Home > Bibliography > View Citation

View Citation


Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ]

Evidence Related to this Citation

US Commercial Space Sector has Deferred to Judgement of Military Planners
 
The political ascendance of SPACECOM supporters has been coupled with a corresponding decline in the commercial space industry as an independent actor influencing U.S. space policy. Although the Bush presidential campaign pledged to make the U.S. export control process more rational and less restrictive, administration officials have zealously applied the tightened export restrictions and pursued costly legal actions against top U.S. satellite firms accused of violations. The commercial interests affected largely conced- ed the greater impediments imposed after discreet lobbying efforts to modify them proved ineffective. Industry executives have long been eager to avoid any allegation of pursuing profit to the detriment of national security, and that traditional deference was strengthened when assessments of commercial opportunity in space became more circumspect.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 29 ]
Claims of an Inevitable Threat to US Space Assets don't Hold up under Examination
 
The public discussion accompanying these developments has been limited and has not as yet penetrated to the fundamental issues involved. The assertion of inevitable threat has been repeatedly proclaimed and occasionally reported along with what are said to be indicative incidents, but mitigating details have generally been omitted. One of the most persistent jamming problems was diplomatically resolved after it was determined that the Libyan jammers were trying to interfere with satellite phones used by smugglers and might not have understood that they were disrupting service to legitimate satellite phone users outside of Libya. References to Iraqi interference with U.S. satellite-based navigation systems during the 2003 invasion of Iraq rarely mentioned that Iraqi forces jammed U.S. military GPS receivers, not satellite signals, or that the jammers were destroyed without space weapons. Repeated assertions that a Chinese microsatellite is being developed for “parasitic” or “killer” purposes are based on a single independent and unsubstantiated source in China. China’s January 2007 test of a direct-ascent ASAT against an aging weather satellite is the most recent incident to be used as evidence that “the threat to our space security is real and growing.” This test showed the world that China now also has a capability that the United States demonstrated two decades ago, but the purpose of the Chinese program is no more clearly offensive or defensive than is the intent behind the more advanced U.S. ASAT development programs. The distinct possibility that pursuit of the SPACECOM vision would stimulate or exacerbate threats beyond those that would otherwise occur is rarely if ever acknowledged when inevitability is asserted.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 30-1 ]
Recent Allegations of Chinese Laser ASATs were more Politically Motivated than Cause for Alarm
 
Another recent set of allegations about Chinese ASAT development had noteworthy parallels to claims about Russian lasers used in the late 1970s to increase support for U.S. ASAT work. During the final stages of congressional debate on the FY2007 defense authorization bill, which includes funding for U.S. military space programs, a Defense News article quoted several unnamed officials and experts who claimed that China had tested ground-based lasers against U.S. spy satellites. No substantiating evidence was offered, nor were enough details given to know whether any laser test that did occur was intended to “blind” electro- optical satellites or was for more benign purposes, such as satellite tracking. The article noted that White House officials who would be in a position to know the classified details decided not to include the strong form of these allegations in a recent DOD report on China’s military capabilities, which contains only one sentence noting that China has a powerful laser that could be used to interfere with U.S. reconnaissance satellites. When questioned about the allegation, the director of the National Reconnaissance Office confirmed that at least one U.S. satellite had been illuminated but not damaged by a Chinese laser. The top U.S. military officer in charge of space also stated that the United States had no clear evi- dence that China had intentionally disrupted U.S. satellite capabilities.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 31 ]
Most Military Space Programs Plagued by Cost Overruns and Technical Problems
 
Nearly all of the military space acquisition programs have experienced at least one Nunn-McCurdy Amendment violation—that is, cost overruns have exceeded the baseline cost by at least 15 percent. The SBIRS program to provide information for missile warning, missile defense, and battlespace characterization is the most egregious public example. Since its inception in 1994, the SBIRS-High program has experienced four Nunn-McCurdy breaches; projected cost has soared from $2 billion to $10 billion; the number of planned satellites have been reduced; its detection and data-processing technologies are no longer state-of-the-art; the launch date for the first GEO satellite has slipped until late 2009 or 2010; software and hardware problems persist; and a spacecraft with similar design features failed in testing. The first SBIRS sensor hosted by a classified satellite in highly elliptical orbit was declared operational in November 2006, but the United States must still primarily rely on Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites first launched in the 1970s to watch for missile launches. The last available DSP satellite was launched in November 2007, exacerbating concerns that U.S. missile warning capability could deteriorate if the SBIRS schedule continues to slip.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 49 ]
Starfire Optical Range could be Testing Lab for Directed-Energy ASAT
 
The budget documents also provide information about a largely secret Air Force project to develop a ground-based anti-satellite laser that would use advances in optical technology to compensate for atmospheric turbulence, enabling concentrated beams of light to destroy targets in space. The telescopes at the Starfire Optical Range have been using adaptive optics on incoming light to improve the telescopes’ ability to image satellites and identify small objects in orbit. The FY2007 budget request, however, included the use of adaptive optics on outgoing light to “demonstrate fully compensated laser propagation to low earth orbit satellites” for purposes including anti-satellite operations. Congress raised questions, so the FY2008 budget documents emphasize the project’s utility for space surveillance and no longer mention ASAT uses. Although potential weapons applications are said to be “years and years and years into the future,” funding these near-term experiments under any justification moves the United States further in that direction.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 52 ]
Increased Spending on Space Weapons has not lead to Increase in Capabilities
 
In general, the Bush administration has been trying to spend as much money as Congress will allow on acquiring new military space capabilities, with annual requests that continue to rise despite congressional pressure for cost reductions and reallocations. So far, however, increased spending has not been matched by comparable advances in capabilities. Growing budget scrutiny and cost constraints have stimulated debate about whether the United States should devote even more of its military space acquisition budget to completing Clinton-era upgrades or whether it should leapfrog over next-generation satellites and invest more heavily in research on transformational systems that are at least a decade from deployment. The more fundamental question is whether a sustained commitment to either the incremental or the revolutionary acquisition route could reasonably be expected to reach the full SPACECOM vision. The experience of the past five years suggests that no matter how hard the Bush administration or subsequent U.S. leaders try, the costs and technical challenges of—not to mention other countries’ probable military reactions to—unilateral space security will keep total dominance out of reach.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 54 ]
Military Space Programs Plagues by Cost Overruns and Technological Failures
 
Like the SBIRS program, a number of major space acquisition programs fit a pattern in which DOD's rush to develop complex new weapons systems based on immature technology and inadequate knowledge has led to major cost overruns, quantity reductions, per unit cost increases, and performance shortfalls. Contrary to predictions that advanced information technology and the integration of satellites into a "system of systems" architecture would provide much greater capabilities at much lower costs, these technological trends and the post–September 11, 2001, surge in U.S. defense spending are increasing the costs and uncertainties associated with transformational military projects. The United States is the undisputed front-runner when it comes to military space spending, but the faster it runs, the more it seems to trip over its own feet.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 56 ]
US Military Space Acquisition Failures have Deep Roots
 
The evident deficiencies of the military space acquisition process have deep roots. A 2003 Defense Science Board/Air Force Scientific Advisory Board report (the "Young Panel") identified serious systemic problems, including undisciplined definition of and uncontrolled growth in requirements, an acquisition process biased to produce unrealistically low cost estimates, an erosion of engineering and managerial competence among government overseers, and industry failure to follow best practices. The GAO observed that "DOD starts more programs than it can afford over the long run, forcing programs to underestimate costs and overpromise capabilities" in order to get funded each year. Senior defense officials do not want to make difficult choices among space programs or scale back the desired capabilities in response to budget shortfalls, so product developers "pursue exotic solutions and technologies that can, in theory, do it all"—a form of denial that perpetuates the problem.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 56 ]
Supporters of Space Weapons Recognize Failure of Acquisition Process Dooms Proposals for Space Weapons
 
Supporters of the SPACECOM program understand that massive cost over-runs and development delays are eroding congressional support for major projects that are integral to plans for U.S. military space dominance, defense transformation, and the coercive prevention strategy. Senator Wayne Allard told the National Defense Industrial Association that "the Air Force and its contractors have lost all credibility with Congress when it comes to space acquisition" and that "continued mismanagement of our space acquisition programs is a far greater threat to our space dominance than any external threat." But much as Allard and senior SPACECOM officials might like to believe that military space acquisition problems can be rectified by slowing the pace, relying more on proven technology, and reorganizing management, informed observers have come to believe that the factors driving the exorbitant costs of high-tech military acquisition in general, and space projects in particular, "have become so widespread and chronic that they threaten to undermine the viability of the entire transformation agenda." Simon "Pete" Worden, a retired senior Air Force officer with a long history of support for expanded U.S. military space activities, has observed that "the most compelling case against space weapons is that the U.S. space industry and associated military space leadership are incapable of delivering any space capability, let alone a space weapon."
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 57 ]
Trying to Accelerate Development of Military Space Programs is Doomed to Fail
 
The fixation on unilateral military space dominance contributes to military space acquisition problems in several ways. First, trying to revolutionize U.S. military space capabilities on an accelerated schedule in an atmosphere of radical uncertainty about future threats, missions, and technologies is bound to produce expensive programs that cannot provide all the promised results. Getting diverse parts of the U.S. military, intelligence, and homeland security communities to agree on required capabilities that should be designed into satellites that will not be deployed for a decade or more is difficult enough. Even more challenging is coordinating space acquisition projects with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies who recognize the benefits of interoperable communications and navigation systems but who lack SPACECOM's lavish acquisition budget and do not share its highly adversarial view of space security.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 58 ]
Political Leaders Lack Technical Training to Adequately Evaluate Military Space Programs
 
Finally, many senior political leaders who have embraced the SPACECOM vision lack the technical training to understand the scientific and engineering challenges involved. As one observer generally sympathetic to SPACECOM remarked:
"During the Cold War, the performance requirements of key military systems were driven mainly by what was known about the dominant threat. In a "capabilities-based" planning environment, there is much more latitude for imagination. But if senior decisionmakers lack a grasp of technological realities, then the possibility of unexecutable requirements would exist even in an otherwise optimal acquisition system."
From what can be discerned from available information, the magnitude of expenditure, the specific allocation to development projects, and the over- all management of the weapons acquisition process do not appear sufficient to overturn the traditional presumption that decisive dominance in space cannot be achieved.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 59 ]
Export Controls have Hampered Ability of Aerospace Industry to Complete Military Space Projects
 
Second, tighter export controls have increased the U.S. commercial space industry's dependence on the Defense Department and raised the costs and risks associated with developing new military space capabilities. Contractors who are desperate to make the winning bid for a small number of lucrative, long-lead-time development projects are likely to promise whatever the sole customer wants, on the fastest possible schedule and at the lowest possible price, in the expectation that requirements, schedule, and cost will be adjusted after the project is underway. Moreover, as the primary customer, the DOD must provide more investment funding, pay a larger portion of fixed costs, and shoulder more responsibility for keeping contractors in business than it would if the commercial side of the U.S. space industry was flourishing. For example, the government's share of the EELV program, a government-indus- try partnership intended to reduce the life-cycle cost of launching large satellites, had nearly doubled by 2005 over the $18.8 billion baseline approved in 2002, with a little more than half of the increase due to the lack of a commercial market.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 58 ]
Continuous, Global SAR Coverage is Beyond Current Capabilities
 
The CBO used information from unclassified studies of previous space radar concepts to assess three architectures using five, nine, and twenty-one satellites with 40-square-meter radar arrays and one architecture comprising nine satellites with 100-square-meter radar arrays. The CBO analysts determined that for life-cycle costs ranging from $25 billion to $90 billion, a space radar system could increase the availability of high-resolution SAR imagery and shorten response time but could not provide continuous SAR coverage of a given region. Even at the theoretical optimal limit for signal-processing algorithms, the less expensive architectures would be able to detect targets moving at or below 20 miles per hour less than 30 percent of the time, while the detection probability for the 21-satellite constellation would be about 60 percent. Perhaps the most valuable capability attributed to space radar by its proponents, the ability to continually track a mobile missile launcher or other moving target until it could be destroyed, would require at least four or five times more satellites than are currently under consideration, with a corresponding multiplication of costs.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 70 ]
Achieving Qualitative Breakthrough in Space Imaging Capabilities would Require Unrealistic Intelligence Infrastructure and Vast Constellations of Satellites
 
Achieving qualitative breakthroughs in the U.S. military's ability to identify, understand, and address emerging security challenges would require a much more extensive program. Because satellites cannot see inside buildings, efforts to dramatically improve the utility of space-based imagery for finding and neutralizing chemical or biological agents would most likely involve taking much more frequent pictures throughout the construction of anything that might one day become a suspect site, then frequently checking for external signs of suspicious activity. The notion of an "unblinking eye in the sky" scanning the entire global for evidence of suspicious activity that requires closer scrutiny would also require vastly expanded capabilities. If satellites with one-meter resolution were used and could image both day and night, then roughly 200 satellites would be required for a six hour revisit time, assuming that every spot on the Earth would be imaged at least once every six hours. As many as 1,200 satellites would be needed to be able to image every spot on the Earth at least once an hour. Hundreds of terabytes (1012) of raw data would be collected on the six-hour schedule, while petabytes (1015) would be collected on the one-hour schedule, creating downlink bandwidth bottlenecks and requiring ten- to fifty-fold increases over current U.S. imagery data processing and storage capabilities.200 If a mix of U.S. and foreign government and commercial imagery satellites were used, lack of com- mon standards would create potential compatibility problems. As the number of different sources of imagery data increase, integrating the information into a single coherent picture or measuring changes at the same location over time becomes more and more difficult. Finally, mountains of archived and fresh satellite data would be of little value without a comparable investment in highly skilled imagery analysts, a perennial problem in the intelligence community.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 70 ]
US is Past Point of Diminishing Returns for Improving Current Dominance in Outer Space
 
The longer the United States rebuffs international pressure to restore strategic restraint, the further other countries are likely to go in their efforts to emulate or offset U.S. military space activities, making space a much more expensive and dangerous place to operate than it currently is. The United States could probably sustain its technological lead and budgetary advantage for decades, but the U.S. military space acquisition program appears to have passed the point of diminishing returns, whereas other countries could still make significant advances in their military space capabilities for some fraction of what the United States is spending. The number of satellites needing protection keeps increasing, but offensive and dual-use space technologies are advancing and spreading faster than purely defensive ones are. Thus, if U.S. space dominance is defined in relative rather than absolute terms and likely counterreactions are considered, even the less ambitious form of the SPACECOM vision appears increasingly unattractive.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 73 ]
US Suffers High Opportunity Costs from its Pursuit of Space Dominance
 
Ineffectual pursuit of military space dominance carries high opportunity costs. At the most basic level, the U.S. attitude has hindered efforts to develop strong international rules to minimize space debris, manage space traffic, and allocate orbital slots in GEO. The U.S. attitude has been a major obstacle to the most efficient and equitable approach to space-based navigation services—a single system operated as a global public utility with decision- making control shared among international partners. The U.S. position currently also precludes any realistic strategy for truly transformational uses of space. A system of remote sensing satellites that could provide comprehensive, detailed, and continuous coverage of the Earth could be immensely valuable for information-based strategies to address emerging global security problems, including the possibility of catastrophic climate disruption. Owens and Nye observed a decade ago that the uncontested acquisition of this type of capability required a strategic purpose with widespread legitimacy. Given a better understanding that the number and cost of the necessary satellites are beyond the reach of even the richest individual country and that the global commercial space industry will not spontaneously produce this type of capability any time soon, the only way to achieve a qualitative change in space-based information will be through close and committed cooperation with other space-faring countries.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 73 ]
US Should Improve its Compliance with the UN Registration Convention
 
The Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space, signed in 1975, already provides part of the legal foundation for an advanced verification arrangement. The convention makes states responsible for space objects that they launch, that they commission others to launch for them, or that are launched from their territory or facility, and it requires that states maintain a national registry of all such objects. The convention further requires that all states report to the UN Secretary General specific information from their national registry; notably, the time and location of launch as well as the orbital parameters and the general function of the object launched. Other agreements include more detailed launch notification and date- exchange obligations; most notably, a U.S.-Russian agreement to establish a Joint Data Exchange Center (JDEC) and the multilateral Hague Code of Conduct (CoC). With an ambiguous definition of launching states and no compliance management provisions, the Registration Convention's central registry is far from complete. The United States has not been reporting the launch of intelligence-gathering satellites even though they are usually identified by amateur observers. The United States is not the only country that fails to take seriously its launch registry obligations, but it is the only major spacefaring member of the Hague CoC that currently does not submit the recommended prelaunch notifications to other member states. The United States should improve its own compliance and encourage others to do so by making access to U.S. space surveillance information contingent on compliance.
Steinbruner, John D. and Nancy Gallagher. Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security. College Park, MD: Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), 2008. [ 17 quotes ] [ page 75 ]