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For the time being, the idea of placing offensive weapons in space for use against terrestrial targets remains contrary to declared national policy, and there is no indication that the nation is anywhere near the threshold of deciding to weaponize space. Any truly serious steps toward acquiring a space force application capability will involve a momentous political decision that the nation's leadership has not yet shown itself ready to make. As the Air Force's former deputy chief of staff for air and space operations, then Lieutenant General Robert Foglesong, noted, "if the policy decision is made to take our guns into space, that will be decided by our civilian leadership." Until that threshold is reached, any talk of space weaponization will remain not only politically moot but needlessly provocative, and military space activity will remain limited to enhancing terrestrial operations and controlling the ultimate high ground.
Fourth, while the American military is currently far ahead of any other military in the ability to exploit space systems, even the United States has probably realized no more than 1015 percent of space's potential for force enhancement. While near-real-time use of targeting information from space sensors has been repeatedly demonstrated since the late 1980s in experiments such as the Talon Sword technology demonstrations of 199394, experience during the NATO's 1999 air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) suggests that the United States has yet to integrate space sensors into sensor-to-shooter kill chains on either a regular or widespread basis.38 Historically, security and organizational barriers limited what US military users knew about American space capabilities, while the space community, especially within the US Air Force, was dominated by a research-and-development mindset which "knew or cared little about the operational needs and preferences of the space user communities." Also, the bulk of the vast amounts of data collected by American overhead sensors could not be processed or fused into tactically meaningful, cockpit-friendly information quickly enough for operational use. Although Congress had directed the military services as early as 1977 to create offices to facilitate operational exploitation of national overhead systems, a lament from Desert Storm was that, while these systems provided lots of information, "too little was available to the warfighter." Even today, operational exploitation of national systems appears to remain, at best, an "applique" that continues to be unevenly utilized across Services and from one contingency to the next.
Among the extraordinary powers that the United States now enjoys is the power to shape the agenda for the use of space in the twenty-first century. If Washington seeks to extend its military dominance by flight-testing and deploying space weaponry, other capitals would surely follow suit. They would not do so in as sophisticated or as expensive a manner, but they will compete as best they can. If, on the other hand, the United States refrains from embarking on a course to weaponize space, there are no guarantees that others will exercise similar restraint. Potential adversaries will, however, have less incentive to do so, since Washington can compete effectively in space warfare, even if it does not benefit from it. Neither would weaker states, since the use of ASATs would complicate, but not alter, U.S. terrestrial military dominance. Weak states are more likely to carry out sneak attacks against the United States in our cities, our ports, and wherever the American flag is flown abroad, than to engage in space warfare.
In light of international opposition, unilaterally deploying weapons in space has little to recommend it. Such an offensive attitude (in both senses of the word) would do little to generate international support for actions such as the 1991 Gulf War. Some may argue that the United States's current position of power makes international support irrelevant and that the United States did not need a coalition to defeat Iraq, but the costs of acting unilaterally would undoubtedly have been much higher. It seems unwise to alienate potential allies at the same time that force reductions may make acting unilaterally difficult or impossible.
These problems are a feature of what some call the 'always/never' dilemma: "nuclear weapons must always detonate when those authorized direct and never detonate when those authorized do not." These are cross purposes -- finding the right balance between the two requires making intelligent judgments about which risks one chooses to run. Given the enormous destructive power of nuclear weapons and important economic and political interests that the United States shares with both Russia and China, all sides should be more interested in the 'never' part of the equation. Yet space weapons, by threatening the nuclear forces of both countries, could well create incentives for Russia and China to do the opposite.
ON the morning of September 13, 1985, Air Force Major Doug Pearson smashed through the sound barrier in his F-15. Pointed almost directly upward more than seven miles above the Pacific Ocean, he tapped a little red button on the side of his control stick, and released a missile strapped to the belly of his plane. The missile blazed out of sight, leaving the earth's atmosphere quickly and reaching a speed of 13,000 miles per second[Corrected, ed.] hour. Pearson wondered if it would hit anything. The mission was classified, so Pearson had developed a code with the folks back at Edwards Air Force Base: The radioman would tell him to level off at a certain altitude if his missile struck its target, an obsolete scientific probe orbiting 345 miles over Hawaii. As it happened, the code wasn't necessary. When Pearson checked in a few minutes after firing, he could hear cheering in the background from the control room. It was the one time an American pilot had ever destroyed an object in outer space. People still talk about Pearson as the country's first "space ace." He remains its only space ace. A few weeks after the satellite was destroyed, Congress banned further tests. "We had hoped to conduct more," recalls Pearson, now a general. "But politics were what they were, and the nation decided to go another way."
Moreover, America's technical lead could be rendered less important even where it does not shrink. America's advantage over Iraq and Yugoslavia was that it was an information-age power fighting an industrial-age power, and the disparity between two information-age powers is likely to be less significant than that. The theft or import of technology may be no substitute for homegrown research and development, but a cheap knock-off may in some cases be good enough to get the job done. This is especially so if the knock-off can be produced in large numbers. The dual-use character of so much space technology and the fact that others are likely to be able to imaginatively combine various technologies, improvise, adapt, and even innovate mean it can not be assumed that other states will always field inferior systems.