States, of course, have many incentives to start a weapons program, (not just reacting to what Washington does). So we can't ignore unique national security requirements. I would also observe that there is no evidence that unique capabilities residing in U.S. stealth bombers and fighters, its aircraft carriers, advanced satellites, and superior land power forces have sparked in-kind arms racing, although governments do seek ways to counter U.S. superiority in less direct, unconventional ways. The rise of American aircraft carriers did not spark hell-bent arms racing for carriers. The appearance of U.S. stealth planes, and specialized advanced satellites, did not turn the world upside down, with adversaries focused single-mindedly on matching the United States in these areas. Why do we presume that other states will not jump to space simply to counter the operational advantages the United States currently enjoys there? History tells us that this is what will happen. States will not need the incentive of an American ASAT program to do so. ( More ... )

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Lambakis, Steven. "Putting Military Uses of Space in Context." Future Security in Space: Commercial, Military, and Arms Control Trade-Offs. Ed. James Clay Moltz. Monterey, CA: Center for Nonproliferation Studies, 2002. [ 4 quotes ] [ page 26-7 ]

 

Hence, the argument that the unilateral deployment of space weapons will precipitate a disastrous arms race is misplaced. To be sure, space weapons are offensive by their very nature. They deter violence by the omnipresent threat of precise, measured, and unstoppable retaliation. They offer no advantage if the target set considered is not global. But they also offer no advantage in the mission of territorial occupation. As such, they are far less threatening to the international environment than any combination of weapons employed in their stead. A state employing offensive deterrence through space-weapons can punish a transgressor state, but is in a poor position to challenge its sovereignty. The transgressor state is less likely to succumb to the security dilemma if it perceives its national survival is not at risk. Moreover, the tremendous expense of space weapons inhibits their indiscriminate use. Over time, the world of sovereign states will recognize that the US does not threaten self-determination internally, though it challenges any attempts to intervene militarily in the politics of others, and has severely restricted its own capacity to do so. ( More ... )

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Dolman, Everett C. "US Military Transformation and Weapons in Space." E-Parliament Conference on Space Security. Washington, D.C.: , September 14, 2005. [ 4 quotes ]

 

From the late 1960s to the present, the first-order response to U.S. missile defense initiatives by political opponents has been to assert this logic with confidence, pointing to all historical evidence as proof. The supposed historical proof of the 'inevitable' superiority of the offense, however, is nonsense. Defensive measures have frequently, and for long stretches of history, dominated the offense. Athens's defensive walls, for example, precluded a bloody invasion by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. The defensive walls of Constantinople provided security for nearly a thousand years. British air and naval defenses shut down the planned Nazi invasion of the British Isles, Hitler's "Operation Sea Lion." ... Historical evidence supports neither the assertion that offense must dominate defense nor the argument that an action-reaction arms race cycle is inevitable. In fact, predictions based on the action-reaction model have often proven to be far different from the subsequent course of events. ( More ... )

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Payne, Keith R. "Action-Reaction Metaphysics and Negligence." Washington Quarterly. Vol. 24, No. 4 (Autumn 2001): 109-121. [ 3 quotes ] [ page 113 ]

 

Why have missile defense critics been so wrong in their predictions? In short, numerous factors drive armament decisions, and the simplistic action-reaction formulation does not account for most of them. For example, the theory ignores such basic factors as:

• competing foreign policy goals and defense requirements,


• inter- and intraservice rivalries,


• bureaucratic politics,


• the specific character and style of political and social systems,


• electoral politics,


• resource availability or limitations,


• organizational momentum, and


• technological innovation/limitation.

Even highly personal and idiosyncratic factors can drive armament decisionmaking. Adolf Hitler, for example, canceled the V-2 program on the basis of a bad dream he had about the missile. Only the combined efforts of Albert Speer and Wernher von Braun got the program back on track. ( More ... )

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Payne, Keith R. "Action-Reaction Metaphysics and Negligence." Washington Quarterly. Vol. 24, No. 4 (Autumn 2001): 109-121. [ 3 quotes ] [ page 116-7 ]

 

And America would respond -- finally. But would another state? If America were to weaponize space today, it is unlikely that any other state or group of states would find it rational to counter in kind. The entry cost to provide the infrastructure necessary is too high; hundreds of billions of dollars, at minimum. The years of investment it would take to achieve a minimal counter-force capability -- essentially from scratch -- would provide more than ample time for the US to entrench itself in space, and readily counter preliminary efforts to displace it. The tremendous effort in time and resources would be worse than wasted. Most states, if not all, would opt not to counter US deployments in kind. They might oppose US interests with asymmetric balancing, depending on how aggressively America uses its new power, but the likelihood of a hemorrhaging arms race in space should the US deploy weapons there -- at least for the next few years -- is extremely remote.

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Dolman, Everett C. "US Military Transformation and Weapons in Space." E-Parliament Conference on Space Security. Washington, D.C.: , September 14, 2005. [ 4 quotes ]

 

Common to all hedging strategy proponents is the fear that placing weapons in space will spur a new arms race. Unfortunately, such a strategy increases the likelihood of a space arms race if and when space weapons are ultimately deployed, as the only plausible response by the US would be to at least match the opposing capabilities. This dithering approach blatantly ignores the current real world situation. At present, the US has no peer competitors in space. For the US to refrain from weaponizing until another state proves the capacity to challenge it allows for potential enemies to catch up to American capabilities. At a minimum, there is no risk for potential peer competitors to try. On the other hand, should the US reject the hedging strategy and unilaterally deploy weapons in space, other states may rationally decide not to compete. The cost of entry will simply be too great; the probability of failure palpable. In other words, the fear of an arms race in space, the most powerful argument in favor of the hedging plan, is most likely if the US follows its counsel. ( More ... )

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Dolman, Everett C. "Strategy Lost: Taking the Middle Road to Nowhere." High Frontier Journal. Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 2005): 31-33. [ 1 reference ] [ page 33 ]

 

Seizing the initiative and securing low-Earth orbit now, while the United States is unchallenged in space, would do much to stabilize the international system and prevent an arms race in space. The enhanced ability to deny any attempt by another nation to place military assets in space and to readily engage and destroy terrestrial anti-satellite capacity would make the possibility of large-scale space war or military space races less likely, not more. ( More ... )

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Dolman, Everett C. "U.S. Military Transformation and Weapons in Space." SAIS Review. XXVI, No. 1 (Winter-Spring 2006): 163-174. [ 10 quotes ] [ page 171 ]

 

Indeed, far from producing a costly and deadly arms race, the deployment of a robust, global, space-based missile defense is likely to make it more expensive, and therefore less attractive, for other states to build missiles or to engage in regional arms races based on the deployment of missiles. There is no empirical or historical basis for the contention that such an effort will lead other states to step up their missile-related programs, leading to an escalating race to deploy missiles designed to overcome whatever missile defense is deployed by the United States. In fact, following the ABM Treaty in the 1970s, the Soviet Union nevertheless deployed large numbers of advanced missile systems, negating the logic that the ABM Treaty reduced the incentive or need to deploy new generations of missiles designed to defeat deployed missile defenses. The ABM Treaty codified a strategic relationship of mutual vulnerability in which the Soviet Union nevertheless built large numbers of additional intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads whose purpose was to increase U.S., not mutual, vulnerability – and to assure that, in the event of nuclear war, the Soviet Union would have had strategic superiority.

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Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. Independent Working Group on Missile Defense, the Space Relationship, and the Twenty-First Century, 2007 Report. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, August 28, 2006. [ 13 quotes ] [ page 36 ]