Newswise — Though no country today is known to have weapons deployed in space, and many countries oppose their development, at least some U.S. Pentagon officials have been arguing that the United States must now, after decades of debate, develop and deploy offensive space weapons. In fact, over the past 10 years, the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars researching and testing such weapons. If deployment became official U.S. policy, such a step would have profound--and profoundly negative--implications for the balance of global power, argue physicist Richard Garwin, a longtime adviser on U.S. science and technology policy, and his coauthors in the March 2005 issue of IEEE Spectrum.
The problem with space-based weapons is that any military advantages that might be gained from them would be far outweighed by their political and economic costs. Deploying such weapons would also create new, asymmetric vulnerabilities for U.S. armed forces, and would be a significant political and strategic departure from 50 years of international law and diplomatic relations.
Without a doubt, the exploitation of space has helped the U.S. military remain the most technologically advanced fighting force in the world. Satellites are now routinely used to detect, identify, locate, and track targets. They also provide mobile, secure communication links between military control centers and theaters of operation, near-real-time imaging, signals intelligence, and meteorological data. And, of course, the constellation of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites ensures that military personnel need never be lost amid a war's chaos.
At the same time, though, such systems have made the United States and its allies deeply vulnerable to an attack on their satellites and other space-based systems. What's more, the means to disable or disrupt this valuable and complex machinery are well within the reach of even technologically unsophisticated adversaries. In their article, Garwin and his coauthors examine the capabilities of each of the main space weapons now being considered--space-based lasers, hypervelocity rod penetrators, microsatellites, and common aero vehicles--and lucidly describe their many shortcomings.
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