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New on the space-based weaponry front
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Topic Started: May 18 2005, 10:29 AM (314 Views)
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Admiralbill_gomec
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May 18 2005, 10:29 AM
Post #1
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UberAdmiral
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Actually, some of this article deals with old technology that has been miraculously resurrected.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/business...agewanted=print
Titled: Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval for Space Weapons Programs
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The Air Force, saying it must secure space to protect the nation from attack, is seeking President Bush's approval of a national-security directive that could move the United States closer to fielding offensive and defensive space weapons, according to White House and Air Force officials.
The proposed change would be a substantial shift in American policy. It would almost certainly be opposed by many American allies and potential enemies, who have said it may create an arms race in space.
A senior administration official said that a new presidential directive would replace a 1996 Clinton administration policy that emphasized a more pacific use of space, including spy satellites' support for military operations, arms control and nonproliferation pacts.
Any deployment of space weapons would face financial, technological, political and diplomatic hurdles, although no treaty or law bans Washington from putting weapons in space, barring weapons of mass destruction.
A presidential directive is expected within weeks, said the senior administration official, who is involved with space policy and insisted that he not be identified because the directive is still under final review and the White House has not disclosed its details.
Air Force officials said yesterday that the directive, which is still in draft form, did not call for militarizing space. "The focus of the process is not putting weapons in space," said Maj. Karen Finn, an Air Force spokeswoman, who said that the White House, not the Air Force, makes national policy. "The focus is having free access in space."
With little public debate, the Pentagon has already spent billions of dollars developing space weapons and preparing plans to deploy them.
"We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space," Pete Teets, who stepped down last month as the acting secretary of the Air Force, told a space warfare symposium last year. "Nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities."
In January 2001, a commission led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the newly nominated defense secretary, recommended that the military should "ensure that the president will have the option to deploy weapons in space."
It said that "explicit national security guidance and defense policy is needed to direct development of doctrine, concepts of operations and capabilities for space, including weapons systems that operate in space."
The effort to develop a new policy directive reflects three years of work prompted by the report. The White House would not say if all the report's recommendations would be adopted.
In 2002, after weighing the report of the Rumsfeld space commission, President Bush withdrew from the 30-year-old Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which banned space-based weapons.
Ever since then, the Air Force has sought a new presidential policy officially ratifying the concept of seeking American space superiority.
The Air Force believes "we must establish and maintain space superiority," Gen. Lance Lord, who leads the Air Force Space Command, told Congress recently. "Simply put, it's the American way of fighting." Air Force doctrine defines space superiority as "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" in space.
The mission will require new weapons, new space satellites, new ways of doing battle and, by some estimates, hundreds of billions of dollars. It faces enormous technological obstacles. And many of the nation's allies object to the idea that space is an American frontier.
Yet "there seems little doubt that space-basing of weapons is an accepted aspect of the Air Force" and its plans for the future, Capt. David C. Hardesty of the Naval War College faculty says in a new study.
A new Air Force strategy, Global Strike, calls for a military space plane carrying precision-guided weapons armed with a half-ton of munitions. General Lord told Congress last month that Global Strike would be "an incredible capability" to destroy command centers or missile bases "anywhere in the world."
Pentagon documents say the weapon, called the common aero vehicle, could strike from halfway around the world in 45 minutes. "This is the type of prompt Global Strike I have identified as a top priority for our space and missile force," General Lord said.
The Air Force's drive into space has been accelerated by the Pentagon's failure to build a missile defense on earth. After spending 22 years and nearly $100 billion, Pentagon officials say they cannot reliably detect and destroy a threat today.
"Are we out of the woods? No," Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, who directs the Missile Defense Agency, said in an interview. "We've got a long way to go, a lot of testing to do."
While the Missile Defense Agency struggles with new technology for a space-based laser, the Air Force already has a potential weapon in space.
In April, the Air Force launched the XSS-11, an experimental microsatellite with the technical ability to disrupt other nations' military reconnaissance and communications satellites.
Another Air Force space program, nicknamed Rods From God, aims to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon.
A third program would bounce laser beams off mirrors hung from space satellites or huge high-altitude blimps, redirecting the lethal rays down to targets around the world. A fourth seeks to turn radio waves into weapons whose powers could range "from tap on the shoulder to toast," in the words of an Air Force plan.
Captain Hardesty, in the new issue of the Naval War College Review, calls for "a thorough military analysis" of these plans, followed by "a larger public debate."
"To proceed with space-based weapons on any other foundation would be the height of folly," he concludes, warning that other nations not necessarily allies would follow America's lead into space.
Despite objections from members of Congress who thought "space should be sanctified and no weapons ever put in space," Mr. Teets, then the Air Force under secretary, told the space-warfare symposium last June that "that policy needs to be pushed forward."
Last month, Gen. James E. Cartwright, who leads the United States Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services nuclear forces subcommittee that the goal of developing space weaponry was to allow the nation to deliver an attack "very quickly, with very short time lines on the planning and delivery, any place on the face of the earth."
Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama who is chairman of the subcommittee, worried that the common aero vehicle might be used in ways that would "be mistaken as some sort of attack on, for example, Russia."
"They might think it would be a launch against them of maybe a nuclear warhead," Senator Sessions said. "We want to be sure that there could be no misunderstanding in that before we authorize going forward with this vehicle."
General Cartwright said that the military would "provide every opportunity to ensure that it's not misunderstood" and that Global Strike simply aimed to "expand the choices that we might be able to offer to the president in crisis."
Senior military and space officials of the European Union, Canada, China and Russia have objected publicly to the notion of American space superiority.
They think that "the United States doesn't own space - nobody owns space," said Teresa Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information, a policy analysis group in Washington that tends to be critical of the Pentagon. "Space is a global commons under international treaty and international law."
No nation will "accept the U.S. developing something they see as the death star," Ms. Hitchens told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting last month. "I don't think the United States would find it very comforting if China were to develop a death star, a 24/7 on-orbit weapon that could strike at targets on the ground anywhere in 90 minutes."
International objections aside, Randy Correll, an Air Force veteran and military consultant, told the council, "the big problem now is it's too expensive."
The Air Force does not put a price tag on space superiority. Published studies by leading weapons scientists, physicists and engineers say the cost of a space-based system that could defend the nation against an attack by a handful of missiles could be anywhere from $220 billion to $1 trillion.
Richard Garwin, widely regarded as a dean of American weapons science, and three colleagues wrote in the March issue of IEEE Spectrum, the professional journal of electric engineering, that "a space-based laser would cost $100 million per target, compared with $600,000 for a Tomahawk missile."
"The psychological impact of such a blow might rival that of such devastating attacks as Hiroshima," they wrote. "But just as the unleashing of nuclear weapons had unforeseen consequences, so, too, would the weaponization of space."
Surveillance and reconnaissance satellites are a crucial component of space superiority. But the biggest new spy satellite program, Future Imagery Architecture, has tripled in price to about $25 billion while producing less than promised, military contractors say. A new space technology for detecting enemy launchings has risen to more than $10 billion from a promised $4 billion, Mr. Teets told Congress last month.
But General Lord said such problems should not stand in the way of the Air Force's plans to move into space.
"Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny," he told an Air Force conference in September. "Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future."
The bolded portion of this article is a reworking of Project Thor, developed in the early 60s at Boeing by, among others, science fiction author Jerry Pournelle (it appeared in the Niven-Pournelle book Footfall). In addition, this would be a modified resurrection of Brilliant Pebbles, an anti-missile program developed during the Reagan and Bush 41 Administrations but killed by the first Clinton Administration.
Visit the following site for more information on Brilliant Pebbles:
http://www.missilethreat.com/systems/bp_usa.html
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somerled
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May 19 2005, 10:46 AM
Post #2
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Admiral MacDonald RN
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Mealwhile back on the ranch
US denies plans to 'weaponise space'- Quote:
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The White House says it is not looking at weaponising space in the face of a newspaper report stating the US Air Force is seeking presidential authority that could lead to such a program.
"Let me make that clear right off the top, because you asked about the weaponisation of space, and the policy that we're talking about is not looking at weaponising space," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
However, Mr McClellan says that the administration of US President George W Bush wants to ensure that its space assets are adequately protected.
"We have a draft updated national space policy that is going through the interagency review process," he said.
Mr McClellan spoke in the wake of a New York Times report that says the US Air Force is seeking a national security directive from President Bush that could lead to fielding offensive and defensive space weapons.
An unidentified senior administration official, cited by the Times, says a new presidential directive to replace a 1996 policy that emphasised a more pacifist use of space is expected within weeks.
Mr McClellan says that Mr Bush had directed in June 2002 "that there be a review of our national space policies".
The White House spokesman says it has been "about seven or eight years" since US space policy had been updated.
"Certainly during the last eight or nine years there have been a number of domestic and international developments that have changed the threats and challenges facing our space capabilities," McClellan said.
"We believe in the peaceful exploration of space."
Officials told the Times that the aim of the directive was not to place weapons permanently in orbit, which is banned under the 30-year-old Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty the US withdrew from in 2002.
But it is to use space as a platform for weapons systems currently being developed.
I only think the militarisation of space is acceptable if it is aimed at planetary protection from natural space born threats and xenobiological extraterrestrial threat to humanity as a whole. Since the later is not a present threat, then only planetary protection from natural space born threats is an acceptable pretence.
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Admiralbill_gomec
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May 19 2005, 01:34 PM
Post #3
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UberAdmiral
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So you're perfectly okay with say, North Korea launching an ICBM at Newcastle?
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somerled
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May 19 2005, 09:54 PM
Post #4
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Admiral MacDonald RN
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- Admiralbill_gomec
- May 19 2005, 01:34 PM
So you're perfectly okay with say, North Korea launching an ICBM at Newcastle?
Who's being paranoid ?
At Newcastle ? .... Not going to happen .
What I object to is a country militarising and weaponising space , and holding the rest of the world , and of humanity to ransom. It's not on and will only make the world a much more dangerous place.
So if the USA does this, are you OK with Russia, China, Japan, France, Germany, Iran, India, Pakestan following suit in order to defend themselves ? (from the USA.)
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doctortobe
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May 19 2005, 11:00 PM
Post #5
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Speak softly, and carry a 57 megaton stick!
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So if the USA does this, are you OK with Russia, China, Japan, France, Germany, Iran, India, Pakestan following suit in order to defend themselves ? (from the USA.)
Not going to happen. :lol:
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somerled
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May 20 2005, 05:00 AM
Post #6
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Admiral MacDonald RN
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- doctortobe
- May 19 2005, 11:00 PM
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So if the USA does this, are you OK with Russia, China, Japan, France, Germany, Iran, India, Pakestan following suit in order to defend themselves ? (from the USA.)
Not going to happen. :lol:
If USA does it, then why shouldn't they ?
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Admiralbill_gomec
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May 20 2005, 10:09 AM
Post #7
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UberAdmiral
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- somerled
- May 20 2005, 04:00 AM
- doctortobe
- May 19 2005, 11:00 PM
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So if the USA does this, are you OK with Russia, China, Japan, France, Germany, Iran, India, Pakestan following suit in order to defend themselves ? (from the USA.)
Not going to happen. :lol:
If USA does it, then why shouldn't they ?
Because they really don't have the financial resources to do so, nor do most have the technology.
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doctortobe
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May 20 2005, 04:14 PM
Post #8
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Speak softly, and carry a 57 megaton stick!
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And besides, we're so EEEEEVIL that we'll blow their attempts out of the sky.
In all seriousness, I remember when they were trying to do upper atmosphere nuclear testing in an attempt to create a field of such intense radioactive energy, that ICBMS would be totally fried if they passed through (I believe).
The attempt failed, but that is when I believe they discovered that they could wipe out all radio communications in the area for an extended period.
I wonder if we could use space weaponry to cause this to happen without the radioactive blast?
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somerled
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May 20 2005, 10:55 PM
Post #9
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Admiral MacDonald RN
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- Admiralbill_gomec
- May 20 2005, 10:09 AM
- somerled
- May 20 2005, 04:00 AM
- doctortobe
- May 19 2005, 11:00 PM
- Quote:
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So if the USA does this, are you OK with Russia, China, Japan, France, Germany, Iran, India, Pakestan following suit in order to defend themselves ? (from the USA.)
Not going to happen. :lol:
If USA does it, then why shouldn't they ?
Because they really don't have the financial resources to do so, nor do most have the technology.
Really , where do you think much of that technology is manufactured these days ?
If they feel threatened enough not being wealthy will not stop them.
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Dwayne
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May 21 2005, 08:50 AM
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Profanity deleted by Hoss
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Oh yes ... the rest of the world will feel threatened. Just like the world feels threatened by the United States super superior navy, and all the nations are just rushing to spend billions in effort to compete.
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Admiralbill_gomec
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May 23 2005, 10:41 AM
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UberAdmiral
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That's a valid point, Dwayne.
No other country is trying to compete with us in terms of naval projection. Even China, after buying surplus Russian equipment is still a "brown water" navy.
No other country can come even close regarding air forces either. While the EU has the Eurofighter and China is trying to reverse engineer Russian and Israeli designs, nothing comes close to either the F-22 or the F-35, especially in the numbers in which we plan to build them.
Land forces. While the new Israeli tank is the equivalent of the Abrams, our numbers overwhelm. No other land army on Earth has attempted to come up with a competing design.
Man for man, the only country that could compete would be Israel.
This is why certain rogue nations are trying to develop ICBMs and nuclear weaponry; to put them on a par with American striking power.
I have a question to ask, and it is meant to be answered rationally, not with the same old "I hate the US" rhetoric: "Is it a good idea for North Korea or Iran to have nuclear weapons, and why?"
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gvok
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May 23 2005, 11:05 AM
Post #12
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I suppose from North Korea or Iran's perspective it would be a good thing to have nuclear weapons because they see them as deterents to invasion by another country with superior conventional forces.
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Admiralbill_gomec
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May 23 2005, 11:15 AM
Post #13
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UberAdmiral
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- gvok
- May 23 2005, 10:05 AM
I suppose from North Korea or Iran's perspective it would be a good thing to have nuclear weapons because they see them as deterents to invasion by another country with superior conventional forces.
The question I asked was "Is it a good idea for North Korea or Iran to have nuclear weapons, and why?"
I don't care about their perspective. I want yours. No, I do not believe there is a moral equivalence between either country and the United States, but that's not a topic for this thread.
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gvok
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May 23 2005, 11:17 AM
Post #14
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MODERATOR COMMENT
See my comments at the end of the ISS thread. I asked you a question. You don't want to answer. Fine by me, but do NOT flame me or other posters in this forum.
END OF MODERATOR COMMENT
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somerled
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May 23 2005, 12:31 PM
Post #15
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Admiral MacDonald RN
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- Admiralbill_gomec
- May 23 2005, 10:41 AM
That's a valid point, Dwayne.
No other country is trying to compete with us in terms of naval projection. Even China, after buying surplus Russian equipment is still a "brown water" navy.
No other country can come even close regarding air forces either. While the EU has the Eurofighter and China is trying to reverse engineer Russian and Israeli designs, nothing comes close to either the F-22 or the F-35, especially in the numbers in which we plan to build them.
Land forces. While the new Israeli tank is the equivalent of the Abrams, our numbers overwhelm. No other land army on Earth has attempted to come up with a competing design.
Man for man, the only country that could compete would be Israel.
This is why certain rogue nations are trying to develop ICBMs and nuclear weaponry; to put them on a par with American striking power.
I have a question to ask, and it is meant to be answered rationally, not with the same old "I hate the US" rhetoric: "Is it a good idea for North Korea or Iran to have nuclear weapons, and why?"
If they are such impotent potential adversaries why does the USA need to militarise and weaponise space (well near earth orbit out to GSO distances) , unless to use these new weapons to threaten and cajole any opponents and to blackmail them ?
I still have not seen a convincing argument for doing this other than the planetary protection aspect.
All it will do is start another arms race (like we need that again) , another cold war (this time it could be even more polarising that the last one) , and it will not lead to a more stable global security situation. This will not stop terrorist attacks, and missile attacks are not likely anyway (as to engage in a missile attack is to commit national suicide).
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