Evidence: Recently Added
The pace of growth in India's ballistic missile program combined with its nuclear capabilities and Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons and acquisition of ballistic missiles elevate the South Asia subcontinent to an area of grave concern for the United States and the world community. India's potential to deploy ASAT weapons raises the possibility that India could attempt to damage or destroy the intelligence-gathering satellites of the United States and other countries to blind or severely limit the ability of those nations to monitor military activity and nuclear weapons tests in the region. India's potential to develop and deploy an ASAT system is alarming given the ongoing military confrontation between these two countries.
Physically destroying a ground-based laser site before damage could be done to a U.S. satellite would be nearly impossible, even with space weapons. At the speed of light 300,000 kilometers per second (km/s)a laser's propagation from Earth to space is essentially instantaneous, although it would takeminutes or seconds to aim the laser in addition to whatever "burn time" was necessary for destructive effect once the laser had focused on its target.27 As a defense, airplanes or cruise missiles would take hours or days to act, and intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs (assuming the needed accuracy could be achieved) up to forty-ve minutes. But even a kinetic-energy weapon (such as a long-rod projectile) stationed in orbit would require some tens of minutes to arrive at a suitable orbital position, and ve minutes to fall from a typical altitude of 450 kilometers.
Although the distances involved and the opportunity for activity to take place out of the view of a particular part of the world may make surveillance and observation of satellites difficult, it is hard to prevent someone willing to spend the necessary resources from observing satellites. Because orbits are subject to only minor unpredictable disturbances, satellite positions are predictable. If the satellites are defenses, the depth of the static defense they provide will vary over the course of their orbits. And because orbits are stable and predictable, the variation in defense depth will be predictable and exploitable. Another downside to stable orbits is that a satellite destroyed in orbit leaves behind a persistent debris field that increases the hazard to other satellites needing to transit its orbit.
In opening new high-risk frontier areas, a general pattern of military and governmentled exploration efforts is inevitably followed by commercial exploitation activities. The same pattern seems to be holding for space. Governments opened the way; commercial operations are following. Although telecommunication has been the predominant commercial space activity, the areas of remote sensing and other products that are expected to be unveiled are now emerging as new areas of commercial space endeavor. Many of the planned commercial ventures are multi-national in composition; a number of ventures are also headquartered in countries other than the United States. The increase in multi-national space activity undoubtedly will trigger a plethora of international disputes similar to those of past centuries that accompanied the development of international norms for controlling the use of the high seas.
Insofar as we have no experience in space warfare, no cases exist to justify what is in essence a theoretically derived conclusion -- that space combat must be destabilizing. We do know, however, that the causes of war are rarely so uncomplicated. Small events, by themselves, seldom ever explain large-scale events. When ardent Israeli nationalist Ariel Sharon visited this past fall the holy site around the Al Aksa Mosque at Jerusalem's Temple Mount, his arrival fired up a series of riots among impassioned Palestinians and so widened the scale of violence that it kicked up the embers of regional war yet again. Yet the visit itself would have been inconsequential were it not for the inveterate hostility underlying Israeli-Palestinian relations. Likewise, World War I may have symbolically begun with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Yet a serious student of history would note that the alliances, the national goals and military plans, and the political, diplomatic, and military decisions of the major European powers during the preceding years and months were the true causes of the erosion in global strategic stability. By extension, if decisions to go to war are set on a hair-trigger, the reasons for the precarious circumstances extend far beyond whether a communications or imaging platform is destroyed in space rather than on earth.
Attacking satellites is difficult, at least compared to attacking most sorts of terrestrial civilian targets.[28] It certainly can be done, but crippling or destroying a small object several hundred miles overhead moving at 17,000 miles per hour (to say nothing of satellites at higher altitudes) is vastly more challenging than doing comparable damage to targets such as ships, airliners, bridges, dams, pipelines, computer networks, office buildingsthe list could go on almost indefinitely. That such targets are not attacked on a regular basis is due mainly (at least until recently) to the very small numbers and limited capabilities of serious terrorists, not to any great degree of protection for these assets. Increased defensive measure since 11 September 2001 have done little to alter the relative difficulty of attacking space and terrestrial targets. Even if an enemy did want to disrupt the use of American satellites, attacking their ground communications stations and launch facilities might be far more effective than striking satellites in orbit, as well as much easier.
Finally, it is far from clear that a country planning on or engaged in fighting the United States would appreciably reduce the amount of military power the United States could ultimately bring to bear by attacking LEO satellite constellations with a nuclear burst above the sensible atmosphere. Yes, the growing dependence of the American military on commercial satellites for reachback to data and information systems in the continental United States means that their loss would impose delays and problems for US operations. On the other hand, critical satellite components of DoD's communications architecture, such as the geosynchronous MILSTAR I/II satellites, are nuclear hardened. Consequently, even an exo-atmospheric nuclear burst seems unlikely to be as serious for the United Stateseconomically or militarilyas would, say, a complete cessation of the flow of crude oil from the Persian Gulf to the developed countries. The costs of such a wantonly destructive act would be high and the likely benefits for the perpetrator, at best, fleeting and short term.
These weapons could be used to blind the missile warning and radar satellites that allow the United States to target Chinese ballistic missiles on the ground or in flight, as well as the communications satellites that would direct systems such as the Common Aero Vehicle (CAV) to their targets. missile defenses, or place a large number of CAVs in orbit (aboard a space maneuver vehicle like NASA's X-37), China might target those weapons with anti-satellite weapons as well. If the United States were to deploy space-based This situation would essentially put the United States on "hair trigger" alert in space. A Chinese military exercise, for example, involving the movement of large numbers of troops and mobilization of ballistic missile units might be mistaken in the United States as a prelude to a surprise attack. With a military strategy that absolutely depends on vulnerable space assets to protect the homeland, an American president would face the unenviable task of choosing between launching a surprise attack on China or risking the loss of space-based intelligence, strike and missile defense assets that protect against nuclear attack.