its satellites’ signals, and they feared that sophisticated technicians might be able to adapt the GPS to provide guidance for their own cruise or ballistic missiles. The United States therefore required that commercial GPS receivers have limits on the velocities and altitudes at which GPS would supply positions. Moreover, the air force has never thought of itself as a supplier of public goods but rather as an overlord of the globe. Insisting on making civilian and foreign users of GPS dependent on the United States, it implemented something that it called “selective
