U.S. Lacks Roadmap For Space Security

By Jim Wolf
Thu Mar 27, 2008 5:17pm EDT
Courtesy Of: Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military and U.S. intelligence have failed to produce an overarching roadmap for spending billions of dollars on the use of space to protect national security, congressional auditors said on Thursday.

Without such an integrated guide to decision-making, the United States faces possible "gaps in some areas of space operations and redundancies in others," the Government Accountability Office said.

The Air Force, the Defense Department's lead buyer and operator of space systems, is seeking $11.9 billion for its space efforts in the coming budget year, not including classified projects, up from $11.3 billion in fiscal 2008, service officials said in February.

Total Pentagon spending on space paired with the intelligence community's may be as high as $30 billion a year, including "black," or classified programs, according to Theresa Hitchens, who heads the private Center for Defense Information in Washington and its space-security project.

She said friction over control of key space assets such as a constellation of radar satellites may help explain the lack of a top-level architecture.

The absence of a plan has taken on new importance since China used an aging satellite for target practice in January 2007 and the United States shot apart a satellite of its own last month, boosting fears that space could one day become a battleground.

An overall roadmap could entail big trade-offs for multibillion-dollar programs carried out by such companies as Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co, and Northrop Grumman Corp.

GAO, Congress's investigative arm, said the military and the intelligence community did not always see eye to eye on how to put into effect a revised national policy that governs the conduct of U.S. space activities. The so-called National Space Policy was issued by President George W. Bush in October 2006 after it went through more than 30 drafts.

Differences of opinion between the military and intelligence communities plus their "cultural differences" have delayed a joint plan, said the GAO report for the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces.

"Until a national security space strategy is issued, the defense and intelligence communities may continue to make independent decisions and use resources that are not necessarily based on national priorities," it said.

Davi D'Agostino, GAO's director of defense capabilities and management and the report's author, said the two were on "separate tracks" even though the Defense Department includes the National Reconnaissance Office, which designs, buys and operates space systems for intelligence-gathering, and three other major intelligence agencies.

"That means they may be missing opportunities for efficiencies and integrated solutions that would boost national security," she said in a telephone interview.

John Pike, a space expert at globalsecurity.org, a research group, said the absence of an overall plan was not the sole reason for schedule delays and performance shortfalls that have dogged many big-ticket U.S. efforts in space in recent years.

"The programs themselves are perfectly capable of doing that on their own," he said.

(Editing by Toni Reinhold)

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