U.S. 'negation' policy in space raises concerns abroad
By Loring Wirbel, 

May 22, 2003 (EE Times) COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - While much 
of the talk around the Pentagon these days focuses on "transformation" 
of the military, some of the United States' closest allies worry about 
another buzzword being used in subtler ways at the National 
Reconnaissance Office: "negation."  

The nation's largest intelligence agency by budget and in control of 
all U.S. spy satellites, NRO is talking openly with the U.S. Air Force 
Space Command about actively denying the use of space for 
intelligence purposes to any other nation at any time - not just 
adversaries, but even longtime allies, according to NRO director 
Peter Teets.  

At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, 
Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and 
commercial satellites be combined to provide "persistence in total 
situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation's war fighters." 
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. The 
allies, he told the symposium, will have "no veto power."  

Beginning next year, 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, said Teets.  

The program will include two components: the Counter Communication 
System, designed to disrupt other nations' communication networks 
from space; and the Counter Surveillance Reconnaissance System, 
formed to prevent other countries from using advanced intelligence-
gathering technology in air or space.  

"Negation implies treating allies poorly," Robert Lawson, senior policy 
adviser for nonproliferation in the Canadian Department of Foreign 
Affairs, said at a Toronto conference in late March. "It implies treaty 
busting."  

Hints of such a policy 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.  

The European Union complained in no uncertain terms 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 chimed in last fall, 
when the Defense Department tried to bully ESA into changing its 
design plans for a navigational-satellite system called Galileo.  

In the aftermath of the successful Iraq campaign, concern goes 
much deeper and extends to the heart of NORAD, the North American 
Aerospace Defense Command inside Cheyenne Mountain near here. 
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 United States 
can.  

"We cannot address the way the U.S. 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.  

Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Judd Blaisdell, director of the Air Force Space 
Operations Office, said recently, "We are so dominant in space that I 
pity a country that would come up against us."  

Missile-defense critic William Hartung, of the Institute for Policy 
Studies, said none of this should be a surprise. U.S. unilateralism in 
space was codified in a Sept. 20, 2002, document titled the "National 
Security Strategy of the United States."  

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.  

In fact, 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.  

Currently, the NRO manages a series of imaging satellites, including 
the 20-year-old Advanced Crystal system. It manages a family of large 
radar satellites called Lacrosse/Onyx, and two classes of listening 
satellites: a microwave-only system known as Vortex or Mercury, and a 
multifrequency behemoth known as Magnum or Orion. The last two 
geosynchronous satellites are so large they must be launched by the 
massive Titan-IV rocket.  

Even though billions were spent every year on these satellites in the 
1980s and 1990s, they could not fulfill the new NRO mission of 
disseminating intelligence beyond the nation's civilian leaders, direct 
to the attlefield. NRO lobbied Congress for a radar satellite follow-on, 
now called Space-Based Radar. While NASA is supposed to be a customer 
for such a system, Teets said its primary purpose is to improve moving-
target indication on the battlefield.  

On the imaging and signals fronts, Boeing Corp. won separate contracts 
in the late 1990s for a next-generation imaging network called Future 
Imagery Architecture and for a listening satellite called Intruder. Both 
Boeing projects now face Congressional scrutiny for being over budget 
and behind schedule.  

To fill the imaging gap during the Afghan and Iraq wars, the NRO and 
the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) bought up all the 
image products from two companies that fly commercial imaging 
satellites, Space Imaging Inc. and DigitalGlobe Inc. In the first phase, 
ClearVision, the agencies merely bought up existing photographs. But a 
new phase, NextVision, calls for NRO and NIMA to specify how the 
commercial firms should build their next-generation satellites.  

The constellation of 27 satellites in the Global Positioning Satellite 
navigation network were used in Iraq to turn dumb bombs into precision 
weapons. With further upgrades planned in the GPS-III system, DoD 
wants to be sure the United States holds the trump in space-based 
navigation.  

The SBIRS-High infrared detection system, meanwhile, has become 
one of the Defense Department's biggest white elephants.  

The SBIRS-High Increment 1 software finally was installed at Buckley 
Air Force Base in Aurora, Colo., almost two years late, but the birds 
themselves are plagued with problems involving the infrared telescopes 
and other glitches.  

New communications satellites are being rolled out for the Defense 
Information Systems Agency, under the management of NRO. The 
Advanced Extremely High-Frequency satellite is the successor to 
Milstar. Voiceband communications will be handled by the Multi-User 
Objective System satellite, or MUOS, while new broadband video 
services will be handled by the Wideband Gapfiller.  

But NRO's Teets said those three programs are only the beginning. 
The Transformational Communication Office was established last September 
to meld the communication and intelligence interests of the Defense 
Department. NRO and NASA will spend more than $10 billion in coming 
years to define a network of joint NRO-NASA satellites that will bring 
Internet-like space communications to terrestrial battlefields.  

What will this massive palette of space resources bring? Teets told 
Congress that what's already in place allows U.S. military dominance in 
any possible battle scenario.  

This transformational use of space resources may play well since the 
end of the Iraq War, but it is causing some defections. Several analysts 
at the Naval War College and Air Force Academy published essays in 
the months leading up to the Iraq assault, warning against assuming 
that the United States can maintain sole dominance of space. In March, 
retired Brig. Gen. Owen Lentz, former director of intelligence for Space 
Command, publicly voiced his opposition to using space intelligence 
assets for first-strike warfare. Just because the strategy worked in Iraq, 
Lentz warned, "does not mean that it should become a pattern for future 
action against others."

                          -==-

Source: Information Clearinghouse ...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3509.htm

Cheers, Steve..

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