June 26, 2018—May the Force Be With Us . . .

“Someday, not too distant; there can come streaking out of somewhere (We won’t be able to hear it, it will come so fast.) some kind of gadget with an explosive so powerful that one projectile will be able to wipe out completely this city of Washington. . . . I think we will meet the attack alright [sic] and, of course, in the air. But I’ll tell you one thing, there won’t be a …pilot in the sky! That attack will be met by machines guided not by human brains, but by devices conjured up by human brains.” ~ General Henry H. Arnold, 1943

General Arnold’s vision was right on … and subsequently has been ignored, with the exception of President Ronald Reagan’s vision that was central to his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) — and the SDI era (1983-93).

This history is pertinent to understanding the likely treatment of President Trump’s recent directive to the Defense Department to establish a Space Force, separate from the other five services. As is often stated, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to repeating it.

During the height of World War II — before the advent of the atomic bomb or intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs), then Chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps, General “Hap” Arnold, had a prescient view of the future — as indicated above. Later, as he led in the formation of the U.S. Air Force, he retained this visionary priority on science, technology, and American ingenuity to stay ahead of threats to the United States.

Within about 15 years after Arnold’s comments above, Soviet ICBMs armed with nuclear warheads could indeed threaten to obliterate Washington, but our ability to sustain development of maturing technology to shoot down even a single such ICBM eluded us until 2004 — because of policy and political constraints, not technological ones, rooted in political conditions especially imposed in the late 1950s and the 1960s.

Since then — and perhaps even today, it has been politically incorrect to build the most cost-effective ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems — to deploy “machines” in space to shoot down nuclear weapons that transit space on their way to American cities, just as Hap Arnold prophesied. And it has also been politically incorrect for the United States to build weapons to destroy threats to our important satellites. (Who depends entirely on GPS and remembers how to read a map, if they ever knew?)

Ironically, political conditions that frustrated the second half of Arnold’s vision, which called upon using America’s edge in technology to provide for the nation’s defense and supremacy in space, were perhaps because the then political “powers that be” believed reaching that objective was not achievable — but most likely because they considered seeking to achieve it was not desirable.

They preferred to rely on diplomacy and arms control, and argued against exploiting technology, which, they believed, would only provoke an arms race. They advocated this point-of view at the highest political levels, and they were very successful in meeting their objectives — and not only via the 1972 Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that made it illegal to protect the American People from ballistic missile attack.

They were the primary advocates of a mutual suicide pact with the Soviet Union, called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). That doctrine called building effective defenses provocative and destabilizing. And it is still alive and well among many who will oppose President Trump’s Space Force.

Even though President George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002, nothing yet has been done to actually build the most cost-effective defenses that we well understood could be built 30-years ago. These biases should not be ignored in evaluating the Pentagon’s response to President Trump’s directive to the Defense Department to establish a Space Force — equal and separate from the Air Force:

“When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space . . . We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force. Separate but equal.” ~ President Donald J. Trump

Click here for my Newsmax article applauding Senator Ted Cruz’s initiative directing the Pentagon to build space-based defenses. It also highlights the views of the first four directors of what is today called the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), about a key space-based system pioneered on their watch. A key effort, exploiting then commercially available technology, provided the basis in 1990 (actually 30 years ago) for the Pentagon’s Defense Acquisition authorities to approve a formal Demonstration-Validation (DemVal) program for building a cost-effective space-based interceptor system, “Brilliant Pebbles.”

That system could have provided a global protection of our overseas troops, friends and allies — as well as Americans at home — against a larger, more threatening attack than can the current BMD systems that have been built for many times what that space-based BMD system would have cost.

The Pentagon’s independent costing authorities estimated in 1990 it would cost $10 billion in 1988 dollars ($20 billion in today’s inflated dollars) to develop, deploy and operate for 20 years 1000 Brilliant Pebbles to provide over 95-percent probability of shooting down all an attack of up to 200 reentry vehicles (RVs).

Such a cost-effective capability obviously would, and should, be an important component of President Trump’s Space Force. But achieving this obviously needed capability may still remain a daunting challenge for political reasons, though not technical or funding constraints.

But I digress in my discussion of the pertinent lessons from past, which hopefully will help persuade today’s “powers that be” not to repeat past mistakes.

Whether by design or chance, the civilian scientific leadership in the late 1950s and early 1960s also imposed bureaucratic institutional constraints that limited the ability of the military services to exploit cutting edge technologies to take advantage of space for traditional military purposes.

When combined with arms control constraints and a lack of vision among the military services, that dysfunctional space bureaucracy has simply not been responsive to the growing threat from proliferating space technology among our adversaries as well as our friends. This current status results from the fact that those early military leaders who sought to realize General Hap Arnold’s vision were throttled back.

Consider the experiences of USAF General Bernard Schriever, known as the “Father of Air Force Space” because of his advocacy and leadership of the efforts that led the nation’s efforts into space — including our intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that were developed and deployed at a pace that can not be matched by today’s acquisition bureaucracy.

Subsequently, his protégé, General Sam Phillips, led NASA’s Apollo program that landed a man on the Moon ahead of the time advocated by President Kennedy. Phillips Laboratory on Kirtland AFB, in Albuquerque, NM is named for him. These leaders knew how to cut through bureaucratic obstruction and accomplish truly innovative things.

As a young USAF Lieutenant in the 1960s at Kirtland’s Air Force Weapons Laboratory, the original name of Phillips Lab, I received an award from General Schriever, then Commander of Air Force Systems Command, responsible for the development of all Air Force systems. He was already one of my heroes and eventually one of the few, if not only, officers to witness being memorialized with an Air Force Base — Schriever AFB in Colorado Springs.

General Schriever always sought to fully exploit space systems in our nation’s defense, and I was privileged to come to know him well during my time as the Director of President Ronald Reagan’s SDI program. As we became personal friends, I learned more about his early days and how the political “powers that be” during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations constrained his efforts to exploit fully the potential of emerging technology to establish U.S. dominance in space.

He was not even permitted to demonstrate that capability — and was rebuked by his superiors, especially during the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, whenever his speeches strayed from those purely political constraints that sought to avoid controversial capabilities about “weaponizing space.”

Our reconnaissance satellites became highly classified as well as even the existence of the super-secret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a key USAF province for developing cutting edge space technology, but not for weapons in space. And of course, NASA was focused on “peaceful exploration” of space from its outset, which was tightly overseen by the White House.

I learned a lot about the bifurcation of “military” and “peaceful” space applications in the early 1980s, initially as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force with oversight responsibilities for Air Force defense, space and related systems and later as Assistant Director of the Arms and Control Agency (ACDA) backstopping our bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union.

In the first position, I oversaw, among other things, the development of the Air Force Anti-Satellite (ASAT) system, to be launched from an F-15 fighter to shoot down threatening satellites. Notably, this program was initiated by one of the last Presidential Directives of the Ford administration and carried forward as a little advertised effort by the Carter administration.

At ACDA, I led the Reagan interagency process in successfully blocking the so-called “Tsongas Amendment” that would have directed the Reagan administration to negotiate a comprehensive ban of all ASAT systems. It stalled testing of the F-15 ASAT until receiving our report, which successfully argued that such a ban not only was not in our national interest, but that such a ban would not have been verifiable. (Never mind that the Soviets already had an operational co-orbital ASAT system.)

The F-15 ASAT was then successfully tested on September 13, 1985, providing us with significant negotiating leverage with the Soviet Union, by demonstrating existing impressive technology to reinforce President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) vision. As President Reagan’s Chief Defense and Space Negotiator — charged with defending SDI, I was a first-hand witness to this reality.

Notably, the reward for this successful intercept was that congress refused to fund any further testing of this ASAT — and later blocked additional testing of the Army’s ground-based ASAT system — so prevalent was the bias of blocking “weapons in space,” a continuing residual of the initial biases of the late 1950s and early 1960s. And as previously observed, that same bias blocked the exploitation of the most cost-effective BMD system technologies that were developed during the Reagan SDI era (1983-93).

On the other hand, we had allies in congress who wanted to exploit fully space based-assets and in particular to break up the above mentioned biases that were fully evident to any who wished to examine the facts, certainly by the end of the 1990s. In particular, then Senator Bob Smith (R-NH) gained sufficient political support to get appointed the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, known as the Rumsfeld Commission after its Chairman Donald Rumsfeld.

Senator Smith had been a strong supporter of SDI, particularly of our efforts to evaluate and advance the obvious potential capabilities of space-based defenses. During the Clinton administration years, he tried to no avail to save the Reagan-initiated key technologies and in his initiative to found the Rumsfeld Space Commission, Senator Smith hoped to provide a kick-start to reviving such important efforts in the anticipated George W. Bush administration.

Click here for the Federation of American Scientists webpage on the Commission’s 2001 report and here for its Executive Summary. While there were a number of useful recommendations, some of which were realized, the pathway to at least a recommended “Space Corps” within the Air Force was not realized in the subsequent era — most disappointingly — at least to me, during the George W. Bush’s administration and the Rumsfeld Pentagon.

Two important Commission points still haunting us were that: 1) We may have to wait for a “space pearl harbor” before we deal with the growing threat to our nation from space with own space defenses; and 2) Only the President can correct the government’s dysfunctional space activities. President Trump is acting on the second point with his Space Force initiative, which I hope will avoid the first Commission point.

In 2002, President Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty which had blocked development and deployment of the most cost-effective space-based BMD systems conceived during the SDI era, but his administration did not even revive the key SDI technology programs; let alone institute a program to actually build a cost-effective space-based BMD system. Hopefully, President Trump’s Space Force would reverse that failure.

And, of course, the Obama administration did nothing to revive this SDI technology … and now President Trump’s administration hopefully will actually “Go back to the Future” to exploit the concepts pioneered during the SDI era, with today’s much more advanced technology.

But hope is not a strategy. Needed is the vision of a new Hap Arnold, backed up by a fresh organizational start that exploits America’s technological advantages, while we retain them — to assure the security of the United States and our allies around the world.

Bottom Lines.

President Trump’s directive calls for an appropriate emphasis on exploiting our technological and operational capabilities in space in ways that are not inhibited by past biases, especially within the Air Force by leaders who have resisted and in some cases actively opposed developing such capabilities.

We need such an urgent national security initiative to counter Russia’s and China’s activities that currently rival if not exceed our own capabilities to exploit space-based military operations.

President Trump specifically directed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, USMC General Joe Dunford, to make it happen!

So indeed, may the Force be with us!

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage www.highfrontier.org, for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

Encourage them to review our past email messages, posted on www.highfrontier.org, to learn about many details related to the existential manmade and natural EMP threats and how we can protect America against them. I hope you will help us with our urgently needed efforts, which I will be discussing in future messages.

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