Frances FitzGerald: The 19th Century Echoes in Bush's Space-Based Weapons Plan

Frances FitzGerald, in the NYT (6-3-05):

[Frances FitzGerald is the author of "Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War."]

FOR some time now the Air Force has been pressing the White House for a new national-security directive that would permit the deployment of space weaponry. A decision could come within weeks. Most space-to-ground weapons remain futuristic, but previous presidents and Congresses have chosen not to deploy anti-satellite weapons, fearing that doing so would set off an arms race and endanger the information systems the United States relies on. The new directive, if approved, would constitute a historic change in policy as radical as President Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war.

Yet the idea of putting weapons in space has its roots in American national mythology and in a strain of 19th-century strategic thinking that, curiously enough, seems quite close to that of the Bush administration.

In January 2001 the National Space Commission, which had been led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense designate, warned the incoming President Bush of the potential for a "space Pearl Harbor." The bumper-sticker phrase dramatized a real concern for American defense planners. Over the years the military has become more and more dependent on satellites for navigation, targeting, command-and-control and other essential functions, yet satellites are highly vulnerable. They can be shot down with guided missiles, their ground transmitters can be attacked and the communication links between the two can be jammed. ...

Yet space is not so much a high ground as it as a highway - and in some orbits it is as crowded as the New Jersey Turnpike, mostly with commercial satellites and space debris. Any space-based weapon would have to join this procession and roll along with the rest of the traffic. How putting more or better weapons in orbit would end their vulnerability Air Force officials have yet to explain. But clearly they have faith that technology will find a way. "Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny," Gen. Lance Lord, chief of the Air Force Space Command, said at an Air Force conference last September. "Simply put, it's the American way of fighting," he told Congress recently.

The Air Force's enthusiasm for space weaponry accords with the Bush administration's preference for military superiority over arms control and with Mr. Rumsfeld's view that the United States should fight with high-tech weaponry and as few troops as possible.

As General Lord's rhetoric suggests, these approaches are hardly novel. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Midwestern Republicans, among them Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana and Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, promoted similar strategies. They were isolationists in regard to Europe, which they considered the corrupt Old World, but they rivaled Theodore Roosevelt in their enthusiasm for American imperial adventures to the south and the west. They therefore became advocates of a powerful navy, for it could defend American shores against European powers and extend American reach through the Caribbean and into the Pacific. Later they resisted plans for enlarging the Army because the only function of a large army, as they saw it, would be to intervene in European conflicts. With the advent of the airplane, they championed the air force as a substitute for boots on the ground.

In effect their strategy was to project power while remaining isolated: in terms of the national mythology, they wanted America to pursue its God-given mission abroad while remaining the virgin land. While the Democrats would fight land wars, compromise and negotiate, Midwestern Republicans would preach the American way of life and command the world from the heights of the air and the distances of the sea. Their ideal would surely have been space weaponry. But the record of the last century suggests that, like long-range bombers and aircraft carriers, killer satellites will not save the United States from the messy realities of international engagement.