Illustration by Andy Baker
A HUSHED, dimmed hall in the nerve centre that controls America's air operations from Somalia to Afghanistan is dominated by giant video screens tracking coalition aircraft. Blue dots show the location of ground forces, with “troops in contact” highlighted for priority air support. Smaller screens show live black-and-white footage, relayed by satellite from unmanned drones which, in their turn, are remotely controlled by pilots in America.
The Combined Air Operations Centre's exact location in “southwest Asia” cannot be disclosed. But from here commanders supervise tens of thousands of sorties a year. Through aircraft surveillance pods they get a god's eye view of operations that range from old-fashioned strafing to the targeted killing of insurgent leaders with bombs guided by global positioning system (GPS) satellites, and emergency air drops to isolated soldiers using parachutes that steer themselves automatically to the chosen spot.
These days America fights not in a fog of war but, as one senior air force officer puts it, in a “huge cloud of electrons”. Large amounts of information, particularly surveillance videos, can be beamed to soldiers on the ground or leaders in America. The officer says this kind of “network-centric” warfare is “as revolutionary as when the air force went from open cockpits to jet aeroplanes.”
If Napoleon's armies marched on their stomachs, American ones march on bandwidth. Smaller Western allies struggle to keep up. Much of this electronic data is transmitted by satellites, most of them unprotected commercial systems. The revolution in military technology is, at heart, a revolution in the use of space. America's supremacy in the air is made possible by its mastery of space.
During the cold war space was largely thought of as part of the rarefied but terrifying domain of nuclear warfare. Satellites were used principally to monitor nuclear-missile facilities, provide early warning should they be fired and maintain secure communications between commanders and nuclear-strike forces. Now, by contrast, the use of space assets is ubiquitous; even the lowliest platoon makes use of satellites, if only to know its position.
Space wizardry has made possible unprecedented accuracy. As recently as the Vietnam war, destroying a bridge or building could take dozens if not hundreds of bombing runs. These days a plane with “smart” bombs can blast several targets in a single sortie, day or night, in good weather or bad. Needless to say, precise intelligence and sound judgment are as important to military success as fancy kit.
But might this growing reliance on space and cyberspace become a dangerous dependence, a fatal weakness? Air force officers talk of space being America's Achilles heel. Satellites move in predictable orbits and anybody who can reach space can in theory destroy a satellite, even if only by releasing a cloud of “dumb” pellets in its path—using a shotgun rather than a hunter's rifle to kill the orbiting “bird”.
The Taliban or al-Qaeda can do little about America's space power except hide themselves from its intelligence-gathering satellites. But the Pentagon worries about what would happen if America came up against a major power, a “near-peer” rival (as it calls China and Russia), able to intercept space assets with missiles and “space mines”, or to disable them with lasers and electronic jammers. “There are a lot of vulnerabilities,” admits an American general, “There are backups, but our space architecture is very fragile.”
The precise nature of these weaknesses is a well-guarded secret. But wargames simulating a future conflict over Taiwan often end up with the “Red Force” (China) either defeating the “Blue Force” (America) or inflicting grievous losses on it by launching an early attack in space, perhaps by setting off one or more nuclear explosions above the atmosphere. “I have played Red and had a wonderful time,” says the general, “It is pretty easy to disrupt Blue. We should not expect an enemy to play by established norms in space. They will play dirty pool.”
One shot China has been practising became clear a year ago, on January 11th 2007. In a nuclear-proof air force command centre, built on giant shock-absorbing springs within Cheyenne Mountain, outside Colorado Springs, officers tracked a missile fired from a mobile launcher deep inside China. It followed what one American official said was a “strange” trajectory, designed neither to land a warhead nor to put a payload into orbit. Instead it intercepted one of China's ageing weather satellites. The impact about 850km (530 miles) above Earth created a huge field of space debris, contributing about 28% of the junk now floating around in space (see chart).
Litter louts do their worst
Creating all this rubbish seems a bit irresponsible for a country seeking to be a great space-faring nation. It is true that both America and Russia carried out scores of similar anti-satellite (ASAT) tests during the cold war. Then they stopped, not least because the celestial shrapnel was endangering their hugely expensive satellites. They also accepted that spy satellites provided a degree of mutual reassurance in nuclear arms control. The last piece of American ASAT debris fell back to Earth in 2006, say Pentagon officials. China's shrapnel, created in a higher orbit, could be around for a century to come.
The missile shot put America on notice that it can be challenged in space. The Chinese routinely turn powerful lasers skywards, demonstrating their potential to dazzle or permanently blind spy satellites. “They let us see their lasers. It is as if they are trying to intimidate us,” says Gary Payton, a senior Pentagon official dealing with space programmes. The only conclusion, he argues, is that “space is no longer a sanctuary; it is a contested domain.”
In a report to Congress in November, a commission examining America's relations with China gave warning that “the pace and success of China's military modernisation continue to exceed US government estimates.” China's principal aim, the report said, is to develop the wherewithal to delay or deter American military intervention in any war over Taiwan.
The ASAT test intensifies the concern of those who already find plenty to worry about in Chinese military literature. A study for the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, cites a Chinese theorist who argues that China should adopt a policy of overt deterrence in space. Other Chinese argue that their country's territorial sovereignty extends to space. This kind of thing reinforces the hawkishness of American hardliners.
Ashley Tellis, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, another think-tank, believes China ultimately seeks to build a “Sinocentric order in Asia and perhaps globally.” Any attempt to negotiate arms-control agreements in space would be futile, he argues, and America “has no choice but to run the offence-defence space race, and win.”
Other experts, such as Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Centre, a security think-tank, play down the Chinese peril. Mr Krepon says that though similarly alarming conclusions could have been drawn from American or Soviet military literature in the cold war, a space war never took place. What is more, the greater China's economic reliance on satellites, the keener it will be to protect them.
Even those who doubt that America would really go to war against China for the sake of Taiwan worry about the dangers posed by the growing number of countries that have access to outer space. Ten countries (or groups of countries) and two commercial consortia can launch satellites into orbit. A further 18 have ballistic missiles powerful enough to cross space briefly. By the end of 2006, 47 countries and other groups had placed satellites in orbit, either on their own or with help from others. In its crudest form, any object can become a space weapon if directed into the path of a satellite.
In testimony to Congress last year, General James Cartwright, a former head of America's Strategic Command, said that “intentional interference” with all types of satellites, “while not routine, now occurs with some regularity”. GPS signals are relatively weak and easy to jam. For several months in 2006 electronic jammers in Libya interfered with the Thuraya satellite telephone system, apparently because the Libyan government wanted to make life difficult for smugglers in the Sahara desert.
Satellites are not just military tools; they have also become a vital part of globalised civilian life. It is hard to disentangle military from civilian uses of space. Military GPS satellites support a myriad of civilian uses, including road directions for taxi drivers, navigation for commercial airliners, tracking goods in transit and time signals for cash dispensers. But the armed services' hunger for electronic data means that four-fifths of America's military data is transmitted through commercial satellites. A single Global Hawk unmanned surveillance aircraft flying over Afghanistan can eat up several times more satellite bandwidth than was used for the whole of the 1991 war against Iraq.
Star wars delayed
Space provides the high ground from which to watch, listen and direct military forces. But the idea that countries would fight it out in space has so far been confined to science fiction. International law treats outer space as a global common, akin to the high seas. Countries are free to use space for “peaceful purposes” but may not stake territorial claims to celestial bodies or place nuclear weapons in space. “Peaceful” has been interpreted to mean “non-aggressive” rather than non-military. Space is highly militarised but for the moment nobody has placed weapons there, not openly at least.
During the cold war, under Ronald Reagan's presidency, America worked on plans for space-based weapons designed to shoot down ballistic missiles. But this “star wars” programme faded with the collapse of Soviet communism. Before being appointed defence secretary in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld chaired a special commission to review America's space policy. It issued a stark warning that America could suffer a crippling surprise attack on its space systems—a “space Pearl Harbour”—and argued that America “must develop the means both to deter and to defend against hostile acts in and from space.”
America then broke out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, freeing itself to pursue a slimmed-down version of missile defence. The latest official statement on America's space policy, issued in 2006, affirms the country's freedom of action in space, the right of self-defence and the right to “deny, if necessary, its adversaries the use of space.” At the UN General Assembly, America has stood alone in voting against a resolution supporting negotiations on a treaty to prevent a space arms race, an idea pushed by China and Russia.
Yet the Bush administration has stopped short of taking the fateful step of “weaponisation” in space. Perhaps it is too preoccupied with Iraq, and certainly the downfall of Mr Rumsfeld removed a powerful champion of space weapons. A year after China's ASAT shot, the defence budget passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress did not provide any money for a missile defence “space test-bed”.
One of the big disincentives to placing weapons in space has been the technical difficulty and cost of such an enterprise. A recent study by the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a defence think-tank, concluded that ground-based systems were almost always more cost effective and reliable than space-based weapons, whether used to attack missiles, enemy satellites or targets on land.
America is still hedging its bets. With some tweaking, say experts, the ground-based interceptors for shooting down ballistic missiles could be used against satellites. A host of technologies under research, such as high-powered lasers to destroy missiles rising through the air, could be applied to anti-satellite warfare.
A game of celestial dodgems
The core fear is that any conflict in space would cause the most injury to America since America has the most to lose. Damaged planes crash to the ground and destroyed ships sink to the bottom of the sea. But the weightlessness of space means that debris keeps spinning around the Earth for years, if not centuries. Each destruction of a satellite creates, in effect, thousands of missiles zipping round randomly; each subsequent impact provides yet more high-speed debris. At some point, given enough litter, there would be a chain reaction of impacts that would render parts of low-Earth orbit—the location of about half the active satellites—unusable.
As matters stand, ground controllers periodically have to shift the position of satellites to avoid other objects. This month, NASA was tracking about 3,100 active and inactive satellites, and some 9,300 bits of junk larger than 5cm, about 2,600 of them from the Chinese ASAT test. Given their speed, even particles as small as 1cm (of which there may be hundreds of thousands) are enough to cripple a satellite.
For America, then, avoiding a space war may be a matter of self-preservation. The air force has adopted a doctrine of “counterspace operations” that envisages either destroying enemy satellites in a future war or temporarily disabling them. But for the most part, America's space security relies on passive measures: sidestepping an attacker by moving out of the way of possible strikes; protecting the vital organs of satellites by “hardening” them against laser or electromagnetic attack; replacing any damaged satellites; or finding alternative means to do the job, for example with blimps or unmanned aircraft.
More esoteric space research has ideas such as sending small satellites to act as “guardian angels”, detecting possible attacks against the big birds. It also includes plans for breaking up satellites into smaller components that communicate wirelessly, or deploying “space tugs” that would repair and refuel existing satellites.
Few of these options are cost-free. More manoeuvrable satellites are heavier, as they have to carry more fuel; protective equipment makes satellites cumbrous and more expensive; placing a satellite farther away from Earth, where it is more difficult to attack, means it will broadcast a weaker signal or require more costly sensors and antennae. The promise of cheap, reuseable launch vehicles has yet to materialise. All this makes it hard for America to achieve its goal of “operationally responsive space”: the ability to place satellites in orbit quickly and inexpensively.
The essential prerequisite for better space security is to improve “situational awareness”: that is, to know what is in space, who it belongs to and whether it is acting in a threatening manner. America already has the world's most developed space monitoring system with a network of radars and telescopes. But its surveillance is patchy. Objects in orbit are catalogued periodically rather than tracked continuously. Space surveillance is not really like air-traffic control: it is more akin to trying to track ships at sea with the naked eye, watching them leave port and predicting when they will next come in sight of land. There are gaps in coverage, particularly over the southern hemisphere, and much of the antiquated surveillance system cannot fuse the data to create an overall picture.
Space surveillance would seem to be ideally suited to international co-operation. Yet the Americans, Chinese, Russians and Europeans all seem intent on doing their own monitoring. They are frightened of giving away their space secrets to rivals. Accurate and timely information on space objects is vital for defending a satellite, but also necessary for attacking one.
Coming back down to Earth
Many strategists argue that the most vulnerable parts of the American space system are closer to home. Ground stations and control centres, particularly those of commercial operations, are exposed to conventional bombing, whether by armies or terrorists. Communication links to and from satellites are open to interference. In cyber-warfare, critical parts of the space system could be attacked from distant computers. Even without external meddling, notes Tom Ehrhard, a senior fellow at the CSBA, American forces struggle to find enough bandwidth and to prevent the myriad of electronic systems from jamming each other.
Some remedial action is being taken. Backup ground stations are being set up in case the main GPS control centre outside Colorado Springs is disabled. New satellites will have a more powerful GPS signal that is harder to block. America is experimenting with satellite-to-satellite communication by laser, which can carry more data and is less prone to interference than radio waves.
And the armed forces are starting to train for warfare with few or no data links. Simulated attacks by both space and cyberspace “aggressors” are being incorporated into events such as the regular “Red Flag” air-combat exercises over the Nevada desert. But, said an officer at one recent wargame, there are other ways of doing things. “If you really want to take us down, why go to space? You could just try to take out the control tower or bring down the electricity supply to the base.”
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "Disharmony in the spheres"