Stardate 20030524.1739

(On Screen): John writes:

I enjoyed your post on the vulnerabilities of digital communications, and thought you might find this article tangentially relevant.

The article to which he links, from EE Times, talks about a couple of upcoming programs where the US military will investigate ways of denying other nations the ability to benefit militarily from the use of various kinds of satellites in space.

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."

Not entirely. There's a difference between capabilities and intentions, and the fact that we may develop the ability to do these things doesn't mean we'd actually use that ability.

Lawson's characterization of this as "treating allies poorly" ignores the more important case: dealing with "allies" who are actively aiding our enemies. Taking a random example pulled out of a hat, oh, say, France – it's not at all inconceivable that in a future war such a nation might pretend to be an ally, but might actually be doing everything it can to assist our enemies and to lead to our defeat, while denying it all in public amidst protestations of loyalty and claims of hurt feelings that we would ever doubt them.

We've had a credible ASAT capability against LEO satellites since the 1980's, though I don't know for sure if they maintained it. The system which was developed was a missile which was fired from beneath a jet flying at very high altitude; the missile didn't attain orbital velocity but was able to follow a ballistic trajectory which would get it near enough to a LEO satellite to kill it. In that case I think it just threw shrapnel at the satellite and tried to kill it by impact; a modern system would probably use an HPM burst to knock out the electronics.

During operations in Afghanistan in 2001, there was an independent commercial agency which owned a satellite capable of taking pictures of the ground, and the US ended up signing a contract with them to purchase exclusive rights to all observations of the Afghanistan area. It's not very likely that these satellite photographs were able to give our intelligence people much they could not get with their own birds; the primary point of it was to deny access to those pictures to anyone else.

What they're talking about here is gaining a capability. That doesn't mean they would invariably actually use those abilities, but it means they could do so if it were judged to be operationally important.

Take, for instance, the recent war in Iraq. We had a couple of large forces which quite publicly and noisily moved from Kuwait to Baghdad, but there were also a lot of other forces out in Iraq doing a lot of critical stuff that relied on secrecy.

Suppose that an "ally", such as our randomly-chosen example France, had a reasonable ability to take militarily-significant photos from space. We already know that the French had been routing intelligence information to Baghdad (based on papers discovered after the war by a reporter for The London Sunday Times). France may be an ally on paper since we both participate in NATO, but there's every reason to believe that they were actively working to help defeat us in Iraq. A lot of what we did was only possible because it remained secret, and if an "ally" like France had the ability to learn about it through independent technical means, and could funnel that info to enemies of ours, it could lead to catastrophe for us.

And in such a case, it's not easy to see what we could do about it except to massively escalate the situation. If that information is truly critical, you might end up with something like this:

"We know you are sending critical intelligence about us to our enemy. Stop immediately."

"Non! We would never do anything like that!"

"You're a bunch of liars, and we know you're doing it, and if you don't stop the Marines will hit your beaches a week from Tuesday."

That's a pretty drastic response, especially if they've got nuclear weapons. What you'd like is a lesser way of dealing with this kind of threat, by directly eliminating the means by which such information was being gathered, just in case. Were our "allies" all actually reliable and trustworthy, we wouldn't need such a thing. But here on planet Earth, recent political events have clearly shown that they are not.

Of course, once you have that kind of capability, it can reduce your need for it. In a hypothetical future war where France was actively providing critical military intelligen