The U.S. Must Answer the Challenge of SPACEPOWER.

• Author: SMITH, BOB

WITH ITS HARDWARE and brainpower, the U.S. has unchallenged mastery of air, sea, and land. Except for the government's failure to defend citizens from ballistic missiles--a glaring, reprehensible exception--no one can seriously threaten America.

Experts on such things say that this is a period of "strategic pause," a rare opportunity for the U.S. to catch its breath and rethink strategies and force structures. While the Cold War required Washington to follow a course of incremental advances in doctrine and procurement just to keep pace with the Kremlin, nothing of the scope and scale of that technological competition exists today. As they say at the War Colleges, the U.S. has no "peer competitor."

While I vigorously oppose those who use this circumstance to justify reckless cuts in defense spending or to rationalize their refusal to support an effective ballistic missile defense, I see an opportunity to exploit this period of unchallenged conventional superiority on Earth to shift substantial resources to space. I believe we can and must do this to buy generations of security that all the ships, tanks, and airplanes in the world will not provide. This would be a real "peace dividend"; it would actually help keep the peace.

Space offers the prospect of seeing and communicating throughout the world; of defending the U.S., its deployed forces, and its allies; and, if necessary, of inflicting violence--all with great precision, nearly instantaneously, and often less expensively. With credible offensive and defensive space control, it will be possible to deter and dissuade America's adversaries, reassure its allies, and guard the nation's growing reliance on global commerce. Without it, the U.S. will become vulnerable beyond its worst fears.

In their rhetoric, the Department of Defense and the Air Force have acknowledged the importance and promise of spacepower. In his 1998 report to Congress, Secretary of Defense William Cohen stated that "spacepower has become as important to the nation as land, sea, and air power." In 1995, the Air Force made clear in Global Engagement: A Vision for the 21st Century Air Force that "The medium of space is one which cannot be ceded to our nation's adversaries. The Air Force must plan to prevail in the use of space."

Expanding and refining the ability to gather and transmit information has been the Defense Department's principal focus in space. The Air Force's space budget is dedicated almost entirely to the maintenance and improvement of information systems, as a means of increasing the effectiveness of existing forces here on Earth. Yet, as important as early warning, intelligence, navigation, weather, and communications systems may be, today they are basically dedicated to supporting non-space forms of power projection. Even the Air Force's Space Warfare Center and Space Battle Lab are focused primarily on figuring out how to use space systems to put information into the cockpit in order to more accurately drop bombs from aircraft.

This is not space warfare. It is using space to support air warfare. It is essentially the space component of "information superiority." Given the degree of importance that Joint Vision 2010 and other recent statements of policy and doctrine assign to information superiority, it is understandable that the Air Force and the Department of Defense have tried so hard to exploit the information revolution fully. If the U.S. limits its approach to space just to information superiority, though, it will not have fully utilized spacepower.

In 1994, the Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff challenged the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board to "search the world for the most advanced aerospace ideas and project them into the future." Among the many valuable findings in the resulting New World Vistas: Air and Space Power for the 21st Century report was the conclusion: "For the U.S. to sustain its superpower status it will become necessary not only to show global awareness through space based information, but also to...