China Testing New Space Weapons

By Bill Gertz

China conducted a test of a maneuvering satellite that captured another satellite in space during what Pentagon officials say was a significant step forward for Beijing’s space warfare program.

The satellite capture involved one of three small satellites fitted with a mechanical arm that were launched July 20 as part of a covert anti-satellite weapons development program.

One official described the satellite-grabbing spacecraft as a “mobile satellite launch vehicle.”

“The United States Strategic Command’s Joint Functional Combatant Command for Space (JFCC-Space), consistent with its routine operations to maintain track of objects in space, has monitored these satellites since their launch and has noticed the relative motions of these satellites amongst each other and with respect to other space objects.” 

The Pentagon’s website Space-Track.org does not report on missions or functions of the hundreds of space objects it tracks, and Smith referred further questions to the Chinese government.

A Chinese Embassy spokesman did not return emails seeking comment on the ASAT test.

The satellites involved in the space warfare development program were identified by the Chinese as “scientific experimentation satellites,” according to a notice published July 24 in the online journal Space News.

They were identified as Chuangxin-3 (Innovation-3), Shiyan-7 (Experiment-7), and Shijian-15 (Practice-15). The spacecraft with the robotic mechanical arm that conducted the satellite capture experiment has not been authoritatively identified from among the three orbiters. However, space analysts suspect it is Shiyan-7.

Space News is published by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), which builds strategic missiles and space launchers, and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), China’s largest missile manufacturer.

The notice stated that the three satellites were launched atop a Long March-4C rocket on July 20 from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north central China.

“These three satellites are to be used for the observation of space debris and conducting scientific experiments in space maintenance techniques like space arm operations,” the statement said.

Space Track continues to identify the satellites as by their payload designations, rather than using the Chinese names.

Since no other satellites are in the same orbit as the three satellites and another satellite known as Shijian-7, “if the capture was last week, it didn’t involve any of these working together.” 

... that leaves the possibility that Payload B was captured by Payload C during a close flyby around Aug. 17.

“My actual calculations showed them getting closer than 500 meters but given the inherent error margins of the Space Track data, I stuck with a few hundred meters.”

Another possibility is that the test involved a detachable part of one satellite and its release into a separate orbit, and the subsequent recapturing of the component using the extension arm, Christy said.

“If the separation distance was small and the period of separated flight was short, then U.S. sensors are unlikely to have detected an extra object in orbit,” he said.

A third possibility is that the test involved completely different satellites that were not observed by non-government space trackers.

Christy’s analysis of the August activities revealed that the satellites conducted several experiments.

Since August, Payload C and Shijian-7 showed slight variations in orbit that are likely the result of thruster operation for position control, Christy stated in a recent blog post.

In August, Payload B, a non-maneuvering satellite, was positioned about 620 miles behind Payload C, a spacecraft that specialists say could be the craft with the manipulator arm, and Payload C gradually slowed to until is passed very close to the other satellite.

The robotic satellite may be part of efforts to develop China’s large space station set to be deployed around 2020.

However, Pentagon officials believe the small satellite activity is more closely associated with China’s secret ASAT program.

Little is known about the Chinese space warfare program, which is among the Chinese military’s most closely guarded secrets.

China conducted a direct ascent ASAT missile test in January 2007 that destroyed a Chinese weather satellite and created tens of thousands orbiting debris pieces that threaten both manned and unmanned spacecraft.

Chinese officials have told U.S. counterparts that the 2007 test was a one-time event and so far have not conducted further debris-causing satellite attack tests.

A U.S. official told the Free Beacon in August that the launch of the three satellites was part of Beijing’s covert anti-satellite warfare program.

The official said the craft with the robotic arm was viewed as the most threatening because U.S. satellites, vital strategic assets used by both the American military and civilian infrastructure, are vulnerable to kinetic or electronic disruption in space.

The official said the satellites are part of China’s “Star Wars” space weapon program that has been largely ignored by the Obama administration over concerns that pressing China to explain its space weapons would upset U.S.-China relations.

The ASAT program is a “real concern for U.S. national defense,” the official said.

Until the satellite capture, the mission of the spacecraft with the mechanical arm was unknown. It was thought that it could used to grab, gouge, or alter the orbits of other satellites.

The craft also could be used for maintenance and repair.

Rick Fisher, a Chinese military affairs specialist, said the robot-arm satellite that he believes is the Shiyan-7 is part of China’s dual-use space program that includes satellites for military close-surveillance and attack missions. Civilian applications include development of space manipulator arm technology.

“As an ASAT, a future version of the SY-7 could be used to take close-up images of U.S. satellites, to remove systems from those satellites and return them to China, to directly damage U.S. satellites or to plant ‘mines’ on those satellites or close nearby,” said Fisher, with the International Assessment and Strategy Center.

“An SY-7-like ASAT gives China the option to attack enemy satellites without creating a large cloud of debris that may also damage other Chinese satellites.”

Fisher said China recently hosted a major space conference and is seeking to position itself as a space “superpower” as a means to increase cooperation and technology acquisition from other countries.

At the conference, “Chinese officials made a deliberate appeal to Canada, which developed and built the manipulator arm used on the International Space Station and U.S. Space Shuttles,” Fisher said.

However, Fisher said China made every effort to conceal the People’s Liberation Army’s role in the space program and would probably deny any military role in the developing mechanical arm technology for offensive space operations.

“The ‘Canadarm’ [manipulator arm] was developed in Canada with Canadian funding and four were purchased by NASA for the U.S. Space Shuttle program,” he said.

China conducted a test launch of a new high-Earth orbit anti-satellite missile called the DN-2 in March, according to U.S. officials.

The International Quantum Teleportation Space Race

By Adam Mann,

There is an international quantum teleportation space race heating up. Around the world, countries are investing time and millions of dollars into the technology, which uses satellites to beam bits of quantum information down from the sky and and could profoundly change worldwide communication.

This is not a maybe-sort-of-one-day quantum technology. Quantum teleportation has been proven experimentally many times over and researchers are now eyeing the heavens as their next big leap forward. Most of what remains are the nuts and bolts engineering challenges (and some more money) before it becomes a thing of the present.

Though it may be disappointing to hear, quantum teleportation is not about instantly sending a person or object between two places – this is no “Beam me up, Scotty,” or “Bampf!” Instead, the technique involves the perhaps even freakier task of separating a subatomic particle from its quantum state.

“Once you disembody the state of one of particle, you can then recreate the particle in remote copy,” said physicist and computer scientist Charles Bennett of IBM, who co-authored the first paper on quantum teleportation in 1993.

Though the team’s paper was purely theoretical at the time, scientists since then have done many experiments teleporting particles over longer and longer distances. In the past year, a team from Chinaand another in Austria set new records for quantum teleportation, using a laser to beam photons through the open air over 60 and 89 miles, respectively. This is many times farther than the previous record of 10 miles, set in 2010 by the same Chinese team. With scientists extending quantum teleportation to such distances, many are already considering the next step: zapping particles and information from an orbiting satellite to a relay station on Earth.

If developed, quantum teleportation satellites could allow spies to pass large amounts of information back and forth or create unhackable codes. Should we ever build quantum computers – which would be smaller and exponentially more powerful than modern computers, able to model complex phenomenon, rapidly crunch numbers, and render modern encryption keys useless – they would need quantum teleporters in order to be networked together in a quantum version of the internet.

China plans to launch a satellite with a quantum teleportation experiment payload in 2016 and the European, Japanese, and Canadian space agencies are hoping to fund their own quantum teleportation satellite projects in the coming years. Conspicuously, the U.S. is far behind the pack because of a bureaucratic reshuffling that left quantum communication research experiments without government support in 2008. Whoever loses this new competition could fail to capitalize on the promise of quantum communication altogether.

How It works

The trick to teleportation comes from a quirk of quantum mechanics that allows you to create two particles that are completely in tune with one another, which are known as an entangled pair.

Let’s say you have two entangled photons and you are measuring their polarization, or the direction in which they are oscillating. If one photon has a vertical polarization, you know the other one is going to be exactly the same. The trouble is that quantum mechanics works on probability – before you measure a particle’s polarization it is equally likely to be horizontal or vertical. According to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, particles exist in some strange simultaneous vertical/horizontal state until you make a measurement. With an entangled pair, you can just measure one particle, and no matter how far away the other one is from the first, it will instantly gain whatever property you measured.

“It’s like two people play dice and they always get the same result; it’s always random but they always get the same result,” said physicist Rupert Ursin of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, who works with one team that set the recent distance record.

Of course, even with such dice, there’s no way to compose a signal or transfer information. You could give your friend one die and tell him to stand in another room, agreeing beforehand on a binary system where rolling an even number means 0 and an odd number means 1. But because the outcome of each roll is random, all your friend would end up doing is sending you a haphazard string of zeroes and ones.

To send a controllable signal, you need quantum teleportation. This requires three subatomic particles, say photons. Two of the photons are entangled with one another, and the third contains the bit of information you want to send. For a simple example of how this works, let’s say you place one photon from the entangled pair in L.A. and the other in New York.

In L.A., a scientist measures one of the entangled photons and the third particle at the same time. She doesn’t find out their exact properties but just their relative ones – if they are the same or opposite one another – and the particles get destroyed during this measurement. Let’s say she discovers that the particles are opposites and relays this information to her New York colleague. He then measures his entangled photon and knows that the opposite of that measurement is the bit of information he was meant to receive.

Another way to explain it involves a CIA-interrogation analogy that Charles Bennett, co-author of the first quantum teleportation study, likes to use. Imagine that a woman named Alice who lives in Seattle has uncovered information that the CIA desperately needs to thwart an attack. The CIA wants to interrogate her and they need to be able to do it at their headquarters in Washington D.C. Trouble is, Alice doesn’t want to come to D.C. and nothing will persuade her to do so. But the CIA happens to have a pair of magical twin agents named Romulus and Remus who always answer yes or no questions exactly the same way.

So the CIA sends agent Remus to Seattle, not to interrogate Alice, but just to learn if she gets along with Remus. The two meet and get to know each other. Alice discovers that she hates Remus. Every question that she would have answered yes to in life, he answers no. So now all Remus has to do is tell his boss back at headquarters that his and Alice’s answers are opposite. Now the CIA can simply question Romulus to get the information they need.

But just as Romulus and Remus started out together in D.C., quantum teleportation scientists usually don’t have entangled particle pairs just sitting around in two different locations. During an experiment, researchers will often generate an entangled pair in one place. They measure the state of one of the entangled particles and compare that to a third particle containing the bit of data to be sent. They then use a laser beam to send the information about the particles’ relative states, along with the second entangled particle, to another location.

Because subatomic particles are sensitive and small, they’re liable to get lost, meaning that experimenters have to be careful about their protocols. The first quantum teleportation experiments involved sending particles across small spaces, on the order of inches. Eventually, researchers figured out how to shoot a particle several feet, and then hundreds of feet.

“Now we want to show that this kind of communication might be useful on a global scale,” said physicistAnton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna, who led the Austrian quantum-distance team. “The method of choice is to use quantum communication via satellite,” he added, since photons can’t travel very far in glass fiber without getting absorbed.

The Race To Space

Being able to do this quantum satellite teleportation would provide many new advantages, in particular the ability to create cryptographic keys for sensitive information that would be stored in subatomic particles. If anyone were to measure the particle, they would change its properties so spy agencies would always know if they’ve been hacked. Someday in the future, James Bond and MI6 could be passing secret codes back and forth on a teleported light beam through space.

With this in mind, “there are now a couple of research groups considering how to build a quantum payload suitable for a satellite,” said physicist Thomas Jennewein of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. “There’s basically a race going on to get into space first with a quantum satellite.”

Though Japanese researchers are planning a small quantum experiment on a laser-communication satellite named Socrates that will launch in 2014, the only group with a scheduled satellite devoted to quantum communication is from China.

The Chinese satellite would show the feasibility of several technologies, including quantum key distribution, entanglement distribution, and quantum teleportation, said physicist Yu-Ao Chen of the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, who worked with the Chinese team led by Jian-Wei Pan that set the recent distance record. The main obstacle is how to shrink down the large equipment used in their previous record-breaking teleportation experiment, he said.

The Chinese space agency has put $554 million toward funding five scientific satellites over the coming years, one of which will be used for quantum communication. This is a new direction for China, which has in the past launched more than 100 satellites, but until now only one for dedicated scientific experiments. While the exact figure for the quantum communication project is unknown, it could be on the order of $50 to 100 million, estimated Zeilinger. This stands in contrast to Europe and Canada, which have invested an order of magnitude less for their projects.

This has put China in an enviable position. Other teams are lining up for the chance to collaborate and use their satellite for quantum teleportation experiments. “We already have a deal with Austria to use it when it passes over Vienna,” said Chen. “Germany, Canada, Italy, and many other groups also want to be involved in this project.”

Absent from this tussle is the U.S., whose quantum communication programs have floundered in recent years. Much of this can be traced back to a programmatic reorganization that occurred when the newly created Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – aka DARPA for spies – took over quantum computing research funding from the National Security Agency and National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2008. IARPA said that it would no longer be providing money to the various quantum communications projects because it didn’t want to fund other agencies’ research.

“One of the first things that happened was the quantum communication research program was put into a good deal of chaos, and largely ended,” said physicist Richard Hughes of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Many quantum communication researchers were upset, prompting them towrite an open letter to John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology policy.

While in 2012 U.S. government agencies have shown renewed interest in such research, “there’s been a four-year gap and the world doesn’t stand still,” said Hughes. “It’s interesting how strong China has become in the last four or five years in the international science scene — they’ve really come along fast.”

In order to gain the high ground, all interested countries are racing forward with their technology development. In addition to shrinking the machines used for quantum teleportation to get them aboard satellites, engineers will have to make them usable during all hours. Currently, quantum teleportation experiments only happen at night, because during the day the sun’s light washes out whatever signal researchers are trying to send.

“The greatest challenge in making long-range quantum communication and quantum computing is getting good storage of quantum information,” said Bennett. Since photons are readily absorbed in most materials, it’s difficult to keep them around for much longer than a fraction of a second.

In the meantime, everyone is making sure they stay abreast of the latest developments going on around the world.

“We’re not anxious but definitely keeping our eyes open and talking to the various groups,” said Jennewein. “We have the sense that we have to keep moving if we want to be part of the early game.”

Ursin said that if his Austrian team had the funding, they could develop new experiments in about four or five years. Still, there is a ways to go before people are using quantum teleportation and communication routinely, said Hughes. The technology may feasibly be ready in as little as a decade, but not all new developments are immediately adopted. Cellphones were technically available 40 years ago, but only as unwieldy and relatively powerless devices – it was only in recent times that they became ubiquitous. But others in the field are ready for the next breakthrough.

“For us it’s not a question if these technologies will be used, it’s a matter of when, how, and where will we really use them in everyday life,” said Jennewien.

Images: 1) Schematic of quantum teleportation beaming particles from a satellite to two ground stations. 2) and 3) The Austrian team’s laser beam teleports photons between the Canary Islands of Tenerife and La Palma. IQOQI Wien

Via: "Wired Science"

Ascent - Commemorating The Space Shuttle

Posted By "CavalierZee"



This is absolutely sensational

Photographic documentation of a Space Shuttle launch plays a critical role in the engineering analysis and evaluation process that takes place during each and every mission. Motion and Still images enable Shuttle engineers to visually identify off-nominal events and conditions requiring corrective action to ensure mission safety and success. This imagery also provides highly inspirational and educational insight to those outside the NASA family.

This compilation of film and video presents the best of the best ground-based Shuttle motion imagery from STS-114, STS-117, and STS-124 missions. Rendered in the highest definition possible, this production is a tribute to the dozens of men and women of the Shuttle imaging team and the 30yrs of achievement of the Space Shuttle Program.

The video was produced by Matt Melis at the Glenn Research Center.
Finally PAO uploaded a 720p version, not sure if we will get 1080p like you wanted, but at least we are making progress.

"Best of the Best" Provides New Views, Commentary of Shuttle Launches

The Pentagons Secret Space Plane

By Noah Shachtman
March 30, 2011 | 4:06 pm
Courtesy Of "The Danger Room"


The U.S. military likes to be a little sneaky with its robotic space planes. Unlike typical spacecraft, these vehicles can shift their orbits, frustrating the global network of skywatchers who keep track of just about every man-made object rotating the planet.

But the sleuths have their tricks, too. They’ve tracked down the X-37B on its second secret mission. And the information the skywatchers are finding says quite a bit about the classified operations of this mysterious spacecraft.

It took the amateur sleuths nearly a month to hunt down the first X-37B after it launched on its inaugural mission. That’s an eternity in sky-spotting time.

The second time around was easier. The U.S. space plane was discovered just four days after it blasted into orbit, earlier this month. Cape Town, South Africa’s Greg Roberts — “a pioneer in using telescopic video cameras to track spacecraft, chalking up exceptional results over the years,” according to Space.com — spotted this second secret spacecraft, just like he found the first.

The X-37B has generated intense interest, long before it ever left the ground. Boeing originally developed the 29-foot unmanned craft — a kind of miniature Space Shuttle — for NASA. Then, the military took over in 2004, and the space plane went black. Its payloads were classified, its missions hush-hush.

Depending on who you talk to, the space plane could be a prototype commando transport, an orbiting bomber or (most likely) a spy-above-the-skies. It could launch, repair or reposition U.S. satellites in low orbit. It could sneak up and disable or steal enemy satellites. Its pickup-bed-sized payload bay is particularly enticing to observers.

And now, there are observers — plural. Ontario’s Kevin Fetterof filmed the X-37B “gliding past the binary star Eta Serpentis,” according to Space.com, which has video of the flyby. Skywatchers Brad Young, Bill Young, and Alberto Rango have all reported sightings, as well.

You can even see the space plane for yourself: The X-37B is traveling in a slightly elliptical orbit more than 200 miles up, swooping from 43 degrees north latitude to 43 degrees south. (Check the real-time map at n2yo.com.)

That orbit gives some indications about what the space plane is actually doing up there. The typical spy satellite has a polar orbit, which means “it can cover the whole earth, and it can fly over the same spot at the same sun angle each time it comes overhead,” explains Brian Weeden, a former Air Force Space Command officer, now with the Secure World Foundation.

The X-37B, on the other hand, is orbiting around the fat middle of the planet, traveling over the Middle East, Africa, and fair chunk of China. “It means they are giving up global coverage and predictable shadow lengths, but getting more frequent passes,” Weeden says. The orbit lends credence to the idea that the space plane is an orbiting spy.

So does the X-37B’s altitude. It’s flying pretty low — one of the rare orbiters traveling beneath the International Space Station. “The lower you are,” Weeden notes, “the higher resolution you can get in any imagery.”

And the easier you are to spot from the ground.

Photo: U.S. Air Force. Illustration: Scott Madry/International Space University

• Secret U.S. Space Plane May Be Too Mysterious
• Air Force Launches Secretive Space Plane; ‘We Don’t Know When It’s Coming Back’
• Secret Space Plane Heading Back Into Orbit
• Air Force on Secret Space Plane: Nothing to See Here, Move Along
• Russia Working on Mysterious Space Plane of Its Own

Get Ready For Sea, Air, Space Showdowns

By David Axe
February 28, 2011 | 3:12 pm |
Courtesy Of "The Danger Room"


The era of big land wars is ending. Any senior official recommending a large-scale deployment of U.S. ground troops to Asia, the Middle East or Africa “should have his head examined,” to quote Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Instead, get ready for a new epoch of air and sea wars. Those were the surprising remarks Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered to an audience of U.S. Army cadets at West Point, New York, on Friday.

Surprising, because it was Gates himself who fought to expand the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in recent years, and who argued forcefully for greater focus on our current, large-scale, Asian land wars — even when that meant cutting some of the Air Force’s and Navy’s priciest big-war weapons in favor of new gear to support the Army.

But Gates also spent years quietly prepping the Navy and Air Force to step up, once today’s land wars wound down. In telling the Army that it’s time on point has passed, Gates is simply making public a contingency he had long prepared for. But that’s not to say the secretary is beyond criticism, or the Army immune to risk.

Speaking at a cold and snowy West Point campus, Gates delivered the good news first. “The need for heavy armor and firepower to survive, close with, and destroy the enemy will always be there, as veterans of Sadr City and Fallujah can no doubt attest,” the white-haired 67-year-old crowed.

Then, the bad news. “Looking ahead, though, in the competition for tight defense dollars within and between the services, the Army also must confront the reality that the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements – whether in Asia, the Persian Gulf or elsewhere.”

“As the prospects for another head-on clash of large mechanized land armies seem less likely,” Gates added, “the Army will be increasingly challenged to justify the number, size and cost of its heavy formations.”

In my experience, Army cadets are some of the most respectful people on the planet. Even so, one can imagine a lot of nervous throat-clearing as the secretary’s Kansas twang echoed in the chamber. After a decade during which the Army has borne the brunt of the fighting in two wars, losing around 4,000 soldiers in the process, Gates was telling the ground-combat branch that its most sophisticated capabilities are no longer needed — at least, not in large quantities.

Instead, the Army must be lighter, faster and more flexible. “The strategic rationale for swift-moving expeditionary forces, be they Army or Marines, airborne infantry or special operations, is self-evident given the likelihood of counter-terrorism, rapid reaction, disaster response or stability or security-force assistance missions,” Gates said.

But tanks, artillery and armored fighting vehicles? Not so much.

Gates’ argument is that America’s strategic goalposts have moved past today’s large-scale land wars. This is not an unreasonable position to hold. The most likely near-term security challenges cannot be addressed using armored divisions.

China and Russia, for example, are re-arming with new ships, subs and stealth fighters and exerting greater influence on their neighbors, mostly without mobilizing tank armies. Nuke-seeking upstarts such as Iran and North Korea have deployed ships, submarines, coastal artillery and even hovercraft in bold defiance of world concern. The Middle East and Africa are in the midst of profound changes that could shatter existing relationships with Washington and render large ground deployments untenable.

Gates has always advocated for an atmosphere of cool-headed realism in the headquarters of the world’s most powerful military. That means fighting the war at hand, whatever that war might be. “This is a department that principally plans for war,” he told our own Noah Shachtman two years ago. “It’s not organized to wage war. And that’s what I’m trying to fix.”

With the U.S. involvement in Iraq all but ended, and a staged withdrawal from Afghanistan possible in thenext few years, perhaps Gates is simply turning his attention to the next most-immediate conflicts. And those happen to be Cold War-style showdowns at sea and in the air (and in space). He even implied this might happen in a speech last year. “The weight of America’s deterrent and strategic military strength has shifted to our air and naval forces,” Gates said.

To that end, some observers believe the secretary is preparing the ground for a big reduction in the Army’s thousands-strong tank force.

This should not be read as a defense cut. Gates, who has described himself as an “old Cold Warrior” that “didn’t molt from a hawk into a dove” when he joined the Obama administration after two years under George W. Bush, has consistently argued against reducing the Pentagon’s overall budget, even during the darkest months of the recession. His recent “efficiencies” were really just efforts to move resources from less-urgent weapons programs to more badly-needed ones. Any money and manpower saved by eliminating tanks would probably get reinvested in the Army.

Indeed, Gates’ underlying conservatism is detectable across his policies, going back years. On more than one occasion, Gates warned against demobilizing the military after today’s land wars end. This expressed caution belies the secretary’s subtle hedging against the very emerging threats he outlined in his West Point speech. Looking back, it seems that Gates carefully avoided cutting too deeply into the Navy and Air Force, just in case America found itself facing major airborne and seaborne rivals.

Consider: while Gates curtailed the Navy’s multi-billion-dollar stealth destroyer program in 2008, he did so in favor of a larger fleet of the arguably more effective Burke-class destroyer. Moreover, this year the secretary actually increased the Navy’s overall annual shipbuilding slate to more than 10 ships — something that hadn’t happened in 15 years. He also shepherded a long-planned doubling of attack-submarine production starting in 2012.

Gates performed a similar trick with the Air Force. True, in 2009 he ended production of the $300-million-per-copy F-22 Raptor stealth fighter at just 187 copies, but only because he was committed to maintaining an Air Force fighter fleet that’s stealthy and numerous — and that meant funneling all resources into the potentially much-cheaper F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Despite serious technical challenges, Gates has never wavered from his plan to build more than 1,700 F-35s for the Air Force. And just a few weeks ago he launched development of a new stealth bomber for the flying branch.

These are not the doings of a SecDef who was ever interested in shortchanging the Navy and Air Force. This, too, is a point Gates made years ago, as he defended his decision to truncate the F-22 program. “Contrary to what some have alleged, the purpose was not to reorganize and rearm the entire U.S. military to hunt insurgents and do nation-building or to fight wars just like Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.

With his West Point speech, Gates might have been making his recent shift toward air and sea power more public, but it was a contingency he had long prepared for — and now believes is necessary. All the same, the secretary’s assessment of the Army’s usefulness might seem unfair to some. For others, it might even invoke the chilling specter of Gates’ “Transformation”-obsessed predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld.

Readers might be forgiven for hearing echoes of Rumsfeld’s doomed “net-centric” Army in Gates’ comments. There was a good reason Rumsfeld’s Army reforms stalled: traditional, big war ground forces are still really useful — even for so-called “low-intensity” operations, like counterinsurgencies. As both Iraq and Afghanistan proved, it’s the heavy weaponry that opens up a country for the lighter forces to chase guerrillas or rebuild shattered states. It’s the heavy weaponry that often protects those light forces. Your infantry may not survive without plenty of armor, in other words.

Inside sources tell Danger Room that the most likely outcome of Gates’ current thinking is a tweaks to the mix and balance of the Army’s heavy and light forces. Carefully executed, these changes could preserve the Army’s ability to fight future wars of all sorts, while still allowing the Air Force and Navy to take the lead in America’s overall defense posture.

But get the balance wrong, and the future Army could find itself ineffective and vulnerable — the very deficiencies Gates fought so hard to correct.

See Also:

• Inside Bob Gates' Overhaul of the Pentagon
• Pentagon Chief Rips Heart Out of Army's 'Future'
• Gates: Time for the Pentagon to Actually Wage War
• Moseley: Gates was Right; 'Zero Chance' of War with China or Russia
• Gates: F-22 Has No Role in War on Terror

The Globalization Of Militarism

The Biggest Parasite

By ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH
Weekend Edition
December 17 - 19, 2010
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. James Madison

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Many Americans still believe that US foreign policies are designed to maintain peace, to safeguard human rights and to spread democracy around the world. Regardless of their officially stated objectives, however, those policies often lead to opposite outcomes: war, militarism and dictatorship. Evidence of the fact that US policy makers no longer uphold the ideals they state publicly is overwhelming.

Those who continue to harbor illusions about the thrust of US policies around the world must be oblivious to the fact that the United States has been overtaken by a military-industrial-security-financial cabal whose representatives are firmly ensconced in both the White House and the US Congress. The ultimate goal of the cabal, according to their own military guidelines, is “full spectrum dominance” of the world; and they are willing to wage as many wars, to destroy as many countries and to kill as many people as necessary to achieve that goal.

The liberal hawks and petty intellectual pundits who tend to defend US foreign policies on the grounds of “human rights” or “moral obligations” are well served to pay attention (among other evidence) to the US foreign policy documents that are currently being disclosed by the Wikileaks. 

The documents “show all too clearly that,” as Paul Craig Roberts puts it, “the US government is a duplicitous entity whose raison d’etre is to control every other country.” In essence, the documents show that while the US  government, like a global mafia godfather, rewards the pliant ruling elites of the client states with arms, financial aid and military protections, it punishes the nations whose leaders refuse to surrender to the wishes of the bully and relinquish their national sovereignty. US foreign policies, like its domestic policies, are revealed as catering not to the broader public or national interests of the people but to the powerful special interests that are vested primarily in the military capital and the finance capital.

US foreign policy architects are clearly incapable of recognizing or acknowledging the fact that different peoples and nations may have different needs and interests. Nor are they capable of respecting other peoples’ aspirations to national sovereignty. Instead, they tend to view other peoples, just as they do the American people, through the narrow prism of their own nefarious interests. By selfishly dividing the world into “friends” and “foe,” or “vassal states,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, powerful beneficiaries of war and militarism compel both groups to embark on a path of militarization, which leads inevitably to militarism and authoritarian rule.

Although militarism grows out of the military, the two are different in character. While the military is a means to meet certain ends such as maintaining national security, militarism represents a bureaucratized permanent military establishment as an end in itself. It is “a phenomenon,” as the late Chalmers Johnson put it, “by which a nation’s armed services come to put their institutional preservation ahead of achieving national security or even a commitment to the integrity of the governmental structure of which they are a part” (The Sorrows of Empire, Metropolitan Books, 2004, pp. 423-24).

This explains the cancerous growth and parasitic nature of US militarism—cancerous because it is steadily expanding throughout many parts of the world, and parasitic because not only does it drain other nations resources, it also sucks US national resources out of the public purse into the coffers of the wicked interests that are vested in the military-industrial-security complex.

By creating fear and instability and embarking on unilateral military adventures, corporate militarism of the United States also fosters militarism elsewhere. A major US strategy of expanding its imperial influence and promoting militarism around the globe has been the formation of international military alliances in various parts of the world. These include not only the notorious North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which is essentially an integral part of the Pentagon’s world command structure, and which was recently expanded to police the world, but also 10 other joint military commands called Unified Combatant Commands. They include Africa Command (AFRICOM), Central Command (CENTCOM), European Command (EUCOM), Northern Command (NORTHCOM), Pacific Command (PACOM), and Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).

The geographic area under the “protection” of each of these Unified Combatant Commands is called Area of Responsibility (AOR). AFRICOM’sarea of responsibility includes US “military operations and military relations with 53 African nations - an area of responsibility covering all of Africa except Egypt.” CENTCOM’s area of responsibility spans many countries in the Middle East/Near East/Persian Gulf and Central Asia. It includes Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

EUCOM’s area of responsibility “covers 51 countries and territories, including Europe, Iceland, Greenland, and Israel.” NORTHCOM’s area of responsibility “includes air, land and sea approaches and encompasses the contiguous United States, Alaska, Canada, Mexico and the surrounding water out to approximately 500 nautical miles (930 km). It also includes the Gulf of Mexico, the Straits of Florida, portions of the Caribbean region to include The Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.”

PACOM’s area of responsibility “covers over fifty percent of the world's surface area — approximately 105 million square miles (nearly 272 million square kilometers) — nearly sixty percent of the world's population, thirty-six countries, twenty territories, and ten territories and possessions of the United States.” SOUTHCOM’s area of responsibility “encompasses 32 nations (19 in Central and South America and 13 in the Caribbean)…and 14 US and European territories. . . . It is responsible for providing contingency planning and operations in Central and South America, the Caribbean (except US commonwealths, territories, and possessions), Cuba, their territorial waters.”

Together with over 800 military bases scattered over many parts of the world, this military colossus represents an ominous presence of the US armed forces all across our planet.

Instead of dismantling NATO as redundant in the post-Cold War era, it has been expanded (as a proxy for the US military juggernaut) to include many new countries in Eastern Europe all the way to the borders of Russia. Not only has it inserted itself into a number of new international relations and recruited many new members and partners, it has also arrogated to itself many new tasks and responsibilities in social, political, economic, environmental, transportation and communications arenas of the world.

NATO’s new areas of “responsibility,” as reflected in its latest Strategic Concept, include “human rights”; “key environmental and resource constraints, including health risks, climate change, water scarcity and increasing energy needs. . .”; “important means of communication, such as the internet, and scientific and technological research. . .”; “proliferation of ballistic missiles, of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction”; “threat of extremism, terrorism and trans-national illegal activities such as trafficking in arms, narcotics and people”; “vital communication, transport and transit routes on which international trade, energy security and prosperity depend”; the “ability to prevent, detect, defend against and recover from cyber-attacks”; and the need to “ensure that the Alliance is at the front edge in assessing the security impact of emerging technologies.”

Significant global issues thus claimed to be part of NATO’s expanded mission fall logically within the purview of civilian international institutions such as the United Nations. So why is the US ruling plutocracy, using NATO, now trying to supplant the United Nations and other international agencies? The reason is that due to the rise of the influence of a number of new international players such as Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Iran, and Venezuela the UN is no longer as subservient to the global ambitions of the United States as it once was. Planning to employ the imperial military machine of NATO instead of the civilian multilateral institutions such as the UN clearly belies, once again, the self-righteous US claims of trying to spread democracy worldwide.

Furthermore, NATO’s expanded “global responsibilities” would easily provide the imperial US military machine new excuses for unilateral military interventions. By the same token, such military adventures would also provide the US military-industrial-security complex additional rationale for continued escalation of the Pentagon budget.

The expansion of NATO to include most of the Eastern Europe has led Russia, which had curtailed its military spending during the 1990s in the hope that, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the US would also do the same, to once again increase its military spending. In response to the escalation of US military spending, which has nearly tripled during the last 10 years (from $295 billion when George W. Bush went to the White House in January 2001 to the current figure of nearly one trillion dollars), Russia too has drastically increased its military spending during the same time period (from about $22 billion in 2000 to $61 billion today).

In a similar fashion, US military encirclement of China (through a number of military alliances and partnerships that range from Pakistan, Afghanistan and India to South China Sea/Southeast Asia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia, New Zealand and most recently Vietnam) has led that country to also further strengthen its military capabilities.

Just as the US military and geopolitical ambitions have led Russia and China to reinforce their military capabilities, so have they compelled other countries such as Iran, Venezuela and North Korea to likewise strengthen their armed forces and buttress their military preparedness.

Not only does aggressive US militarism compel its “adversaries” to allocate a disproportionately large share of their precious resources to military spending, but it also coerces its “allies” to likewise embark on a path of militarization. Thus, countries like Japan and Germany, whose military capabilities were reduced to purely defensive postures following the atrocities of World War II, have once again been re-militarizing in recent years under the impetus of what US military strategists call “the need to share the burden of global security.” Thus, while Germany and Japan still operate under a “peace constitution,” their military expenditures on a global scale now rank sixth and seventh, respectively (behind the US, China, France, UK and Russia).

US militarization of the world (both directly through the spread of its own military apparatus across the globe and indirectly by compelling both “friends” and “foe” to militarize) has a number of ominous consequences for the overwhelming majority or the population the world.

For one thing, it is the source of a largely redundant and disproportionately large allocation of the world’s precious resources to war, militarism and wasteful production of the means of death and destruction. Obviously, as this inefficient, class-biased disbursement of resources drains public finance and accumulates national debt, it also brings tremendous riches and treasures to war profiteers, that is, the beneficiaries of the military capital and the finance capital.

Secondly, to justify this lopsided allocation of the lion’s share of national resources to military spending, beneficiaries of war dividends tend to create fear, suspicion and hostility among peoples and nations of the world, thereby sowing the seeds of war, international conflicts and global instability.

Thirdly, by the same token that powerful beneficiaries of war and military-security capital tend to promote suspicion, to create fear and invent enemies, both at home and abroad, they also undermine democratic values and nurture authoritarian rule. As the predatory military-industrial-security-financial interests find democratic norms of openness and transparency detrimental to their nefarious objectives of limitless self-enrichment, they cleverly create pretexts for secrecy, “security,” military rule and police state. Concealment of the robbery of public treasury in the name of national security requires restriction of information, obstruction of transparency, and curtailment of democracy.

It follows that under the kleptocratic influence of the powerful interests that are vested in the military-security-financial industries the US government has turned into an ominous global force of destabilization, obstruction, retrogression and authoritarianism.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism(Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.