Wednesday, January 23, 2008
The New Space Race
As Barry Posen argues, American Hegemony is based on military command of the commons: the ability of the superior US military capability to control the global common areas of airspace, the high seas, and outer space.
This week's Economist has an excellent discussion of the importance of space-based assets to American military superiority:
China, starting with its 2007 A-Sat test, is making an overt play to challenge the US military by placing these space-based assets at risk. Even by creating more space-junk, they put valuable satellites at risk of collision with a deadly piece of debris. Now, a poorly developed challenger to US influence has no hope of countering the massive military advantage afforded by space dominance. But a so-called "near peer" competitor (ie China, Russia) could. By blinding or even taking out US satellites, they could drastically reduce the US military's ability to exercise its dominance in other areas of the global commons.
While it will be a long time before any other nation can match what the US has produced and launched into space, its a current reality that several nations could level the playing field significantly by taking out America's space based assets.
The key question: How likely is such an action, and how much would it really matter?
This week's Economist has an excellent discussion of the importance of space-based assets to American military superiority:
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.(implying that lesser developed potential rivals--Iran, North Korea, for instance--are left in the dust...)
If Napoleon's armies marched on their stomachs, American ones march on bandwidth. Smaller Western allies struggle to keep up.
[T]he 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.In a nutshell, the US relies on space-based assets as the backbone for all of its technologically dominant military technology.
China, starting with its 2007 A-Sat test, is making an overt play to challenge the US military by placing these space-based assets at risk. Even by creating more space-junk, they put valuable satellites at risk of collision with a deadly piece of debris. Now, a poorly developed challenger to US influence has no hope of countering the massive military advantage afforded by space dominance. But a so-called "near peer" competitor (ie China, Russia) could. By blinding or even taking out US satellites, they could drastically reduce the US military's ability to exercise its dominance in other areas of the global commons.
While it will be a long time before any other nation can match what the US has produced and launched into space, its a current reality that several nations could level the playing field significantly by taking out America's space based assets.
The key question: How likely is such an action, and how much would it really matter?
Labels: China, hegemony, outter space, satellite
