US guages Chinese ASAT plan

From Air Force Times

U.S. gauges China’s anti-satellite plan

By Vago Muradian - Staff writer

Posted : Friday Feb 2, 2007 11:10:30 EST

As worldwide attention focuses on China’s first successful anti-satellite missile test, U.S. officials are questioning why some Chinese spacecraft are in orbits that bring them close to key U.S. satellites, according to military sources.

The big question is the scale and progress of the Chinese anti-satellite program, including whether the Chinese spacecraft are benign or time bombs that can someday be used to threaten the space assets on which the U.S. military and economy depend for everything from reconnaissance and dropping bombs to logistics, communications and navigation.

The Chinese spacecraft don’t appear to be conducting any particular mission. Rather, “there is a menu of missions that could be performed that we are not yet clear about,” said one source. “These things aren’t being sent up there to be space rocks.”

A 50-page report submitted Jan. 19 to Congress cites evidence that China is considering a covert anti-satellite network that could debilitate the United States in wartime.

For more than a decade, U.S. officials have warily eyed China’s growth as a space power, particularly its interest in developing anti-satellite systems to counter an overwhelming American superiority in space.

Interest peaked after a ground-based missile destroyed an obsolete Chinese weather satellite on Jan. 11. At least one previous test ended in failure, and perhaps two, sources said. Chinese officials issued assurances that the test should not be seen as threatening.

The White House publicly confirmed the test as part of a coordinated effort with close allies — Australia, Britain, Canada and Japan among them — to drive home to Beijing that its anti-satellite activities have global repercussions.

China’s direct-ascent anti-satellite missile is the latest test to prove counter-space capabilities. Last year, senior U.S. officials said China had attempted to use lasers to blind American satellites.

By international convention, a physical attack on a nation’s satellites is considered an act of war.

Tracking Spacecraft

The United States uses a vast array of orbiting and ground-based systems to track spacecraft and determine their purpose. But two programs are seen as key for the future military space force; the XSS-11 and its complementary effort dubbed Angels, both by Lockheed Martin.

Both aim to develop a range of capabilities that the Air Force sees as critical, including highly maneuverable spacecraft that can closely scrutinize what’s in space. XSS-11 flew in 2005 and its public mission was to demonstrate the ability to maneuver on orbit and autonomously rendezvous with orbiting satellites.

Critics say that such a maneuverable spacecraft could be used to ram enemy spacecraft or attack them with weapons.

The XSS-11 flight, however, brought back information that prompted top U.S. military commanders in January 2006 said they needed a better understanding of what’s in space that could jeopardize U.S. defense and economic interests. They also said they needed a more “operationally responsive” space system and the ability to quickly launch military satellites into space to replace those destroyed in an attack.

Assessing China’s Strategy

The Jan. 19 report, authored by Pentagon China consultant Michael Pillsbury for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, is based on the writings of more than 20 Chinese military strategists, particularly three colonels at Beijing’s National Defense University between 2001 and 2005.

The commission is a congressionally chartered bipartisan panel that advises lawmakers on the strategic U.S.-China security and business relationship.

Pillsbury declined to discuss whether China has already launched into orbit elements of a covert space fleet, but stressed that Beijing’s military strategists appear focused on designing a broad set of anti-satellite capabilities.

“We have three books and several dozen articles from China that go back 10 years, all of which advocate all types of anti-satellite weapons and they have a consistent theme — they have to be deployed covertly so that in a crisis with America, China can shoot down some satellites as a deterrent message,” Pillsbury said.

“These documents advocate multiple approaches to preemptive strikes on satellites from plasma clouds, pellets, directed-energy weapons, orbiting spacecraft and attacking ground stations with special forces,” he said.

China, Pillsbury said, is convinced the United States is weaponizing space and Beijing has concluded it must develop a like capability, while simultaneously pressing for an international space weapon ban.

“What’s interesting is that no matter how hard you try, you don’t find anything in Chinese writings that argues the opposite, that if you attack U.S. military satellites you will have World War III on your hands, which is why it’s better to initiate a space weapons dialogue and never have a crisis in the first place,” Pillsbury said.

A Chinese military official said he could not comment on the matter.

But Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, said it is difficult to determine whether the authors quoted by Pillsbury represent fringe or mainstream military thought.

“The hard part of dissecting China is that we know so little of who’s who and we can’t necessarily tell as outside analysts which are credible sources,” she said.

“It would be dangerous to either underestimate or overestimate Chinese capabilities, but you have to be more aware of overestimation because you don’t want to be in a situation where you panic.”

Weapons in space

China in 2002 called on the United States to send a delegation to Geneva to negotiate a space weapons ban. But Washington refused because Beijing rejected verification measures and defined space weapons as including missile defense components.

The Outer Space Treaty, which the United States signed in 1967, prohibited nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction in space. But American officials say that while they are committed to the peaceful use of space, they will not be party to an agreement that could hamstring their ability to defend space assets.

The U.S. Congress barred the Air Force from building anti-satellite missiles in 1986, after an Air Force F-15 fighter launched a missile that destroyed an orbiting U.S. satellite. The Soviet Union also flexed its anti-satellite capabilities in the 1980s. And now China has joined the club.

Asked about the new Chinese anti-satellite threat, Lt. Col. Michael Pierson, a spokesman for the U.S. Air Force Space Command, declined comment. “As a matter of principle, we do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, responses or steps to mitigate,” he said.

“In broad terms, the U.S. has an inherent right of self defense and we take all threats to our sovereign space systems seriously. We monitor activities that threaten our right to use space peacefully and take appropriate steps to defend our systems against current and future threats.”

Part of the problem, Pierson said, is the sheer number of operational and long-defunct spacecraft orbiting Earth. “In 1957, there was one man-made object in space. Today, we are tracking more than 14,000 man-made objects in space. So, the environment has changed,” Pierson said.

And better awareness of what’s exactly in space and why has become a major initiative for the Air Force since the release of a 2000 report by the blue ribbon Space Commission panel that declared that America was vulnerable to a “space Pearl Harbor.”

The panel was chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, who would become defense secretary months later and spearhead changes to the military space organization, including subsuming the U.S. Space Command into the U.S. Strategic Command to ensure a single management point for strategic space.

Operationally Responsive Space

To focus attention on the issue, however, Rumsfeld asked Art Cebrowski to head the Pentagon’s new Office of Force Transformation, which made operationally responsive space a priority. Cebrowski tirelessly argued that the current space infrastructure needed to be re-engineered.

First, he argued, it takes too long to build military satellites and the rockets needed to place them into orbit. To ensure a failsafe space network critical to a new brand of networked warfare, he said, the United States must be able to loft satellites quickly into orbit to replace those that could be destroyed by an enemy.

Publicly, Cebrowski never named China as a potential foe, but Beijing’s interest in anti-satellite systems was a key factor in his strategic thinking. To that end, Cebrowski’s office launched a series of programs, chief among them the development of small “tactical satellites” or Tac-Sats.

The first of a series of such small, innovative and relatively inexpensive spacecraft by the Naval Research Laboratory, TACSAT-1 was to have been launched last year, but has been delayed because teething problems with the all-new, low-cost booster by SpaceX. The satellite and rocket together were planned to cost about $15 million.

The Air Force plans to spend about $300 million over the coming five years on a host of programs to face space threats, most of which would be directed to stockpiling launchers like the Minotaur rocket by Orbital Sciences which launched TACSAT-2 in December from Wallops Island, Va.

“Pearl Harbor was said for effect and may have been overstated, but we need to get serious about protecting the assets in space, not just the spacecraft, but the nodes and ground stations that contribute to that,” said Lance Lord, a retired Air Force general who until 2006 headed the service’s space command. “To underscore the importance of space situational awareness we reordered our priorities to space surveillance, defensive counter space and last, offensive counter space.”

Defense in Depth

“Defensive counterspace is key. You have to have defense in depth so that if you lose one spacecraft or a space-borne capability, you can reroute in a self-healing system to avoid single-point vulnerabilities. In terms of the overall system, it’s relatively robust, but not as good as it needs to be.”

Space, like the sea, is open to all nations for peaceful and select military applications like reconnaissance, surveillance, communications and weather forecasting, and with that openness comes challenges, Lord said.

“You have an inherent right of self defense in the commons of space and if someone is using space against you, you can take a variety of actions to defend yourself,” he said. “That is even more important now that the Chinese have proven that they are technically capable of large projects and want to be a full player in the environment and we have to appreciate how that plays into their doctrine.”

Knocking out the U.S. space network, or even big pieces of it, however, would be difficult. For example, the U.S. satellites that monitor the globe for missile launches — the Defense Support Program spacecraft — are in geosynchronous orbit some 24,000 miles high, while the GPS constellation orbits the Earth at a medium altitude of some 12,000 miles. Both are too high and redundant to easily incapacitate, analysts said.

More vulnerable are the series of giant Keyhole optical and Lacrosse radar reconnaissance satellites that are in low earth orbit several hundred miles high.

“These are big satellites and there aren’t many of them up there are and they aren’t immediately replaceable if lost,” said Barry Watts, the former head of the Pentagon’s Program Analysis & Evaluation office who is now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. “We’re very focused on Iraq and things like armored Humvees, and they’re important, but you have to keep you eye on the space ball because almost everything we do depends on it.”

[An assessment of China's anti-satellite and space warfare programs, policies and doctrines can be found here in PDF format].