The Politics of Space Security: Strategic Restraint and the Pursuit of National Interests, Second Edition / Edition 2 available in Paperback, eBook
The Politics of Space Security: Strategic Restraint and the Pursuit of National Interests, Second Edition / Edition 2
- ISBN-10:
- 0804778582
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804778589
- Pub. Date:
- 06/29/2011
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0804778582
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804778589
- Pub. Date:
- 06/29/2011
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
The Politics of Space Security: Strategic Restraint and the Pursuit of National Interests, Second Edition / Edition 2
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Overview
His conclusion offers a unique perspective on the mutual risks militaries face in space and the need for all countries to commit to interdependent, environmentally focused space security.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804778589 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/29/2011 |
| Edition description: | Older Edition |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 948,421 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Politics of Space Security
Strategic Restraint and the Pursuit of National InterestsBy JAMES CLAY MOLTZ
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7858-9
Chapter One
The Dynamics of Space SecurityExisting Explanations
The concept of national security describes the relationship between a country's capabilities and the challenges posed by the surroundings in which it must operate. When a country is secure, it enjoys the ability to conduct its activities free from harm. Although we normally view security as reliant solely on military power, it is also influenced by a variety of other factors: alliances, economic strength, treaty memberships, political stance (such as declared neutrality), social cohesion, and even perceived moral authority.
In space, the attainment of security involves the task of overcoming both man-made and natural threats, given the extreme hostility of the space environment. Since orbital dynamics require a certain level of interaction with other actors, the behavior of all space-faring entities (states, companies, universities, private citizens, and international consortia) inevitably affects the security of others, more so than in other realms. In general, we can define "space security" as the ability to place and operate assets outside the Earth's atmosphere without external interference, damage, or destruction. By this definition, all actors have enjoyed a high level of space security for most of the space age, with very few exceptions, as will be discussed later. Unfortunately, challenges to space security are increasing today, particularly as space becomes more crowded. Arguably, at least three policy alternatives exist: (1) space actors can assume the worst and prepare for eventual warfare; (2) they can hedge their bets with weapons research and begin efforts at better coordination and conflict avoidance; or (3) they can reject military options altogether and heighten their efforts to build new cooperative mechanisms for developing space jointly.
During the Cold War, the behavior of the Soviet Union and the United States dominated space security considerations. These two sides conducted well more than 95 percent of space activities during the Cold War. Although Russian activity has declined significantly since 1991, even as late as 2005 the combined total of U.S. and Russian activities still made up 50 percent of all commercial space launches, 63 percent of civil launches, and fully 68 percent of military launches. For each of these two countries, achieving space security was for many years primarily a matter of understanding the policies of the other side and trying to reach consensus on how to manage disputes and prevent hostile acts. As discussed in this book, space security evolved during the Cold War in two primary stages: the 1957–62 period (characterized by military-led approaches) and the 1963–91 period (characterized mainly by military "hedging" and negotiated approaches). With the end of the Cold War in 1991, space became a realm led mainly by the United States. For a decade, Washington continued a policy of negotiated space security, in close cooperation with the Russian Federation (drawing on the third option listed above). After 2001, however, a new U.S. leadership, focusing on emerging foreign missile threats and eventual U.S. space vulnerabilities, shifted course back toward a military-led strategy in the belief that hostile actors would arise among new space powers and create threats requiring military solutions. In part for this reason, it withdrew from one of the main, negotiated space security arrangements of the Cold War—the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty—and also developed more space-specific military plans for defensive operations. However, the United States did not abandon the 1967 Outer Space Treaty or a number of other cooperative agreements.
Some analysts believed that the George W. Bush administration's moves had finally paved the way for an historically inevitable process of space's weaponization and the occurrence of direct military conflict, which had been delayed by political and technological factors. As Steven Lambakis of the National Institute of Public Policy in a 2001 book complained regarding the behavior of past U.S. space policies: "If freedom of space is our guidestar, what is being done to nurture and protect it? Are not U.S. policy makers setting a bad precedent by unilaterally restricting national activities in the force-application and space-control areas, limiting in effect the country's freedom to exploit space?" For others, these developments marked a sharp and negative change from wise policies by past presidents that had helped create the foundations for U.S. space preeminence. As the Center for Defense Information's Theresa Hitchens argued in 2003: "Unfortunately, this [Bush] administration has done little thinking ... about the potential for far-reaching military, political and economic ramifications of a U.S. move to break the taboo against weaponizing space." Whether this outcome and the possible U.S. movement toward the deployment of space-based defenses is somehow historically predetermined or instead related mainly to the policy preferences of specific administrations remains a subject of debate among space experts.
These developments and the prospect of space-based defenses and offensive weapons raise a series of important questions: Is the deployment of space-based weapons somehow unavoidable, or can space actors prevent it through rules of the road, treaties, or tacit avoidance? Is there such a thing as the "partial" weaponization of space? Are there definable cut-off lines among systems and could they be enforced? Or, could weapons in space be used to prevent an arms race through some form of "space hegemony"? Skeptics believe that any form of weaponization would be a slippery slope, likely to result in a multilateral arms race and a reversion by states to military-led solutions. But there is also the possibility that recent military trends are an epiphenomenon and instead that the expansion of commercial actors in space will change priorities in Washington and other capitals and lead human space developments away from conflictual, weapons-based scenarios.
In seeking guidance on these questions, we might first observe that space is but one of many new frontiers visited by states over the past several centuries; to better understand the dynamics of space, we can start with this history. Indeed, many analysts of space security have attempted to draw lessons from historical rivalries on new physical frontiers. This chapter begins by summarizing some of the key dynamics involved in policies of "expansionist security." It then focuses on the three most often mentioned historical analogies for space security—the settling of the New World, the development of sea and air power in the late 1800s and early 1900s (taken together), and negotiations over Antarctica in the late 1950s—examining "how parallel" their dynamics actually are in regard to space. The analysis then turns to the four main schools of existing thought regarding space security and where their strengths and weaknesses lie. The chapter concludes with an argument for a new approach: environmentally influenced learning.
The Past as Precedent: Three Analogies
Debates on the future of international relations in space revisit a long history of great power competition on new frontiers, coincident with the rise of the modern nation-state. Advances in maritime technology (sails, rudders, and portable chronometers) allowed countries to seize and control distant lands with the aim of achieving strategic, military, political, and economic advantages over their rivals for the purposes of maintaining or advancing their security. At the domestic level, powerful coalitions often pushed these enterprises in order to promote self-interested aims, with the prizes being profitable new lands, their populations, and their natural resources. Frederick Jackson Turner argued in the late 1800s that expansionism offered states a natural and psychologically necessary release from domestic tensions, and might even be required for the continued stability and development of major nation-states.
By the twentieth century, however, competing Western countries had seized all of the most readily accessible regions of the world that could not be defended by resident populations, leaving only unpopulated areas: the seabed, the polar icecaps, and, finally, space. These new frontiers required a combination of technological innovations and considerable funding to enable human beings to navigate, operate in, and make use of their more hostile environments.
Part of the motivation for states to enter new frontiers has to do with national reputation. As political leaders have long recognized, international influence at any given point in history is a product not only of a country's economic and military power but also of its perceived momentum as a state. As seen in the troubles of the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800s, the malaise of the United States in the late 1970s, and the stagnation of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, when a major world government fails to maintain a national image of power, efficacy, and forward technological progress, it can be perceived as weak by its adversaries and, in the eyes of its population, even as questionable in its claim of legitimacy.
For countries and corporations alike, however, deciding when and where to compete is not easy given the limits of available resources and the presence of risks. While offering great opportunities for those who succeed, costly failures in frontier struggles can destabilize national governments and make them liable to domestic or external subversion. As Paul Kennedy, Richard Rosecrance, and Jack Snyder have observed, this struggle to achieve expansionist versions of security has had many losers resulting from the unexpected effects of frontier competitions on geopolitics, trade, political affairs, and military alliances.
The New World Analogy
The opening of space by the Soviet Union and the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s shares certain characteristics with the competition between Spain and Portugal over the New World in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. For this reason, the New World analogy has been frequently referred to by officials, analysts, and authors on space since the 1950s. As in space, the effort to develop new sea routes to India and the eastern islands required the utmost secrecy and involved technologies crucial to national security. The actual execution of the missions involved costly expeditions relying on the skills of teams of individuals: state leaders, explorers, scientists, and expert technicians. Like Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn in space, the leaders of these voyages—including Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci—became national heroes. Similarly, the fascinating realms these explorers uncovered created new objects for the popular imagination, as well as opportunities for economic and military advantage.
After Columbus's first voyage in 1492, his sponsor, Spain, made unilateral claims to the new territories, which Pope Alexander VI duly endorsed in April 1493. But King John II of Portugal used his powerful navy to force negotiations with the Spanish crown, yielding a compromise that gave Portugal the right to regions located east of a demarcation line in the south Atlantic. In 1500, Portuguese explorers under Pedro Alvarez Cabral reached Brazil and staked a claim to the rich territory within their zone. It seemed that direct, bilateral negotiations and the formation of a cooperative regime had successfully averted an impending conflict.
But the Spanish-Portuguese entente contained certain fatal flaws. First, it relied on a fragile web of secrecy held together only by the elaborate security precautions taken by the two countries to conceal their maps and specific routes to the New World. Second, it deliberately excluded other European powers in a system characterized by multiple states of relatively equal might. The agreement held for a few decades, but word of the New World's location and its riches eventually leaked out and spread throughout Europe, bringing new challengers and their militaries. Relying on now widely distributed maritime technologies, other European powers soon began to exploit this new route to prospective wealth and colonies. As French King Francis I summed up the views of other European claimants in rejecting the Spanish-Portuguese entente: "The sun shines for me the same as for others: I would like to see that clause in Adam's will that excluded me from the partition of the world." The same basic statements about space are now being made by China, India, and other emerging space powers regarding the past history of Russian and U.S. dominance.
The collapse of the Spanish-Portuguese entente and the aggressive activities of France, Holland, and England eventually ruined any chance of managing New World conflicts over colonies and resources. The existence of a system of multiple competing powers in Europe at the time—valuing territory and raw materials as assets of power and seeing nothing to stop their conquests—transformed a peaceful division of spoils (although at the expense of native populations) into a military contest of seek, occupy, and defend.
Notably, the precedent of New World and other multilateral competition on new frontiers has provided a framework for much thinking about space, which assumes a survival-of-the-fittest strategy aimed at edging out the enemy (or suffering similar consequences oneself). Yet such a dire scenario of warfare has not yet emerged in space, contrary to many expectations. One difference may be that, unlike Cold War leaders, reigning kings and queens during the New World struggle viewed war as an acceptable outcome and as fully compatible with the pursuit of expansionist security. But such conflicts were rarely system-destroying, did not involve the elimination of nation-states, and created no crippling environmental damage. One can only imagine, for example, the different outcome in the New World if—as with orbital space debris—all of the arrows and bullets fired in those wars of conquest had continued to speed around the Earth causing damage for decades after they had been fired. These factors (discussed in Chapter Two) make the surrounding context of space security very different. For these reasons, we cannot easily accept arguments about historical inevitability of space conflict and warfare based on the New World analogy.
The Sea and Air Power Analogies
A second common set of analogies used in attempts to explain the dynamics of space security are those of sea and air power. These characterizations of space are most frequently used by military analysts. Common to these studies are references to the great late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan. In his time, Mahan played an influential role in rousing the U.S. public, political circles, and the military to abandon its "sluggish attitude" toward maritime competition and join those powers that "cherish ... aspirations for commercial extension, for colonies, and for influence in distant regions." Mahan cited the requirement for a canal through Central America and a strong U.S. navy to defend its commercial and strategic interests abroad. Mahan's ideas influenced future President Theodore Roosevelt and other leading officials of the day, resulting in the creation of the Great White Fleet, which toured the world from 1907 to 1909 showing the U.S. flag and America's new naval might.
Supporters of the sea power analogy also emphasize the link between commerce and the military, in that the development of one is viewed as requiring the simultaneous expansion of the other in order to be effective in serving national security. As Air Force Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) David E. Lupton argues, "Space control is very much like past and present concepts of sea control," citing such parallels as lines of communications, cluster points, and the relevance of technological advantages. He compares, for example, Great Britain's ability to dominate access and control of great swathes of the ocean in the nineteenth century to the likely ability of a small number of space-faring states to control upper orbits and keep out adversaries because of their greater technological prowess.
The similar air power analogy has also been studied by analysts seeking to explain and predict the behavior of states in space. What started with civilians Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903 soon developed into military uses of aircraft during World War I and strategic bombing during World War II. As Steven Lambakis writes: "What Billy Mitchell said about air power ... is also true of space power and the space environment." In other words, the strong belief is that space will eventually become a dominant field of military endeavor and bring about a revolution in military affairs. U.S. Marine Corps Major Franz Gayl argues in this regard: "As with aviation, access and technology will drive forward to exploit any and all warfighting relevance, application, and advantage from space, quite independent of a nation's will to prevent it." These points lead Major Gayl to conclude that "missions relating to space control, global strike, missile defense, transport, assault support, and such will necessarily follow."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Politics of Space Security by JAMES CLAY MOLTZ Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................viiIntroduction....................1
1. The Dynamics of Space Security: Existing Explanations....................11
2. Space and Environmental Security....................42
3. Roots of the U.S.-Soviet Space Race: 1920s–1962....................69
4. The Emergence of Cooperative Restraint: 1962–1975....................124
5. Challenges to Space Security and Their Resolution: 1976–1991....................176
6. Post–Cold War Space Uncertainty: 1992–2000....................228
7. Renewed U.S. Space Nationalism: 2001–2008....................259
8. Expanding International Norms amid Tensions: 2009–Present....................305
9. Alternative Futures for Space Security....................326
Index....................355