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Space war – high risk now
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Space war – high risk nowRisk of space war with China is high – almost happened beforeWalters, 16 Greg Walters is a journalist specializing in business, politics, energy markets and Russia. Formerly based in Moscow, he has written for Bloomberg News, Dow Jones Newswires, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Moscow Times, VICE News, Energy Risk magazine and more. He’s appeared on BBC World Service, NPR's All Things Considered and All Songs Considered, Deutsche Welle and other television and radio programs. February 12, 2016. “The Pentagon Is Betting Big on Space Warfare — Against China and Russia” Vice News https://news.vice.com/article/the-pentagon-is-betting-big-on-space-warfare-against-china-and-russia "The US military is the most reliant on satellite capabilities of any military in the world," noted Theresa Hitchens, an expert on space and cyber security at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. "Russia and China look at US space capabilities and say, 'You know what? That's a vulnerability.' " A potentially devastating vulnerability. Taking out those satellites would throw American forces back into the "pre-digital age," Singer said. "After that, the battles may look more like the battles of WWI or WWII, where you're struggling to find the enemy first, and they're struggling to find you." The US military is looking to forestall that scenario and envision the battleground of the future. In December, US military and civilian specialists gathered at the Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado for a large-scale war game set in outer space in the year 2025. The event brought together 200 experts from 27 US agencies as well as representatives from the UK, Canada, and Australia. While details are classified, a statement by the US Air Force Space Command said the game "included full spectrum threats across diverse operating environments that challenged civilian and military leaders, planners, and space system operators." The goal of a war in space would be for each side to take out its competitor's satellites as quickly as possible — using any means available. A blinding assault on enemy satellites could well be the very first step of a military conflict between great powers, said professor Bhupendra Jasani, an expert in the militarization of outer space at the department of war studies at King's College London. Some satellites would be jammed by radio waves. Others might be blown to smithereens by rockets fired from earth. This kind of kinetic attack has enormous implications for space debris. It could be a relatively trivial matter to create enough debris to set off a chain reaction of collisions that could eventually clear out an entire orbit. Attack drones might also spray paint onto surveillance satellites, blinding their lenses. Kamikaze space-bots might collide into satellites, ramming them off course. Lasers and directed-energy beams would likely be used in space combat to blind surveillance equipment or fry satellite components. Actually mounting laser weapons on spacecraft is probably no more than a decade away, according to Jasani, but until then they would probably be fired from the earth's surface. Russia, China, and the US are all thought to already have this capability. Another element of assault would be to hack or reprogram an opposing military's satellites and use them to send false signals to its forces, sowing chaos. An attacking army could slip past enemy lines on the ground as early warning systems give false all-clear readouts to defenders. Compromised satellites could even allow an enemy to redirect deployed missiles against the side that launched them, said Singer. A prime target for any would-be adversary taking on the US would be the Global Positioning System, or GPS, which lets users pinpoint exact locations on the earth's surface. GPS is a network of satellites developed and maintained by the US Air Force. The same system that helps college undergrads road trip during spring break is also used to drop bombs on the heads of Islamic State militants in Syria. That's one reason China set alarm bells ringing in the halls of Washington, DC in 2013 when it launched a rocket 30,000 kilometers into space — far enough to hit one of the GPS satellites, which hang in orbit about 20,000 kilometers from earth, or other key communications satellites even farther out. China had previously knocked one of its own satellites out of the sky from a height of 865 kilometers using a missile launched from earth in 2007. "China needs to be more forthcoming about missile tests that appear to be more focused on the development of destructive space weapons," US Admiral Cecil D. Haney told the US Senate Committee on Armed Services last March. Download 357.18 Kb. Share with your friends:
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