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SMIL Bad – Space Industry 1NC



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SMIL Bad – Space Industry 1NC




Weaponization destroys US space industry and competitiveness


Hitchens 2 – Theresa Hitchens is Director of the Center for Defense Information, and leads its Space Security Project, in cooperation with the SecureWorld Foundation. Editor of Defense News from 1998 to 2000, Hitchens has had a long career in journalism, with a focus on military, defense industry and NATO affairs. She also was director of research at the British American Security Information Council. Hitchens serves on the editorial board of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and is a member of Women in International Security and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. April 18th, 2002, "Weapons in Space: Silver Bullet or Russian Roulette? The Policy Implications of U.S. Pursuit of Space-Based Weapons," www.cdi.org/missile-defense/spaceweapons.cfm
In any event, it is clear that U.S. policy-makers must look at the potential strategic and direct military risks, and the costs, of weaponizing space.

Economic Risks in a Globalized Market Besides the potential for undercutting, rather than strengthening, the U.S. military edge, there also is reason to be concerned about the possibility that moves toward weaponizing space could damage the competitiveness of the U.S. space industry, which currently dominates the international marketplace and therefore bolsters U.S. economic and military power.

The commercial space and telecommunications sector is also arguably the most globalized of today's economic sectors. The customer base is international; the industry itself is largely comprised of multinational alliances among companies and consortia, as well as joint government programs. Whereas space used to be available only to the most developed nations, there are more than 1,100 companies in 53 countries now exploiting space.34  Space is a major worldwide market accounting for many billions in revenue, and U.S. firms are dominant in the sector.

According to a 2000/2001 study (the 2001/2002 version should be released shortly) by the Washington-based Satellite Industry Association, worldwide revenue (including both government and commercial customers) for the satellite industry was $85.1 billion in 2000, and $97.7 billion is estimated for 2001. Over the past five years, the average annual growth has been 17 percent. The industry association was predicting year-end numbers in 2001 to show 15 percent growth. The U.S. satellite industry pulled in $8.9 billion in 2000, and $10.3 billion in 2001 in satellite manufacturing alone, out of worldwide revenue of $17.2 billion and $20.7 billion respectively. Importantly, exports account for half or more of U.S. industry revenue.35 A parallel study, released by the Satellite Industry Association April 5, 2001, and conducted by Henry R. Hertzfeld, senior research scientist at the George Washington University Space Policy Institute, showed worldwide spending on "civilian space programs totaled $20.8 billion in 2000 excluding spending by Russian, Ukrainian and Chinese governments. Government spending on space reached $35.8 billion when adding in military space budgets. The United States accounted for more than three-fourths of all spending on civil space (78 percent), while combined spending by European countries and all other governments (Japan, China, Brazil and others) accounted for the remaining spending."36 

While commercial space was a booming market during most of 1990s, the market for low-earth orbit satellites has collapsed over the past two years. Launch providers are predicting a flat marketplace for a number of years.37  In addition, the market for large geosynchronous orbit satellites for communications also is at near rock bottom and is expected to remain flat through 2011, according to a recent report by Forecast International/DMS Inc.38 The growth in the market is now being driven by satellite services, such as direct downlinks for Internet (with high hopes pinned on the development of broadband Internet services) or TV.

There further is excess capacity in the commercial space market place, with five major manufacturers (three U.S., two European), according to Christopher E. Kubaski, chief financial officer of Lockheed Martin Corp.39  Kubaski and other U.S. industry leaders are predicting little growth in the commercial sector in the near term. Corporate chieftains at major defense and space firms already are citing missile defense as a much more lucrative future market than commercial/civil space operations. Such a market assessment by U.S. industry is not without consequences. As one corporate strategist at a major U.S. defense/space firm explained, market assessments drive where corporate research and development dollars go.40  Considering that it is industry, rather than DoD and NASA, that carries the bulk of R&D spending in the defense and civil space arena, there is some possibility that an emphasis on space weaponization could shift technology investment from the commercial to the defense world. Granted, this would hold only for those firms — such as Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co., Raytheon Co., and TRW — that do large percentages of government businesses, rather than for those companies more vested in the commercial end of space operations (providing telecommunications and Internet services for example.) Nonetheless, the ramifications of shifting R&D on market edge in the commercial arena deserve some consideration. Interestingly, the U.S. industry has not done as well over the past two years as the overall marketplace. Overall, the worldwide market rebounded in 2000 with a 23 percent growth in revenue, according to the Satellite Industry Association. The association data show that while the global market for satellite manufacturing grew by 9 percent in 2000, U.S. revenue declined by 11 percent. Similarly, worldwide revenue in the satellite launch segment grew by 29 percent in 2000, whereas U.S. revenue grew only by 17 percent.41 



(Still, U.S. manufacturers snagged more than half the satellite orders in 2001, according to data from Futron Corp., a consulting firm specializing in the space market.42  ) U.S. industry officials partially blame the government for their recent poor performance — worried about the effects of U.S. regulatory requirements and export controls on their bottom line. The global marketplace is highly competitive, and U.S. policy and regulations are a major factor in determining U.S. competitiveness. For example, a RAND study of the remote sensing industry states: "Success for these new U.S. commercial remote sensing satellite firms heavily depends on both understanding and overcoming various risks (e.g., technical, market, policy and regulatory) that could diminish their prospects in the highly competitive global marketplace for geospatial information products and services. Within this context, U.S. government policies and regulations exert a major influence on the ability of U.S. remote sensing satellite firms to realize their competitive potential in both the domestic and international marketplace."43  This is just as true for other segments of the space industry. For example, in 1998 licensing of satellite exports was switched by Congress from the Commerce Department to the State Department and now is handled in a similar manner to weapon export controls because of national security concerns, particularly about technology leakage to China. In an open letter to Congress in June 2001 urging a reversal of the law, the Satellite Industry Association stated that the U.S. market share for geostationary communications satellites dropped from its 10-year average of about 75 percent to 45 percent during 2000, and it largely blamed the regulatory switch to State and the subsequent slowing of the export licensing process for the problem.44 Thus, U.S. industry officials are concerned about Pentagon plans to deny "enemies" access to space assets, including commercial imagery and other services provided by U.S. firms. In his Huntsville address, Cosumano admitted that as "some of these assets belong to U.S. companies and they don't feel too good about the idea that we might shoot them out of the sky."45  The U.S. Defense Department already has the legal ability to exercise so-called shutter control of U.S. civilian satellites — that is, the ability to shut down a satellite to prevent enemies from using images or data to help them defeat the U.S. military in wartime. In addition, U.S. export policy requires that any foreign government purchasing a U.S.-made imaging satellite must sign a government-to-government agreement to take into account American national security interests. While the Pentagon did not use its shutter control privilege in Afghanistan, as noted earlier, DoD did take commercial imagery off the market by buying exclusive rights to all pictures taken by Space Imaging's Ikonos satellite. This was done despite the fact that Russia's Cosmos satellite network could provide equivalent imagery. 46  The Pentagon move immediately caused a stir overseas. Because the United Arab Emirates, a Space Imaging customer, was directly affected by the Pentagon buy, the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council commissioned a joint committee to consider buying their own military imaging satellite rather than rely on U.S. commercial providers.47 Besides the United States, France, Israel and Russia are in the imagery satellite business — and obviously, U.S. industrialists cannot like the idea that defense policy or actions may be rebounding to create stronger competitors for them. The 15-nation European Union already is moving forward on plans to buy a European version of the U.S. Global Positioning System navigation satellite network, called Galileo, in part due to fears that future access might be denied or downgraded by the U.S. military. "Europe cannot accept reliance on a military system which has the possibility of being cut off," Rene Oosterlinck, head of the European Space Agency's navigation department, was quoted by the New York Times.48  Some international customers also already are questioning the reliability of U.S. suppliers (and government-supplied products). After the 1998 change in export-licensing authority, German-controlled Daimler-Chrysler Aerospace announced it would no longer purchase U.S.-made satellite components. The competitive and cost challenges the U.S. satellite industry faces could be increased if the United States moved to make space a battlefield. Up to now, the threat that commercial satellites could become direct wartime casualties has been negligible. But an aggressive U.S. pursuit of ASATs would likely encourage others to do the same, thus potentially heightening the threat to U.S. satellites. Space industry executives, whose companies often are working at the margins of profitability, are concerned about U.S. commercial satellites and their operations becoming targets, especially because current commercial satellites have little protection (electronic hardening, for example, has been considered too expensive). There would be costs to commercial providers for increasing protection, and it is highly unclear whether the U.S. government would cover all those costs. Another area where Defense Department policy could threaten U.S. industry competitiveness is in access to the radio spectrum. DoD has been resisting calls from the telecommunications industry to free from government-only access a portion of the spectrum that companies believe is essential to providing high-speed Internet access over cellular phones. That portion of the spectrum (1755-1850 megahertz) is now denied to U.S. commercial users because it is the spectrum band of choice for military (and other government) communications, as well as precision targeting. However, that band is being used by many other firms abroad for commercial wireless communications, raising the possibility that a continued U.S. policy of denial, although perhaps making short-term military sense, will inhibit the ability of U.S. firms to compete abroad. Stephen Price, head of the Pentagon's new office for spectrum management, recently said that the greater information demands of the war on terrorism and increased homeland security efforts are making DoD even more leery of freeing the disputed spectrum bands.49 

Competitiveness prevents great power war --- now is key


Baru 9 – Sanjaya Baru 2009 is a Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School in Singapore Geopolitical Implications of the Current Global Financial Crisis, Strategic Analysis, Volume 33, Issue 2 March 2009 , pages 163 - 168

Hence, economic policies and performance do have strategic consequences.2 In the modern era, the idea that strong economic performance is the foundation of power was argued most persuasively by historian Paul Kennedy. 'Victory (in war)', Kennedy claimed, 'has repeatedly gone to the side with more flourishing productive base'.3 Drawing attention to the interrelationships between economic wealth, technological innovation, and the ability of states to efficiently mobilize economic and technological resources for power projection and national defence, Kennedy argued that nations that were able to better combine military and economic strength scored over others. 'The fact remains', Kennedy argued, 'that all of the major shifts in the world's military-power balance have followed alterations in the productive balances; and further, that the rising and falling of the various empires and states in the international system has been confirmed by the outcomes of the major Great Power wars, where victory has always gone to the side with the greatest material resources'.4 In Kennedy's view, the geopolitical consequences of an economic crisis, or even decline, would be transmitted through a nation's inability to find adequate financial resources to simultaneously sustain economic growth and military power. The classic 'guns versus butter' dilemma. Apart from such fiscal disempowerment of the State, economic under-performance would also reduce a nation's attraction as a market, as a source of capital and technology, and as a 'knowledge power'. As power shifted from Europe to America, so did the knowledge base of the global economy. As China's power rises, so does its profile as a 'knowledge economy'. Impressed by such arguments, the China Academy of Social Sciences developed the concept of Comprehensive National Power (CNP) to get China's political and military leadership to focus more clearly on economic and technological performance than on military power alone in its quest for Great Power status.5 While China's impressive economic performance, and the consequent rise in China's global profile, has forced strategic analysts to acknowledge this link, the recovery of the US economy in the 1990s had reduced the appeal of the Kennedy thesis in Washington, DC. We must expect a revival of interest in Kennedy's arguments in the current context. A historian of power who took Kennedy seriously, Niall Ferguson, has helped keep the focus on the geopolitical implications of economic performance. In his masterly survey of the role of finance in the projection of state power, Ferguson defines the 'square of power' as the tax bureaucracy, the parliament, the national debt, and the central bank. These four institutions of 'fiscal empowerment' of the state enable nations to project power by mobilizing and deploying financial resources to that end.6 Ferguson shows how vital sound economic management is to strategic policy and national power. More recently, Ferguson has been drawing a parallel between the role of debt and financial crises in the decline of the Ottoman and Soviet Empires and that of the United States. In an early comment on the present financial crisis, Ferguson wrote: We are indeed living through a global shift in the balance of power very similar to that which occurred in the 1870s. This is the story of how an over-extended empire sought to cope with an external debt crisis by selling off revenue streams to foreign investors. The empire that suffered these setbacks in the 1870s was the Ottoman empire. Today it is the US. … It remains to be seen how quickly today's financial shift will be followed by a comparable geopolitical shift in favour of the new export and energy empires of the east. Suffice to say that the historical analogy does not bode well for America's quasi-imperial network of bases and allies across the Middle East and Asia. Debtor empires sooner or later have to do more than just sell shares to satisfy their creditors. … as in the 1870s the balance of financial power is shifting. Then, the move was from the ancient oriental empires (not only the Ottoman but also the Persian and Chinese) to western Europe. Today the shift is from the US - and other western financial centres - to the autocracies of the Middle East and East Asia. …7 An economic or financial crisis may not trigger the decline of an empire. It can certainly speed up a process already underway. In the case of the Soviet Union, the financial crunch caused by the Afghan War came on top of years of economic under-performance and the loss of political legitimacy of the Soviet State. In a democratic society like the United States, the political legitimacy of the state is constantly renewed through periodic elections. Thus, the election of Barack Obama may serve to renew the legitimacy of the state and by doing so enable the state to undertake measures that restore health to the economy. This the Soviet State was unable to do under Gorbachev even though he repudiated the Brezhnev legacy and distanced himself from it. Hence, one must not become an economic determinist, and historic parallels need not always be relevant. Politics can intervene and offer solutions. Political economy and politics, in the form of Keynesian economics and the 'New Deal' did intervene to influence the geopolitical implications of the Great Depression. Whether they will do so once again in today's America remains to be seen.




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