Evidence: Most Popular
The exploitation of orbital assets by the US-led Coalition before and during the 1991 Persian Gulf war (January 17-February 28, 1991) reinforces this conclusion. The preponderant utilization of space assets during this conflict was force enhancement of terrestrial operations. The United States and its allies made heavy use of communications satellites for both inter-theater and intra-theater command and control as well as for long-distance communications. Sixteen military and five commercial communications satellites were utilized by Coalition forces; taken together, these systems provided a transmission rate of some 200 million bits per second, or about 39,000 simultaneous telephone calls. Imagery satellitesboth electro-optical (EO) and radarwere employed for order-of-battle and target intelligence, as well as for bomb damage assessment (BDA) following coalition air strikes.30 Additionally, ELINT and SIGINT satellites were used to establish Iraqi electronic order-of-battle and to monitor the operation of such things as Iraqi air defenses and military communications. By and large, though, none of these activities employed space systems as an integral, real-time element of lethal kill chains during combat operations.
The argument presented here is that terrestrial U.S. military dominance would be impaired, rather than enhanced, by American initiatives to weaponize space. While the United States clearly has the ability to outspend competitors, and to produce more advanced types of space weaponry, weaker adversaries will have affordable, asymmetric means to counter U.S. initiatives in space, as well as on earth. The net result of an uneven competition to weaponize space would be that prudent U.S. defense planners could not count on protecting space assets, and that weaker adversaries could not count on the negation of U.S. advantages. Neither could be certain of the outcome of space warfare, but both adversaries would have to fear the worst. Because of the vulnerability of space assets to ASATs, both would need to assume a dangerous hair-trigger posture in spaceunless the United States employed preemptive military means to prevent the launch or deployment of presumably hostile space assets belonging to other states.
Prompted by this concern, the U.S. Army, U.S. Strategic Command, and other joint agencies conducted a succession of high-level war games in recent years that focused expressly on the susceptibility of various U.S. space systems to disruption, denial, degradation, deception, and destruction. By one account, those experiences gave land, sea, and air commanders "a new appreciation for how dependent on space resources their operations have become." In one Army-sponsored game, a scenario set in the year 2020 involving an invasion of Ukraine by 'a neighboring state' featured the early neutralization of many U.S. satellites by detonations of nuclear weapons on orbit aimed at disrupting intelligence and communications channels and at inhibiting any Western intervention. As one game participant later said of this gambit, "they took out most of our spacebased capabilities. Our military forces just ground to a halt."