Earlier this week, over the Pacific Ocean, somewhere off the
coast of Hawaii during questionable weather, the Aegis-class
Cruiser USS Lake Erie successfully shot down the damaged
U.S. 193 military spy satellite with an SM-3 missile. Intercepting
the tumbling, 5,000-pound, bus-sized satellite was a great
achievement for the Lake Erie command and crew, the U.S.
military, the missile defense community, and the Bush
Administration, who announced the real-world operation only days
earlier.
Skeptics are wrong to suggest that the operation was in response
to China's successful--but unannounced--anti-satellite (ASAT) test
on January 11, 2007, in which Beijing destroyed one of its own
aging weather satellites in low-Earth orbit. The Bush
Administration made the appropriate executive decision after it was
determined that the satellite was uncontrollable, unrecoverable,
and--due to technical malfunctions--was going to re-enter Earth's
atmosphere on March 7, posing a potential threat to human life,
property, and the environment.
China's Concerns
In the past week, the Chinese government has repeatedly
questioned President Bush's decision. In light of the pending
shootdown, representatives from both China and Russia have again
cited the necessity of an outer space arms control treaty to
prevent what they claim is the unnecessary "weaponization" of
space.
Beijing's commitment to a space treaty is suspect considering
the circumstances surrounding its own ASAT test, carried out in
January 2007. China launched its operation in secret and followed
it with two weeks of steadfast denial. The operation littered outer
space with an inordinate amount of debris that may orbit Earth for
centuries, endangering peaceful space operations. Make no mistake:
China's ASAT operation was a clandestine test of the Second
Artillery Corps's evolving asymmetric military capability
against space assets of potential opponents.
China clearly recognizes they will not be a "peer competitor" of
the United States; its military will not match U.S. conventional
military capabilities for several decades. As a result, Beijing has
undertaken an effort to acquire weapons that will enable its
military to challenge the U.S. military by targeting its
weaknesses.
In addition to developing cyberwarfare capabilities, China wants
to exploit America's architecture of satellites, which it sees as a
potential Achilles' heel. Beijing believes that having the capacity
to target U.S. space assets will make American leaders more
reluctant and less capable of challenging China on the battlefield,
if necessary. Further, the strategy behind the Chinese asymmetric
capability is both aggressive and indiscriminant. It would permit
the use of ASAT weapons that would contaminate important orbits for
all nations in order to counter the U.S. advantage in space
systems.
China's power ambitions cast further doubt on the sincerity of
its commitment to a space treaty. There would also be serious
difficulties in defining "space weapons" and verifying compliance
in any arms control agreement.
For the Common Good
By contrast, the U.S. strategy is defensive. The Bush
Administration is putting into place a damage limitation strategy
designed to protect the American people, U.S. friends and allies,
and people around the world against attacks and other threats that
pose risks to their lives and well-being. Given the aggressive and
indiscriminate Chinese strategy and the defensive nature of the
U.S. counterpart, there is no moral equivalency between the Chinese
ASAT test of a year ago and the shootdown of the U.S. 193
satellite.
Arms control advocates would prefer to ascribe justification for
the fielding and employment of weapons on the basis of the
capabilities of the weapons themselves. By this way of thinking,
all weapons capable of shooting down satellites are bad. The more
appropriate way to address the question of justification is on the
basis of the overarching strategic purpose of the weapon in
question. The defensive purpose of the SM-3 and its use to destroy
the 193 satellite provides more than sufficient justification, both
morally and in terms of arms control.
The care the U.S. took in conducting this operation, which was
carried out with meticulous planning and execution and included
landing the Space Shuttle Atlantis and declaring closure areas,
reflects the fundamentally defensive and non-aggressive purpose of
a damage limitation strategy. The operation mitigated, if not
eliminated, the potential effects of hazardous chemical fuel
onboard the satellite, and any long-term space debris is believed
to have been destroyed.
Conclusion
The decision to intercept the U.S. 193 satellite will be debated
in the months to come by arms control advocates, opponents and
proponents of missile defense, and space experts in the U.S. and
abroad. Critics will portray the operation as a staged event that
was undertaken just to test missile defense or ASAT technologies
under the guise of a humanitarian exercise. They will likely accuse
the United States of starting a space arms race and will portray
the two ASAT tests as moral equivalents.
However, these arguments fail to recognize the vast
discrepancies between the two strategies that stand behind the
corresponding events. China's ASAT test was a military exercise to
demonstrate its ability to execute an aggressive strategy of
asymmetric warfare. As such, it does not compare to the transparent
and necessary actions taken by the United States in the face of
pending humanitarian danger. The U.S. operation demonstrated the
defensive and protective features of a damage limitation
strategy.
No matter how small the chances that hazardous materials would
have reached the Earth's surface without the shootdown, the United
States was fully justified and possibly obligated to pursue its
chosen course of action. As such, this operation marks an important
point in the transition from a Cold War strategy focused on
retaliatory deterrence and vulnerability to a damage limitation
strategy based on protecting and defending people in the U.S. and
elsewhere. Other nations, including China, would do well to
consider the merits of the damage limitation strategy. The world
will be a better place if they do.
Baker Spring is F.M. Kirby
Research Fellow in National Security Policy for The Kathryn and
Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The
Heritage Foundation.