PENTAGON STARTS SPACE WAR TRAINING

Just in case you were won­der­ing whether or not the Pentagon was really seri­ous about knock­ing other coun­tries’ satel­lites out of orbit, comes this item from C4ISR Journal. The Defense Department, it seems, has “launched a series of exer­cises designed to sharpen its under­stand­ing and man­age­ment of counter-​​satellite oper­a­tions.“
The three-​​year Joint Space Control Operations-​​Negation (JSCO-​​N) pro­gram will help the Pentagon fig­ure out which satellite-​​killers to buy, and deter­mine which pro­ce­dures to fol­low when knock­ing the orbiters out.
According to a report from the Pentagon’s test­ing and eval­u­a­tion office, the Defense Department wants to “tar­get an adversary’s space capa­bil­ity by using a vari­ety of per­ma­nent and/​or reversible means to achieve five pos­si­ble effects: decep­tion, dis­rup­tion, denial, degra­da­tion and destruc­tion…“
“The JSCO-​​N effort includes three ‘field tests,’” C4ISR Journal’s Jeremy Singer notes. “The first of those, Terminal Fury 05, was sched­uled to take place in December, accord­ing to the report. It was to be fol­lowed by Terminal Fury 06 and Unified Endeavor 06.“
Not sur­pris­ingly, the Pentagon refused to give details on the exer­cises. But, as Singer observes, “the Air Force has for at least the past few years been work­ing on sys­tems for neu­tral­iz­ing enemy satel­lite capa­bil­i­ties. The ser­vice announced in October 2004 that one such sys­tem, designed to dis­rupt satel­lite radio-​​transmissions, is now being fielded.” In 2003, the Air Force released its “Transformation Flight Plan,” which spelled out a num­ber of anti-​​orbiter weapons, includ­ing “ground-​​based lasers, air-​​launched mis­siles and space-​​based radio fre­quency trans­mit­ters capa­ble of dis­rupt­ing or destroy­ing other satel­lites.“
THERE’S MORE: On the other hand, Defense Daily has this…

Weapons in Space? Not this year, it seems, or a least not part of the Missile Defense Agencys bud­get. The Missile Defense Agency is not fund­ing any new space-​​based pro­grams in the FY 06 defense-​​spending request, although the con­tro­ver­sial Near Field Infrared Experiment, NFIRE, remains in the bud­get. Space-​​based is not part of this bud­get, says a senior Pentagon offi­cial. The debate on whether to develop a space-​​based capa­bil­ity has not yet taken place, accord­ing to the offi­cial. Another thing you wont see is a follow-​​on on to Russian American Observational Satellite pro­gram, or RAMOS, which was defunded in the FY 05 budget. 

AND MORE: “It is true that the space-​​based test bed was delayed by two years, but that deci­sion is accom­pa­nied with an increase in clas­si­fied fund­ing for futur­is­tic mis­sile defense pro­grams from $ 160 M to $ 350 M,” the Arms Control Wonk notes. “That’s a lot of secret money.”

February 11th, 2005 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.