Paper Tiger in a Polar Orbit

 previous page    homepage  

This article is published in AD&D Magazine

- by DR. PHILIP H.J.DAVIES

When the Chinese tested on January 11 its anti-satellite system, the world was immediately put on alert of the dragon’s ever-increasing military might even though the Beijing government has denied any overt aggressive policies. But was the test simply empty posturing?

Newsflash

Wire news AP has reported that China has no plans to carry out another test of an anti-satellite weapon, Japan’s former defense chief said, citing a conversation with the Chinese defense minister Cao Gangchuan.

Former Japanese defense chief Fukushiro Nukaga told Japanese reporters that Cao said at a meeting: “China conducted a test for scientific purposes and it did not target any country and did not pose a threat to any country, and therefore it did not go against agreements.”

The test was widely criticized as a provocative display of China’s growing military capability. It unnerved Japan, a regional rival, but also more friendly countries like South Korea who depend on satellites for communications.

China insists it is committed to the peaceful use of space and outer resources, having along with Russia, presented a draft outline for a treaty to prevent the deployment of weapons in space to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva in 2002. Since the test, Beijing has indicated it remains willing to work with other countries on an agreement to prevent an arms race in space.

© - AD&D Magazine

Almost no one noticed when a defunct Chinese satellite was destroyed in a test of Beijing’s latest anti-satellite system or ‘ASAT’, and it took several more days before anyone could state with any confidence that the event actually occurred.

The unannounced test reportedly involved boosting into orbit an ASAT device, referred to as a ‘kill vehicle’. Kill vehicles can operate in a variety of ways, sometimes simply by dogging the target satellite and jamming its communications, but sometimes the kill vehicle is rammed into the target or carries an explosive payload which is detonated at close range.

In the vacuum of space, of course, there can be no shockwaves and so the damage done to the target is caused by what is effectively shrapnel, fragments of the kill vehicle driven into the target by the force of the explosion. As a result, both ramming and explosive ASATs are referred to as ‘kinetic’ devices.

During the test in question, the kill vehicle was put into space on an ICBM boost vehicle, manoeuvred alongside the aging FengYun 1C weather satellite, and then blown up resulting in more that 600 pieces of debris dispersed into the FY-1C’s polar orbit. China’s decision to test a kinetic ASAT device is an alarming development at a number of different levels.

One of the most disturbing features of the test is the willingness of the Chinese government to demonstrate the development of a weapons system and method of conflict so intrinsically ill-considered that the United States and Soviet Union - each willing to spend billions on a nuclear balance of terror and the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction - had both abandoned it as soon as they had tried it out.

In their way, kinetic antisatellite systems have more in common with chemical and biological weapons than they do with the other technologyintensive weapons of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Battlespace Blind Alley

During the Cold War, both the Soviets and the Americans conducted anti-satellite tests.

© - AD&D Magazine

At the time, the main roles for satellites were communications (in a comparatively limited capacity), weather monitoring and intelligence-collection, both through imagery and communications interception.

A lot of military communications was still ground broadcastbased; defence satellite communications became more significant only towards the end of the Cold War with contemporary global positioning achieving its current level of sophistication in the 1990s.

The main goal, therefore, was to try and blind the opponent’s satellite surveillance and reconnaissance, presumably as a precursor to some sort of surprise move. There were, however, three problems with the use of ASAT capabilities.

The first problem was fairly obvious fairly immediately. One of the main purposes of satellite reconnaissance and surveillance was to try and detect what were called indicators – signs of an impending attack or comparably precipitate move that might tip the scales of the nuclear balance of terror.

The trouble with knocking out the opponent’s remote sensing capability was that this could only indicate an imminent and probably massive attack. As a result, far from blinding the opponent to threat indicators, an ASAT attack effectively constituted The Biggest And Worst Indicator of All.

The only thing worse would be a huge outburst of infrared plumes or ‘tube radiation’ from all of the missile silos scattered across one’s continental heartland - themselves detectable by a variety of infrared monitoring satellites that sat out in a ‘translunar’ orbit, far beyond the reach of any available ASAT launch vehicle.

So on the whole, an antisatellite ‘blinding’ attack was almost by definition self-defeating.

The second problem had to do with efficiency. Firing anti-satellite vehicles into space is complicated, expensive and even more expensive if one misses the target. Even the launches themselves would probably detectable, from visual traffic, telemetry or the ASAT booster’s own ‘tube radiation’. It is far cheaper, easier and subtler to attack the ground control uplink/downlink stations that are used to direct satellites. While in principle one can communicate with a satellite from anywhere that lies under its orbit – known as it its ‘footprint’ – close direction of satellite on-board control systems such as navigation, attitude control and manoeuvring, communications and diagnostics, requires expensively outfitted and usually fixed ground control stations. These are not overly difficult to locate and identify, inexpensive to attack and also relatively vulnerable to attack. That attack does not even have to be physically destructive. Carefully targeted jamming or disabling the ground station’s electronics through various types of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon will have about as satisfactory an effect as flattening the place with a fuel-air explosive - and be harder to detect, intercept or pre-empt.

It is far easier to attack ground control uplink/downlink stations used to direct satellites © - AD&D Magazine

So for the most part, ASAT’s really are a costly and unsatisfactory alternative to good the oldfashioned sea-land-air option.

The final reason for avoiding ASATs is in many respects the most compelling of all, and a special case of a much more general problem - space junk.

Space junk is all the bits and pieces left over from various previous vehicles, missions and projects which have so far failed to fall out of orbit and - hopefully - burn up during re-entry. Space junk can be as small as nuts and bolts which are as or more destructive than any ordinary highvelocity ammunition because of the very high orbital speeds at which they travel. It can be fragments of earlier space missions such as components of the old Apollo booster stages during the NASA lunar flights of the late 1960s and 1970s.

It even includes entire, intact satellites that have simply experienced ‘point failure’ – in other words, they plain old broke down and stopped working - or ran out of the limited supply of fuel that they carry to allow alteration or correction of their orbits.

Unfortunately, when a working satellite hits a piece of space junk it becomes another piece of space junk. If the impact was hard enough the victim satellite can break up into dozens, hundreds, even thousands of pieces of space junk in its own right. And there’s only so much space up there, even in space. There is a relatively small number of useful orbital altitudes and trajectories, and many hundreds, now thousands, of satellites all crowding to use those routes. The great danger from space junk is what is called ‘cascade’. ‘Cascade’ refers to a chain reaction in which one collision results in, say, a hundred fragments which then scatter and create a hundred more collisions.

In principle, each of those releases a hundred new pieces of fast-moving space junk - each of which creates a hundred new collisions and so forth. Numerically, a full-on cascade could easily clear low- and medium-Earth orbits of working satellites while leaving those orbits so littered with debris any new vehicle placed orbit would be struck and disabled almost immediately.

With ASAT use, however, the goal is to disable the opponent’s satellite capability without harming one’s own. The trouble is that the orbits an adversary uses for their reconnaissance, communications or navigation satellites are generally much the same as those one wants to use oneself.

However, the use of ASATs like the relatively primitive kinetic device used by the Chinese would contribute drastically to the volume of space junk.

While it might not be on a scale that triggers an all-out cascade, it would certainly flood the immediate orbital zone with debris and dramatically increase the likelihood of one’s own satellites being knocked out by that debris.

Once again, ASAT attacks appear to be self-defeating or worse. As the Americans and Russians quickly realized, the risk of ‘blow back’ on one’s own strategic assets was simply too great to accept.

How, then, are we to read the Chinese ASAT test?

Perhaps the test was merely empty posturing. It might also, however, indicate a Chinese willingness to pursue military and strategic options that amount to potentially pulling the temple down around oneself and the kind of willingness to foul one’s own political and strategic nest that Mainland China has repeatedly exhibited in its Great Leap Forward, Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, Tienanmen Square and whole assortments of disastrous agricultural and industrial mismanagement fiascos that have caused famine and chaos at assorted points since the Communist regime seized power in 1949.

And once again, it gives the lie to the myth that China has no history or inclination towards threatening her neighbours or seeking hegemonic influence.

Balancing the Books

At a certain level, however, the credibility of the Chinese ASAT threat, in terms of the risks of blowback or the sheer costinefficiencies of chasing small things moving at orbital velocities, isn’t the point.

The real question is how a country like China can afford the kind of aggressive civilian (if you can call it that) and military space programmes with its economy in its present state. To be sure, specific sectors and regions in the Chinese economy are booming - chiefly the Special Economic Zones concentrated mainly on the southeast coast. Further inland, and especially further north, large swathes of China are poverty ridden, deprived of infrastructure, subject to very poor health conditions with pervasive, increasing and unchecked pollution and a booming HIV infection rate.

Large swathes of northern China is still poverty ridden and deprived of modern infrastructure © - AD&D Magazine

Because of this, China receives considerable quantities of foreign aid for purposes as varied as medical support, educational subsidies, agricultural development and even payments to assist the development of human rights, democracy and good government. Apart from the sheer deluded futility of funding human rights, democracy and good governance in the world’s largest, corruptionridden, one-party dictatorship, a more important question has to do with collective international culpability in creating what is rapidly becoming a serious concern for international security and stability – an aggressive and resurgent Communist Party-led China. The really disturbing dimension of both the manned Chinese space flight programme and the recent ASAT test is that these highly expensive and threatening projects represent expenditure that might otherwise have gone towards medicine, education, or infrastructure instead.

In other words foreign aid to China effectively subsidizes Chinese aggression in space.

China implicitly applies moral blackmail to the rest of the world by holding its own poor, diseased and disadvantaged as hostages, allowing them to suffer if the international community does not cough up foreign aid.

Every dollar spent by the international community on China’s poor is a dollar China does not have to spend, and can put towards menacing and unnecessary space programmes, hi-tech rearmament for the People’s Liberation Army and otherwise propping up its regime and bidding for an international role the country cannot afford.

The real lesson of the 2007 ASAT test is that the international community needs to stop sponsoring the world’s largest tyranny and its growing stature as a dangerous, unpredictable and irresponsible menace to the international community that indirectly finances that menace. Bluntly put, the time has come, indeed it is long past, for the international community to prorate foreign aid to China against Chinese military and space expenditure.

Source & copyrights: AD&D Magazine

 previous page    homepage