September 29, 2020—Space Race with China?

“As the era of great power competition continues to evolve, we must understand the full breadth and depth of the competition, how they think, and how they are likely to act or react.” ~Brendan Mulvaney, Director of the Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI), in the introduction to “China’s Space Narrative”

Click here for this important report, released on Sept. 17, 2020 by the U.S. Air Force Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI) and the CNA nonprofit research center, that confirms the widely held view that China’s anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons pose a national security threat to the United States. China’s Space Narrative, while highlighting China’s use of “soft power” and diplomacy to undermine the United States.

This welcome report, based on publicly available native language resources, discusses the China Communist Party (CCP) view of the U.S.-China space relationship as “a long-term competition in which China is attempting to become a global power, and [that] part of this effort is being played out in space.”

But it is hardly news that China is a military rival in space with a growing array of anti-satellite weapons, but it is important that this USAF study recognizes the rise of China’s space program now poses a combination of military, economic and political challenges to the United States.

Click here for my discussion a year ago of these factors, which keyed off Bill Gertz’s then recent book, Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy.Click here for information on his 2019 book that discusses the failure of generations of U.S. policymakers over the past forty years of assuming that trade and engagement with China would result in a peaceful, democratic state.

Moreover, as I also pointed out last year, Gertz wrote five year ago in his October 17, 2015 Washington Times article, “New Details of Chinese Space weapons,” that China was then “pursuing a broad and robust array of counterspace capabilities, which includes direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles, co-orbital anti-satellite systems, computer network operations, ground-based satellite jammers and directed energy weapons.”

Click here for my October 27, 2015 discussion of that important Gertz article that focused on China’s anti-satellite (ASAT) systems. While those ASAT concerns remain and have grown further over the past five years, we still have done little or nothing to develop countermanding capabilities, and the threat from China is NOW much larger.

Moreover, China’s longstanding political objective, including these means to an end, is really not news either. As I have often pointed out Michael Pillsbury’s classic republished The Hundred Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America and the Global Superpower clearly demonstrates that this objective has long been the objective of China’s leaders.

While Gertz conclusions about China’s long-standing strategy and objectives are very important, they are not new. Indeed, click here for Michael Pillsbury’s even more authoritative 2015 book that updated his years earlier first edition — then already based on decades of his studies of China’s military strategy.

The Hundred Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America and the Global Superpower clearly demonstrates that this objective has long been the objective of China’s leaders. Pillsbury points out that China has long sought “to supplant the United States as the world’s dominant power, and to do so by 2049,” the hundredth anniversary of founding of the People’s Republic of China (PLC).

As a fluent Manderin speaker, his views draw from his involvement in studying and engaging with China’s military “Hawks” and their writings, from within and as a consultant to the government, since the days of President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Beginning then and ever since, the U.S. government has helped — sometimes unwittingly and sometimes deliberately — the China Communist Party (CCP) move toward their goal.

Pillsbury, among others, has urged President Trump to implement a more competitive strategy toward China as it really is, and not as we wish it to be. As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made clear, including this past Sunday evening on Fox News’ Life, Liberty and Levin, that goal is now U.S. national security policy. Hopefully, it will continue until we see an actual policy reversal of several decades under both Democrat and Republican administrations.

But if it is to be successful, it needs to be backed up with serious related national security programs, especially in my view those involving military activities in space. And therein lies a major political problem, even if President Trump is reelected. Let’s just recount a bit of past history with which I am most familiar.

Technology theft from American companies has taken place on a massive scale through cyber theft and unfair trade practices. This theft directly supported the largest and most significant buildup of the Chinese military, which now directly threatens American and allied interests around the world. And the military threat is only half the danger as China aggressively pursues regional and international control using a variety of non-military forces, including economic, cyber and space warfare and large-scale influence operations.

In some of these areas, we are now playing “catch up” because we abandoned the leading role our scientists and technologists played in developing these as part of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), when the Clinton administration scuttled it — as then Defense Secretary Les Aspin said, he “took the stars out of Star Wars.”

Moreover, some of the most important SDI technologies were passed to the China, as was discussed by the Independent Working Group on Missile Defense in considerable detail in Appendix B of reports on The Space Relationship & the Twenty-First Century, published by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis.

Click here and here for those 2007 and 2009 reports that summarized how the George W. Bush administration did little to deal with the threat from China — even though it withdrew from the ABM Treaty that had previously blocked U.S. effort to develop, test and deploy space-based defense, which President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) championed as the most cost-effective ways to defend the United States and our overseas troops, friends and allies.

The following Obama administration did nothing to counter this growing threat from China; and the Trump administration so far has done little, beyond setting up the Space Force, to revive those key technologies that have been dormant in the United State for three decades, while China moved ahead. And what we are doing in related technologies is playing “catch-up” as observed by former Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin.

Without elaborating on this disheartening situation re. space-based missile defenses, consider the history of the U.S. lethargic efforts to build “hit to kill” ASAT systems.

While noting China’s above-mentioned long-standing efforts now providing such capabilities to China’s military, this ASAT history makes clear that the problem is not a challenge to our technological competence — it Is a consequence of political constraints, especially from the arms control community.

Forty years ago, Russia already had an operational co-orbital ASAT, and successfully used arms control initiatives to lull the United States and Western powers to sleep, a process I first witnessed up close and personal as USAF Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategic and Space Systems when, among other things, I oversaw the early development of our F-15 launched hit-to-kill ASAT, illustrated below.

Click here for a discussion of that important program, actually begun as one of the last directives of the Ford administration as a highly classified effort, maintained through the Carter administration and actually tested in President Reagan’s second term.

Members of congress sought to block our efforts when it first became known during early budget cycles during President Reagan’s first term. In early 1984, one of my first jobs as Assistant Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) for Strategic Programs was to lead the interagency activities in responding to the so-called Tsongas amendment, after Senator Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.), which blocked funding unless the United States sought a comprehensive ASAT ban.

We prepared a comprehensive unclassified report, with exhaustive classified backup, explaining that such a comprehensive ban was neither verifiable nor in the U.S. national security interest. Happily, we were successful in blocking the Tsongas amendment — and the F-15 ASAT was successfully tested on September 13, 1985 — 35 years ago.

That test certainly captured the attention of our Soviet counterparts in the Geneva Defense and Space Talks, where I was then President Reagan’s Ambassador in our negotiations on these matters with the Soviet Union. That capability increased the credibility of the President’s SDI efforts and gave us additional leverage in those talks — leverage that eventually produced the first arms control treaties ever actually to reduce nuclear arms.

Nevertheless, for political, mostly arms control related, reasons, Congress blocked any further funding for follow-on USAF ASAT developments. And several years later — during the Clinton administration, the Army pursed a ground-based ASAT, and President Clinton used his “fleeting” line-item veto power to block the funding congress had provided for such development.

Notably, he also vetoed funding for an Air Force space plane and for a deep-space probe follow-on to the Clementine effort (which space-qualified essentially all Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptor technology), because they employed “Star Wars” technology — such was the animosity for Ronald Reagan’s interest in space defenses.

These political issues are still a significant problem because there is such ideological opposition to military space systems — and that opposition includes domestic and international arms control efforts more to block related U.S. development activities than to provide any effective constraint on others.

By the way, our above-mentioned 1984 Report to Congress to block the Tsongas Amendment demonstrated that it is practically impossible to verify any meaningful ASAT arms control agreement. That reality is still the case, of course.

Nevertheless, we can expect the arms control community to continue to be an obstacle in efforts to develop such systems today, including with President Trump’s Space Force initiatives — where the Washington “powers that be” are stumbling forward without reviving a modern Brilliant Pebbles effort.

Bottom Lines.

The President has taken important initiatives, including his efforts to initiate a Space Force.

But the Federal Government ‘s typical response can generously be described as dysfunctional while stumbling ever so slowly, whether forward or not. And so far there is no sign that the Space Force will revive the most cost-effective ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems, those based in space.

Meanwhile, we can fully expect China (and Russia) to exploit modern technology (including that bought or stolen from U.S. technologists) to gain and exploit space-based military systems — of course while seeking arms control agreements to inhibit U.S. efforts.

We’ve seen this show before — and we should follow Ronald Reagan’s model of finding creative ways to simply say “No!” while pursuing a revived SDI effort.

Otherwise, I believe we will lose the Space Race with China (and Russia).

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