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Cosmic Lebensraum: US Pegs Outer
Space
By Loring Wirbel
For EE Times
While much of the talk around
the Pentagon these days focuses on
‘transformation’ of the military, some of the
US' closest allies worry about another buzzword being
used in subtler ways at National Reconnaissance Office:
‘negation.’
..The largest US intelligence agency by budget,
controlling all US spy satellites, NRO is talking openly
with the US Air Force Space Command about denying the use
of space for intelligence purposes to any other nation
not just adversaries but even longtime allies, according
to NRO director Peter Teets.
If allies don't like the new paradigm of space dominance,
said Air Force secretary James Roche, they'll just have
to learn to accept it. Major General Judd Blaisdell,
director of the Air Force Space Operations Office, said:
“We are so dominant in space that I pity a country
that would come up against us.”
NRO will be in charge of the new Offensive Counter-Space
program, which will come up with plans to specifically
deny the use of near-Earth space to other nations. The
program will include two components: Counter
Communication System, designed to disrupt other nations'
communication networks from space; and Counter
Surveillance Reconnaissance System, formed to prevent
other countries from using advanced
intelligence-gathering technology in air or space.
The European Union complained five years ago that the NRO
and National Security Agency were using global
electronic-snooping programs like Echelon outside the
boundaries of mutual NATO advantage. The European Space
Agency said DOD tried to bully it into changing its
design plans for a navigational-satellite system called
Galileo. Concern goes much deeper and extends to the
heart of NORAD North American Aerospace Defense Command
inside Cheyenne Mountain. While Canada is supposed to be
an equal member of NORAD, representatives of Canada's
military and civilian establishment are complaining that
they are not allowed to use space- based communications
and intelligence in the same way the US can. “We
cannot address the way the US views missile defense and
weapons in space without dealing with their insistence on
space negation head-on,” said Lawson of the Canadian
Department of Foreign Affairs.
Missile-defense critic William Hartung of the Institute
for Policy Studies said none of this should be a
surprise, as US unilateralism in space was codified in a
September 20 2002 document titled National Security
Strategy Of The United States. Hints of such a policy
also showed up in the Rumsfeld Commission report of
January 2001, which warned of a ‘space Pearl
Harbor’ if the United States did not dominate
low-earth geosynchronous and polar orbital planes as well
as all launch facilities and ground stations to exploit
space for battlefield advantage. After the administration
renounced the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty last year,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that the
abrogation of treaty constraints in the use of radar and
tracking devices was not just for the benefit of fielding
a missile-defense system, but to build better unilateral
networks to manage the planet from space. NRO director
Teets said here and in earlier Congressional testimony
that it is artificial to see communication tools,
intelligence tools and missile-defense tools as separate.
In reality, he said, the programs all feed into each
other and help reinforce the Pentagon's current
overwhelming space dominance …
Ed: Masters of the Universe: Fullstory=http://www.eet.com/story/OEG20030522S0050.
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