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Space capabilities have created a revolution in military affairs,
an environment in which information is key to the battlespace and
deterrence means war will never be fought in space, the commander of
U.S. Strategic Command said this week at Stanford University in
California.
Air Force Gen. John E. Hyten spoke at the
university’s Center for Security and Cooperation on Stratcom’s
perspectives on 21st century deterrence in space. In the audience
were Stanford faculty, postgraduate national security students, grad
students and some undergrads, and retired government policymakers
and national laboratory scientists.
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January 24, 2017 - Air Force Gen. John E. Hyten, commander of
U.S. Strategic Command, speaks at Stanford University's Center for
International Security and Cooperation in California. (Courtesy photo by Rod Searcey, Stanford University)
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Hyten was nominated for reassignment to head Stratcom in
September 2016. He commanded Air Force Space Command from 2014 to
2016.
“I have two jobs as commander of Strategic Command,” he
said.
Job No. 1 is
defending America against all threats, Hyten explained, and job No.
2 is defending and protecting the space environment so space is
available for exploration to every generation in every nation.
The space domain is critical to every military operation, the
general said, noting that everything from humanitarian to major
combat operations critically depend on space capabilities.
21st Century Deterrence
Hyten said the most important element
of space is geosynchronous orbit, a circular orbit 22,300 miles
above the planet where satellites appear to be stationary above the
surface of the earth. British science fiction writer, futurist and
inventor Arthur C. Clark mathematically determined the orbit in
1947, the general said.
The orbit, also called GEO, is
important for communications, television and radio satellites and
for critical military satellites, Hyten said.
“That’s where
we do our special communications, from national command-and-control
communications [to] … our nuclear business,” he added. “If somebody
wants to threaten that and if they do something to geosynchronous
orbit because of where that orbit is, the debris that's created will
be there forever.”
Preventing potential aggression in space
requires deterrence, Hyten said.
“We have to deter bad
behavior in space and we have to deter conflict in space,” he added,
especially against adversaries like China and Russia that are
building weapons in low earth orbit and in GEO that will deploy from
the ground to these areas of space.
As Stratcom commander,
Hyten said, “that means I have to figure out with the 184,000 people
who work under Strategic Command how we defend the nation against
that kind of threat and how I deter that conflict from ever
happening.”
China, Russia and Space Weapons
Hyten said
China has stated publicly that its goal is to use space only for
peaceful purposes.
China also has been a vocal supporter of
the United Nation’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space,
he added, “and at the same time they're the most aggressive nation
in the world, building weapons that will challenge the United States
in space in the future.”
The Chinese government tested its
low earth orbit capability in 2007, the general said, “and ... they
continue to test that capability today … at multiple orbital
regimes.”
He added, “In the not-too-distant future, they will
be able to use that capability to threaten every spacecraft we have
in space. We have to prevent that, and the best way to prevent war
is to be prepared for war. So the United States is going to do that,
and we're going to make sure that everybody knows we're prepared for
war.”
Russia, which has had an anti-satellite capability
since the 1980s, now is exploring significant anti-satellite
capabilities, including lasers for use in space and other
“capabilities that would threaten our satellites, and many of which
would create debris” that could hinder access to space, Hyten said.
Space Enterprise
To make sure war never happens in space,
the general said, the United States has been working since after the
first Gulf War in 1990-1991 to bolster and build new space
capabilities.
“In February three years ago we announced the
existence of a program called the Geosynchronous Space Situational
Awareness Program -- GSSAP,” Hyten said, adding that the Air Force
has four satellites in GEO now that are “basically a neighborhood
watch program for everything that goes on in that high-value orbit.”
The Air Force made the formerly classified program public
because it wanted the world to know that nothing could be done in
GEO that would catch the United States by surprise, he said.
The Air Force also began a series or war games at Schriever Air
Force Base in Colorado, where players explore “what conflict would
look like if it extends into space someday and how we would fight
it,” Hyten said.
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January 24, 2017 - Air Force Gen. John E. Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, meets with former Defense and State Department officials at Stanford University in California before his speech at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. The officials included William J. Perry, a former defense secretary and now a senior fellow at CISAC; George Shultz, a former defense secretary and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; and Condoleezza Rice, a former secretary of state and now a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution (Courtesy photo by Rod Searcey, Stanford University)
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And they developed something called the Space Enterprise Vision.
This, according to a 2016 Air Force Space Command news release,
is an integrated approach across all space mission areas, coupling
the delivery of space mission effects to the warfighter -- including
communications, positioning, navigation and timing, missile warning
and weather data -- with the ability to protect and defend space
capabilities against emerging threats.
Building Capability
In October 2015, Stratcom launched the Joint Interagency
Combined Space Operations Center, or JICSpOC, a collaboration among
Stratcom, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Air Force Space
Command, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the intelligence
community and commercial data providers, after Deputy Defense
Secretary Bob Work announced its development at a National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency conference in June, said Stratcom
spokesman Army Lt. Col. Martin O’Donnell.
Hyten said JICSpOC
is a place “where we experiment on war that extends into space so we
understand what that is.”
There was no commercial industry to
speak of when the Air Force started building its current
architectures in the 1990s in response to the first Gulf War, the
general said, but now there’s a huge commercial enterprise with
companies that maintain their own satellite constellations and
provide services such as space launch, satellite imagery and more.
“All those things are out there right now, and a lot of folks in
the military think it doesn’t pertain to us,” Hyten said. “But it
pertains to us in two ways. No. 1, it creates an economic
environment that the U.S. military will have to defend at some
point, and it creates an opportunity for us to take advantage of a
commercial sector ... to do the missions that we have to do.”
By Cheryl Pellerin
DOD News
Copyright 2017
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