• Bruce Gagnon Trip Report

Stratcom & The World Peace Forum

Tim Rinne
NFP State Coordinator

Nebraskans for Peace State Coordinator Tim Rinne was one of over 4.500 delegates from a hundred different countries to attend the World Peace Forum in Vancouver, British Columbia June 24-28. A guest of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, he had a prized opportunity to meet with disarmament activists from all across the world. In fact, being from StratCom’s backyard made him something of a novelty at this international gathering. People were amazed—and heartened —to learn that not everybody in Nebraska sanctions the new ‘offensive’ role StratCom has now taken on in the “War on Terror.”

StratCom’s new missions figured in big last month at the inaugural World Peace Forum. Hundreds of delegates—from Japan to Canada, Germany to Brazil—turned out for the Forum’s sessions on missile defense and space weapons to learn the latest about the missions that, in the wake of 9/11, have now been assigned to StratCom.

Although missile defense and space weaponry are generally identified with Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” pipe dream, the concept has been regularly reincarnated over a 40-year-long history, morphing from the Safeguard ABM program of the 1960s into the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of the Reagan years, to the Clinton Administration’s National Missile Defense (NMD), to the current Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) and Theater Missile Defense (TMD) programs.

Despite the ‘defensive’-sounding labels however, missile defense is—and always has been—an integral feature of an offensive, first-strike strategy, intended to foil an enemy’s ability to strike back. And while the putative enemies at which the program has been directed have also morphed over the years (from the Soviet Union and its allies to ‘rogue states’ like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran and North Korea), the goal of ensuring the U.S.’s military and economic prominence around the globe has remained constant.

The sheer technological sweep of the Star Wars program is the stuff of science fiction. President Reagan envisioned a system in which an incoming ICBM would be destroyed by a counter missile—“hitting a bullet with a bullet” as the catchphrase went. Alternative schemes included giant orbiting space platforms, from which nuclear-powered lasers could be fired to zap enemy warheads out of the sky. But as the technology for the military use of space has evolved, so have the space-fighting strategies, and no longer is “missile defense” so narrowly construed as ‘defending against missiles.’

The ‘new,’ even more menacing StratCom now supports a range of duties well beyond its traditional task of nuclear deterrence. Missions such as Space and Global Strike; Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance; Information Operations; Computer Network Warfare; Missile Defense; and Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction have all been added in just the past four years. And “space,” as Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space explains it, “has become the glue that now holds these StratCom missions together.”

Whoever controls space, StratCom’s war planners like to note, controls the Earth. And in the information age particularly, knowledge is power and can be just as crucial as cutting edge weaponry to achieving that control. Although most of the Star Wars weapons are years from being ready for deployment (and judging from the latest missile defense test flops, it’s questionable if they’ll ever be), existing space satellite technology is already supplying the U.S. that vital knowledge edge.

For instance, 70 percent of the munitions delivered on Iraq during the “Shock and Awe” aerial assault were guided to their targets by satellites. The U.S.’s vast satellite network not only provides the ‘eye in the sky’ to identify potential targets, it actually enables our forces to direct weapons to those targets. So while space has still not been “weaponized” with battles being waged in the heavens, the U.S. has already “militarized” space by using satellite technology to gain the upper hand in earth-based conflicts.

It didn’t take long, though, for the war planners to figure out that what the U.S. has, others could also get—unless, that is, they’re prevented from doing so. Thus, to protect its monopoly on satellite reconnaissance, surveillance and targeting capacity, the Pentagon and aerospace contractors have accordingly been actively pursuing research into ventures like anti-satellite (ASAT) technology. The schemes on the drawing board for this ASAT strategy run the gamut from low-tech tactics like throwing junk from one of our satellites to blind or disable a competitor’s, to firing a groundbased laser (the “Starfire” program being developed at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico) to literally knock a rival orbiter from the sky.

Extreme as this all sounds, it clearly demonstrates the U.S. is not going to allow anything to stand in the way of preserving its information supremacy in space—least of all international law. As one Star Wars enthusiast put it, “With respect to space dominance, we like it, we’ve got it, and we’re going to keep it.” It’s no fluke that the 50th Space Wing based at SpaceCom in Colorado Springs, Colorado has as its motto, “Masters of Space.”

Space mastery is key to the U.S.’s longterm global ambitions. The actions of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld couldn’t be more explicit about their goal of securing the world’s energy resources and establishing U.S. hegemony worldwide. And sadly, a majority of the American people would appear to share that outlook. A recent poll by Purdue University Professor Jeremy Straughn on Americans’ identity found that 79 percent of the U.S. public believes the United States should do everything possible to remain the world’s strongest military power. That finding goes a long way toward explaining why we as a public so readily fall into line every time the White House rattles the saber over a toothless threat like Iraq, Iran or North Korea. On a deep personal level, we obviously like being the world’s only superpower, and are predisposed to go along with anything that can make a claim for keeping us on top.

President Bush’s two surviving “Axis of Evil” nations, however, are little more than pretexts to justify a program on the scale of Star Wars (which the aerospace industry boasts will be “the largest industrial project in the history of planet Earth”). At most, the Iran and North Korea ‘threats’ are serving to keep the federal dollars pouring into the Military-Industrial Complex, while the Pentagon and its corporate partners try out their latest hardware and practice their war scripts in ‘real time’ combat settings. But the real target of all this space war planning—the actual nation at which all this activity is presently pointed—is somewhat more formidable. And it holds, coincidentally, a major share of our foreign debt.

China, with its blistering economic growth, is on the verge of rising to ‘great power’ status and challenging the U.S.’s influence in Asia. Of even more immediate interest to the oil men in the White House, though, is the fact that China is also in direct competition with the United States for control of the world’s petroleum supplies. According to Michael Klare, five-college Professor of Peace and World Security Studies, China is now the world’s “number two” consumer of oil, just behind the U.S. By the year 2020, Klare states, “Chinese oil consumption is projected to reach 12 million barrels per day,” while the U.S. will need to import “as much as 16 million barrels per day” by the same date.

Although China is a member of the Nuclear Club, it’s existing nuclear arsenal numbers no more than 20 missiles (compared to our 5,735 operational warheads, with another 4,225 held in reserve), and its military budget of somewhere between $31-38 billion a year is less than one tenth that of the U.S. None of this, however, has prevented the neo-con hawks linked to the White House from sounding the alarm about the military menace China poses to our national security. And the Military-Industrial Complex is rising to the challenge and then some.

Politically, militarily and economically, every resource is already being marshaled to counter this ‘looming threat.’ Current State Department strategy calls for enlisting the assistance of a number of ‘dependable’ allies (such as Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, even India) to “surround” China, isolate it, and thereby “manage” its entrance onto the global stage. The Pentagon is actively at work conducting war games, that utilize Theater Missile Defense, against the “Red” team in anticipation of a coming showdown in Asia. And the aerospace industry (the “Big Five” of Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, in particular) is lining up to cash in on this bonanza—which, as we noted above, promises to be the biggest and most costly industrial project in world history.

But even if Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld do manage to sucker the American public into falling for this latest saber rattle, how are we ever going to pay for such a thing?

The aerospace contractors and their cheerleaders, who will be gathering like vultures at the Strategic Space 2006 conference in Omaha October 10-12, have already got an answer for that.

Our entitlement programs.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and what is left of the Welfare program are slated to be de-funded, with the money diverted to pay for this new arms race in space.

Like the StratCom war planners say, whoever controls space, control the Earth. And that, it would seem, even includes the purse strings of the federal budget.

Thanks to Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space and Loring Wirbel of Citizens for Peace in Space for their expertise in the preparation of this article.

HOME      |      ARTICLES      |      CALENDAR      |      THE NEBRASKA REPORT      |      DONATE      |      CONTACT

This site is made possible by the peacemakers. Site Design by