by Tom Burghardt
August 23, 2010
from
GlobalResearch Website
|
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay
Area.
In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global
Research, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence
Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing
website Wikileaks.
He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military
"Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to
the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great
Depression of the XXI Century. |
Last spring,
Antifascist Calling reported on the
launch of the Pentagon's secretive
X-37B mini space shuttle, a 29-foot long
unmanned orbital test vehicle (OTV).
Built by Boeing Corporation, the multibillion dollar project was the
culmination of a decades-long dream of Pentagon space warriors: to field a
reusable spacecraft that combines an airplane's agility with the means to
travel at 5 miles per second in orbit.
After the craft's successful April 22 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force
Station in Florida, Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) denied that the X-37B
was a prototype for a near-earth weapons platform.
Back in 2005 however,
The New York Times reported that General Lance W.
Lord, then commander of AFSPC, told an Air Force conference that,
"space
superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny... Space
superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the
future."
And with no public debate whatsoever, new weapons programs spawned in the
bowels of the Pentagon's black budget parallel universe are on coming
on-line.
We do know however, that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) the
secretive Defense Department satrapy that builds and flies America's fleet
of spy satellites, is ramping up operations for the,
"most aggressive launch
schedule that this organization has undertaken in the last 25 years," NRO
director Bruce Carlson said in a speech at the National Space Symposium,
according to Aviation Week.
Among the most heavily-outsourced American secret state agencies, NRO and
its sister organization, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
are preparing the "battle-space" for new imperial adventures.
The
AllGov web
site reported Friday that NGA,
"recently awarded $7.3 billion in contracts
for its Enhanced View commercial imagery program, which is intended to yield
higher resolution photos of earth targets than what is currently available
to the military."
Reporters David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff tell us that,
"DigitalGlobe
operates three satellites capable of collecting imagery at resolutions of
better than 1 meter, and GeoEye has two satellites in orbit that can
photograph objects as small as half a meter in size."
Perfect for zeroing-in
on "anti-government forces" or perhaps pesky dissidents and whistleblowers
here in the
heimat.
A short blurb on AFSPC's web site
hailing the space plane's orbital
insertion was long on cheesy boilerplate but short on details of what the
mission hoped to accomplish.
The Air Force informed us that,
"the X-37B... will provide an 'on-orbit
laboratory' test environment to prove new technology and components before
those technologies are committed to operational satellite programs."
What that "test environment" might produce is anyone's guess and the Air
Force isn't saying.
Prior to the launch however, AFSPC was far less coy,
proclaiming,
"if these
technologies on the vehicle prove to be as good as we estimate, it will make
our access to space more responsive, perhaps cheaper, and push us in the
vector toward being able to react to warfighter needs more quickly."
Such as bombing any point on earth in under an hour as the mad
Prompt Global
Strike program hopes to do, or, given
the X-37B's diminutive profile,
serving as an anti-satellite weapon that could threaten the space assets of
other nations, particularly those of China and Russia.
While speculation as to what X-37B capabilities are have run the gamut from
an orbital delivery system for conventional or nuclear weapons, to a
satellite killing drone, to a relatively inexpensive means to launch
mini-satellite swarms into orbit, the best guess is that all three are
plausible hypotheses.
Despite contrary claims by the Obama administration, the "space superiority"
that the Air Force lusts after include plans to weaponize space,
imperialism's "high frontier."
Or, as Gen. Lord would have it, the "freedom
to attack as well as freedom from attack" in earth orbit.
"International Cooperation" and other Fairy Tales
Writing in The Diplomat, journalist David Axe reported last month that
during the 2008 presidential campaign candidate Barack Obama made opposition
to space-based weapons "part of his platform."
According to the changling's campaign material,
"He [Obama] believes the
United States must show leadership by engaging other nations in discussions
of how best to stop the slow slide towards a new battlefield."
"Yet just two years into the Obama presidency," Axe wrote, "it's clear that
these noble sentiments aren't being matched by US deeds."
Brian Weeden, the author of
a briefing paper for the Pentagon - and
industry-connected Secure World Foundation (SWF), claims that the mini space
plane,
"has near zero feasibility as an orbital weapons system for attacking
targets on the ground."
Weeden alleges that the X-37B's payload bay is too small for carrying an
effective space-launched weapon, and moves too slowly to carry out bombing
runs when re-entering the atmosphere, unlike the
hypersonic glide vehicle
under development by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
as a component of the Pentagon's "Prompt Global Strike" program.
Policy wonks such as Eric Sterner, an analyst with the Washington,
D.C.-based
Marshall Institute, a rightist think tank chock-a-block with
former Cold Warriors, retired Pentagon clock-punchers and corporatist bag
men, told Axe that "in theory" the X-37B could be weaponized or might be
ideal for sneaking up on and probing, capturing, or even destroying an
adversary's satellites.
"You open the payload bay, you can have in it anything you want, like a
hard-point on an aircraft," Sterner told The Diplomat. "You can put sensors
in there, satellites in there. You could stick munitions in there, provided
they exist."
Sterner should know. After all, the Marshall Institute is pushing for the
accelerated development of a "robust" U.S. missile defense system.
The Institute, along with right-wing grifters from,
-
the American Foreign
Policy Council
-
the Claremont Institute
-
the Free Congress Research and
Education Foundation
-
The Heritage Foundation
-
High Frontier
-
the Institute
of the North,
...and a gaggle of defense corps, are the dark heart of the Rumsfeldian
Independent Working Group (IWG).
Last year, the IWG published another in a series of alarmist screeds urging
deployment of this exquisitely destabilizing first strike weapons system.
The group's
2009 report, Missile Defense, the Space Relationship & the
Twenty-First Century, told us that,
"Missile defense has entered a new era.
With the initial missile defense deployments, the decades-long debate over
whether to protect the American people from the threat of ballistic missile
attack was settled--and settled unequivocally in favor of missile defense."
Although the United States is a founding member of the
UN Committee on the
Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and is a signatory to the 1967 Outer Space
Treaty banning orbital nuclear weapons, as the previous administration amply
demonstrated, international treaties and agreements are so many worthless
scraps of paper to be tossed aside when it inconveniences the Empire.
Ratcheting up tensions in the wake of the 9/11 provocation as plans to
invade Iraq were secretly being hatched by the Bush crime family, at former
SecDef Rumsfeld's insistence, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty with Russia and proclaimed that it would
build - and deploy - a missile defense system.
With a cover story that the system would be based in Central Europe to
"protect" NATO allies from a nonexistent "Iranian threat," Washington
believes it has the right to threaten and cajole other nations because of
its status as the world's "sole superpower."
Mikhail Barabanov, the editor of Arms Export magazine, believes that the,
"real motivation of the multibillion-dollar undertaking is the desire to
expand U.S. military and strategic capacities and constrict those of other
states that have nuclear missiles, Russia and China most of all,"
UPI reported.
Barabanov argued that,
"even a limited missile defense system injects a high
degree of indeterminacy into the strategic plans of other countries and
undermines the principle of mutual nuclear deterrence.
"With Russia continuing to reduce its nuclear arsenal significantly and
China maintaining a low missile potential," Barabanov said that "the
Americans' ability to down even a few dozen warheads could deprive the other
side of guaranteed ability to cause the U.S. unacceptable damage in a
nuclear war."
In response to the American threat, Barabanov wrote that,
"the only way to
prevent a slow growth of the American strategic advantage is a significant
increase in the purchase of new ballistic missiles by Russia."
America's drive for nuclear and space
superiority excludes any attempt to limit deployment of new weapons systems
anywhere, including space.
While Bush and his minions may have
receded from the headlines, Washington militarists are up to their old
tricks - and semantic parlor games - rebranded
as "change."
In June,
The New York Times reported that the administration will,
"consider
proposals and concepts for arms control measures if they are equitable,
effectively verifiable, and enhance the national security of the United
States and its allies."
As with all things Obama however, the administration's "new space policy"
mantra is more public relations puffery than substance.
Peter Marquez, director of space policy at the National Security Council
told the Times that Washington would,
"oppose the development of new legal
regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access or
use of space."
This of course, is a red herring since no other nation has sought to
"prohibit or limit" America's "access or use of space" for peaceful
purposes.
As a means to preclude the prospect for negotiating a new arms
control treaty for space, despite international backing by China, Russia and
America's NATO allies, caveats and distortions by the NSC are deal killers.
"Those are the gates," Marquez told the Times, "that the arms control
proposals must come through before we consider them."
In other words, the
global godfather has spoken so forget it.
If the U.S., as candidate Obama declared, is truly interested in stopping
the "the slow slide towards a new battlefield," why then has the Pentagon
embarked on a crash program to field a new generation of orbital weapons?
Washington's lack of transparency when it comes to the X-37B's potential to
compromise other nations' satellite systems reveal that Obama's pledge to
strengthen "international cooperation" for de-escalating conflicts in space,
like his promise to close the Guantánamo Bay gulag, end torture or halt
secret state domestic spying, are a cynical pack of lies.
Space Situational Awareness
- Preparing the Orbital Battlespace
With the upcoming launch of the first in a series of spysats called the
Space Based Surveillance System (SBSS) by AFSPC, we can expect more in the
orbital dirty tricks department.
Built by usual suspects Boeing and Northrop Grumman for the Air Force, the
SBSS,
The Register tells us,
"is intended to make life much easier for the US
air force Space Superiority Wing, which tries to keep tabs on all other
nations' military 'space assets'."
In April,
Defense Systems reported that AFSPC has "identified four pillars"
of space situational awareness:
"intelligence characterization, data
integration and exploitation, threat warning, and attack reporting."
To address those "pillars," three new hardware programs are coming on-line:
"the Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) space vehicle, Space Fence and
Space Surveillance Telescope (SST)."
SBSS is viewed by Pentagon star warriors as an ideal spy platform because it,
"offers a resilient space-based capability that weather cannot affect. It
doesn't have foreign basing issues. And it provides more timely revisit
rates for high-interest objects at geosynchronous orbit."
Or, more realistically, given Pentagon proclivities to shoot first and
analyze later, provide wannabe starship troopers with real-time targets for
efficient takedown.
While deliberate meddling with other nation's satellites is strictly
forbidden by international treaty, The Register informs us that,
"America
might not be above a little bit of unattributable orbital naughtiness itself
at some point in the future."
Indeed, "unattributable orbital naughtiness" is the name of the game.
Last
week,
The Register reported that the Pentagon's new,
"'fractionated' swarm
satellites - in which groups of small wirelessly-linked modules in orbit will
replace today's large spacecraft - will be able to scatter to avoid enemy
attacks and then reform into operational clusters."
According to a
DARPA press release,
"System F6 (Future, Fast, Flexible,
Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft) demonstrator program [will] emphasize
development of an open and ubiquitous space architecture and an associated
set of open standards. The fractionated spacecraft concept replaces large,
monolithic space assets with clusters of smaller, wirelessly-interconnected
modules that share resources to create, in effect, a 'virtual satellite'."
In other words, sat swarms in constant communication with their Pentagon
masters on the ground.
With an emphasis on,
"real-time, fault-tolerant resource sharing over
wireless cross-links; algorithms for safe and agile multi-body cluster
flight; persistent broadband communications between low earth orbit (LEO)
spacecraft and the ground; and a robust and scalable multi-level information
assurance architecture," DARPA believes the F6 program will "enable multiple
payloads supplied by different agencies, services or even countries to share
common infrastructure at multiple levels of security."
DARPAcrats say the project will "exploit benefits of democratization of
innovation" and find better ways to kill people in the process.
How's that
for innovation!