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Dolman, Everett C., Karl P. Mueller et al. "Toward a U.S. Grand Strategy in Space." Washington Roundtable on Science & Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, March 10, 2006. [ 10 quotes ]

Evidence Related to this Citation

Space Systems can be Protected against HAND Attacks
 
HAYS: The good news is that, according to a Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) study done back in 2001, for only about two to three percent over the normal cost for hardening space systems, the residual radiation dose effects can be hardened against. Now, that is a significant amount of money. As I will touch on later, most space pro-grams are very broken in terms of their budget right now. But that is something that the United States needs to think about, in particular for satellites that we might rely on to de-liver transformational or revolutionary military effects. If they are going to be taken out by a parting shot from one of our friends like Kim Jung Il, that might not be the best thing.
Dolman, Everett C., Karl P. Mueller et al. "Toward a U.S. Grand Strategy in Space." Washington Roundtable on Science & Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, March 10, 2006. [ 10 quotes ] [ page 11 ]
Threshold to Space Weaponization very Unclear
 
HAYS: Another way we might see placement or use of weapons in space is what I would label “slippery slope.” This is just emphasizing that there is not a clear line of delineation between what is and isn’t a space weapon or even where space begins. It is tendentious; we have never defined that. So many people can make an argument that we have already crossed certain thresholds today. Once we have the kinds of effects that I outlined on that first picture, we are placing lots of force structure and lots of people in harm’s way with space-enabled data streams. Doesn’t that weaponize the systems inherently? There are a variety of other things that you could move up the scale by providing those kinds of ef-fects. Then it is very unclear exactly when you cross the threshold to having “space weapons.”
Dolman, Everett C., Karl P. Mueller et al. "Toward a U.S. Grand Strategy in Space." Washington Roundtable on Science & Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, March 10, 2006. [ 10 quotes ] [ page 11-12 ]
Boost-Phase Missile Defense can Lead to Space Weaponization
 
HAYS: Another path to space weaponization that is commonly discussed is by employing some kind of space weapons as part of a boost-phase ballistic missile defense system. If you want to have a global boost phase defense, space basing is extremely attractive be-cause that gives you the time to engage those targets that are fleeting, but are typically valuable targets. Obviously there are some huge drawbacks as well. It is expensive to de-ploy that kind of thing; you might have to have predelegation built into the system be-cause of that very fleeting window to engage, and there are a variety of other problems. In fact, if you look back during the 1980s with the SDI debates and the Reykjavik summit, this was really the lynchpin in terms of US-Soviet relations – how far and how fast were the two sides going to go in weaponizing space in order to provide ballistic missile defense – and not some of the things we talked about at the beginning.
Dolman, Everett C., Karl P. Mueller et al. "Toward a U.S. Grand Strategy in Space." Washington Roundtable on Science & Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, March 10, 2006. [ 10 quotes ] [ page 12 ]
Arguing that Space has Already been Weaponized ignores Political Perception that New Efforts would Cross a Threshold
 
MUELLER: The second misconception is that the transition from space not being weaponized to being weaponized may be a gray, indistinct thing. It is not true that it is not going to be a big political deal when it happens, even if we don’t know exactly what form it will take. People with engineering backgrounds in the space weapons community have a tendency, I think, to say, "Space is already so weaponized and so militarized because we use GPS for the guidance of many of our weapons, or because in the 1980s there were anti-satellite systems, or because ICBMs cross space on their way to targets, that we have al-ready crossed the weaponization frontier. Stop talking to me about it." I would liken them to the people who on December 31, 1999 were running around saying, "We shouldn't have these big parties tonight! The millennium doesn’t start for another year; it starts in 2001, not 2000." That may be technically correct, but it is totally irrelevant be-cause this is about what the public believes. The party is tonight and you can go or not, it’s up to you.
Dolman, Everett C., Karl P. Mueller et al. "Toward a U.S. Grand Strategy in Space." Washington Roundtable on Science & Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, March 10, 2006. [ 10 quotes ] [ page 16 ]
Key Question Should be When is Space Weaponization Going to Happen, not Whether it is Inevitable or Not
 
MUELLER: Someday somebody will put a weapon in space, but assuming that is true, what really matters is when it is going to happen if we don't do anything and what form it is going to take and, given the various policy options you might pursue, what impact those will have on when it happens, whether it happens, and what form it takes. Death is inevitable, but if you want to live a long time, you do things to affect when it happens to you and how it happens. This also applies to space policy. It is also important to keep in mind, of course, that what we do with national space security is not going to determine the answer to whether space gets weaponized, except to the extent that if we do it, that answers the question. But it is likely to affect how it happens, even though we are not completely masters of our own fate here. ( More ... )
Dolman, Everett C., Karl P. Mueller et al. "Toward a U.S. Grand Strategy in Space." Washington Roundtable on Science & Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, March 10, 2006. [ 10 quotes ] [ page 18 ]
Possible for Space Weapons to be Both Ineffective and Destabilizing at the Same Time
 
MUELLER: Finally, there is an argument that there are many problems with space weapons but look at the bright side: if you can't afford to build them and they won't work at least they won’t frighten anybody and we won’t have any political fallout to deal with. Unfortunately, the more I think about past military programs by a variety of nations, the less convinced I am that that is true. Military history is rife with examples of weapons pro-grams, military doctrines, strategies, military operations, that were ill-conceived, unsuccessful and very frightening to the neighbors. So those are both things you want to watch out for when you are thinking about what sort of space policy you want to pursue. You don’t want to invest in things that aren’t going to work and accomplish what you want; you also don’t want to put resources into things that are going to have political fallout that you don’t like or would be happier if you hadn’t done.
Dolman, Everett C., Karl P. Mueller et al. "Toward a U.S. Grand Strategy in Space." Washington Roundtable on Science & Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, March 10, 2006. [ 10 quotes ] [ page 21 ]
U.S. Dominance of Low-Earth Orbit could Prevent a Space Arms Race
 
DOLMAN: Nonetheless, we have a different system today and, as Karl has pointed out, it may be that if the United States were to unilaterally militarize space – and I am not advocating that necessarily, but it is an option – that it could in fact prevent an arms race. The trillions of dollars that would have to be spent to dislodge the United States from space, if it were to quickly seize control of the low-earth orbit, might be seen as not worthwhile to another state. However, if we wait fifteen or twenty years until a state is able to challenge the United States in space, then we will have a space race. By putting weapons in space to enhance its military capabilities the United States today is saying to the world that in this period of American hegemony, it is not going to wait for problems to develop overseas until they bubble over into its area of interest, and then massively and forcefully fix that problem. No. The American way of war today, based on precision and on space capabilities, is to engage early using less force, using more precise force and more deadly force in a specific area, but with far less collateral damage. That is the new American way of war and we really cannot get out of it.
Dolman, Everett C., Karl P. Mueller et al. "Toward a U.S. Grand Strategy in Space." Washington Roundtable on Science & Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, March 10, 2006. [ 10 quotes ] [ page 24 ]
Resources for Space Weapons will Tradeoff with Conventional Military Needs
 
DOLMAN: What we have to think about then is what would a space-weapons-heavy American military force structure look like? And here we get a number of issues. It would be very, very expensive. I would like to leave you with one thought here: what are the opportunity costs forgone? The money that will have to go into space is not going to come from school budgets or from transportation budgets; it is going to come from the DOD. It is sc going to be at the cost of other military things. It has been pointed out that space weaponization and military space operations are not going to do anything new. These things could be done by other cheaper and possibly less incendiary means. The billions it would cost for a proper recapitalization of all of the aging space support systems that we have and for potentially using space as an integral part of our ability to project violence abroad, which we will be doing – we are not going to give up the right to do that – means that we will have to atrophy some of our existing capabilities to go into other countries and stay there for a long time.
Dolman, Everett C., Karl P. Mueller et al. "Toward a U.S. Grand Strategy in Space." Washington Roundtable on Science & Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, March 10, 2006. [ 10 quotes ] [ page 24 ]
Establishing Space Supremacy will be Necessary for Future Wars
 
DOLMAN: Peter Teets, the former Deputy Secretary of the Air Force for Space, said that we have traditionally kept air superiority around the world because we have a very rigorous and aggressive doctrine of control of the air. The first thing we must do in conflict is gain mastery of the skies and deny the skies to the enemy. We must now, in this 21st century, do so for space. In fact, space supremacy is an enabling condition for the kinds of operations or conflicts that we can imagine in a military that is undergoing something called transformation, and in fact has undergone transformation so far that it really cannot be reversed. We cannot go back, either easily or effectively, toward a Vietnam-era style military that is not reliant on outer space—that is not enabled by space. And we would not want to because the context of war has changed.
Dolman, Everett C., Karl P. Mueller et al. "Toward a U.S. Grand Strategy in Space." Washington Roundtable on Science & Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, March 10, 2006. [ 10 quotes ] [ page 23 ]
Impossible to Predict how States will Respond to U.S. Space Weapons
 
MUELLER: What happens if the United States does build space weapons? Do we get a space weapons race? Maybe. There are several differences between the situation that we will face at that point and what we had during the Cold War with the Soviet Union in the nuclear competition or the naval competition in the interwar period. China is not the same as the Soviet Union. With space weapons the stakes are lower than with nuclear weapons. The costs of getting into the business are also lower. Depending on how it evolves, a space weapons race could be a pretty unstable relationship compared to the nuclear balance, which was quite stable once people figured out what they were doing. Space weaponization might provoke things that don’t look anything like the existing space weapons; if you make other people nervous, it might cause them to want to redress the balance by developing some other threat. Anybody who tells you with absolute certainty that they know what is going to happen if we build space weapons doesn’t know what they are talking about or hasn’t thought the problem through very clearly. This is a scenario in which an important measure of modesty is required by everybody who wants to tell you what happens next, because we just don’t know. Obviously our policy will shape what happens, but there is a fair amount of uncertainty to it, so when you decide what policy you like, that needs to be taken into account.
Dolman, Everett C., Karl P. Mueller et al. "Toward a U.S. Grand Strategy in Space." Washington Roundtable on Science & Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, March 10, 2006. [ 10 quotes ] [ page 21 ]