A Military Intelligence Failure?
The Case of the Parasite Satellite
Gregory Kulacki and David Wright
16 August 2004
Both the 2003 and 2004 editions of the U.S. Pentagon's Annual Report on the Military Power of the People's Republic of China cite a January 2001 Hong Kong newspaper article that claims China has developed and tested an advanced anti-satellite (ASAT) system. This ASAT is described as a "parasitic microsatellite," that is, a small satellite that attaches itself to a larger satellite to disrupt or destroy the larger satellite on command.
The existence of such a system is clearly an important issue to the U.S. military and the Congress.
Yet an examination of the January 2001 newspaper story, which is the only source the Pentagon report gives for this claim, casts strong doubts on the credibility of the story.
We do not take a position on whether or not China might be developing such a weapon. However, the Pentagon's continued use of this article raises important issues about the quality of information that is being presented to Congress and the public on this and other issues. Such concerns are especially relevant given recent revelations about intelligence failures and the implications such failures can have.
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/china/page.cfm?pageID=1479space weapons
For nearly a half-century, the cooperative and peaceful use of space has yielded immense benefits to humans worldwide. Although space has been "militarized"—military satellites have been deployed for purposes ranging from the verification of arms control treaties to providing targeting information to military forces on Earth—it has not yet been "weaponized." Despite Cold War tensions and the technical capability to do so, no nation has deployed destructive weapons in space or destroyed the satellites of another nation.
However, this norm may be breached in the near future. The Bush administration appears to have a serious interest in anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, and the Pentagon has announced its intention to pursue a testbed for space-based missile defenses by 2008. The testbed deployment would entail putting one or more missile-targeting interceptor satellites into orbit.
Weapons in space are likely to be politically destabilizing. They may threaten the commercial, scientific, and military use of space, all without clearly reaping their intended security benefits. The international community, notably including Russia and China, Canada, and the countries of the European Union, supports creating a treaty to ban weapons from outer space. Serious multilateral discussion about "rules of the road" for space is needed.
Which rules and norms are established is especially important for the United States, the country most reliant on space assets. The United States owns and operates the vast majority of satellites orbiting today, and space has become critical to US economic, scientific, and military interests. Though the United States and the former republics of the Soviet Union have long dominated the use of space, currently many states are investing in space assets and have developed or are developing the ability to use space peacefully.
Insight into the Bush administration’s troubling plans can be found in the January 2001 report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld shortly before he became Secretary of Defense. Although the report stresses defensive space operations, it endorses also the notion of "space control" and specifically calls for anti-satellite technology, stating that "The U.S. will require means of negating satellite threats, whether temporary and reversible or physically destructive."
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/space_weapons/index.cfm“Deny Space to others”: the last chance to stop China
As the situation currently stands, it is clear that the expression “to assure our continued access to space and deny the space to others if necessary” - recurrent, with little variations, in the US military plans - is specifically directed towards China. The Pentagon believes that China has the same intention towards the ousting the United States from Space, and considers its polemic declarations about the “rumoured” US plans of space weaponization - expressed in front of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space - as the weapon to diplomatically damage and slow down the action of the USA, while actively working in secret towards the same objective. According to Larry Wortzel, director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, the introduction by the Chinese of a draft treaty devised to act against the US's intent to develop space weapons is misleading (“…because they’re developing their own space-based weapons...”), having no other purpose than to diplomatically damage the USA and thus delay their Theater Missile Defense plan, while China continues with its own plans. According to Richard Fisher of The Jamestown Foundation, the People's Liberation Army is aware that the “control of space” concept - as theorized by the US military - is an objective that China must achieve: “China needs to be able to deny to the United States access and use of space, as they themselves exploit space to support their own forces”.
Several factors, therefore, let one foresee that the impact of the Space challenge between the USA and China will exceed previous expectations about the strategical-military use of Space (spy satellites) and the race to install weapons, both offensively and defensively (concepts that are difficult to distinguish from each other, particularly in regard to the US military ultimate objective to “deny Space to others, if necessary”, suggesting that the offensive dimension will prevail against the defensive one).
While we may not know much about the character of Chinese space policy (with the exception of the declarations of condemnation of any space weaponization plan -but the real intentions of China can be deduced from its will to expel the USA from its own area of infuence), we do know more about China's progress in Space. Meanwhile, it can be asserted definitively that the US is determined to maintain by all means possible (including denying the rest of the world access to Space) their own space leadership, the key to the “Full Spectrum Dominance” and the fundamental presupposition of the unipolar-imperialistic “New American Century”.
The relation between the space dimension and the imperialistic dimension (with “Manifest Destiny” echos) of the USA, is sealed by the conclusions of a book written in 1996 by arms experts George and Meredith Friedman: “Just as by the year 1500 it was apparent that the European experience of power would be its domination of the global seas, it does not take much to see that the American experience of power will rest on the domination of space. Just as Europe expanded war and its power to the global oceans, the United States is expanding war and its power into space and to the planets. Just as Europe shaped the world for a half a millennium
so too the United States will shape the world for at least that length of time” - by dominating Space.
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http://globalpolitician.com/articles.asp?ID=225
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