[Infowarrior] - Administration Conducting Research Into Laser Weapon

[Richard Forno]

Administration Conducting Research Into Laser Weapon
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/washington/03laser.html?ei=5094&en=d7c1adf
7a14592f1&hp=&ex=1146715200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

The Bush administration is seeking to develop a powerful ground-based laser
weapon that would use beams of concentrated light to destroy enemy
satellites in orbit.

The largely secret project, parts of which have been made public through Air
Force budget documents submitted to Congress in February, is part of a
wide-ranging effort to develop space weapons, both defensive and offensive.
No treaty or law forbids such work.

The laser research was described by federal officials who would speak only
on the condition of anonymity because of the topic's political sensitivity.
The White House has recently sought to play down the issue of space arms,
fearing it could become an election-year liability.

Indeed, last week Republicans and Democrats on a House Armed Services
subcommittee moved unanimously to cut research money for the project in the
administration's budget for the 2007 fiscal year. While Republicans on the
panel would not discuss their reasons for the action, Congressional aides
said it reflected a bipartisan consensus for moving cautiously on space
weaponry, a potentially controversial issue that has yet to be much debated.

The full committee is expected to take up the budget issue today.

The laser research is far more ambitious than a previous effort by the
Clinton administration nearly a decade ago to test an antisatellite laser.
It would take advantage of an optical technique that uses sensors, computers
and flexible mirrors to counteract the atmospheric turbulence that seems to
make stars twinkle.

The weapon would essentially reverse that process, shooting focused beams of
light upward with great clarity and force.

Though futuristic and technically challenging, the laser work is relatively
inexpensive by government standards ‹ about $20 million in 2006, with
planned increases to some $30 million by 2011 ‹ partly because no weapons
are as yet being built and partly because the work is being done at an
existing base, an unclassified government observatory called Starfire in the
New Mexico desert.

In interviews, military officials defended the laser research as prudent,
given the potential need for space arms to defend American satellites
against attack in the years and decades ahead. "The White House wants us to
do space defense," said a senior Pentagon official who oversees many space
programs, including the laser effort. "We need that ability to protect our
assets" in orbit.

But some Congressional Democrats and other experts fault the research as
potential fuel for an antisatellite arms race that could ultimately hurt
this nation more than others because the United States relies so heavily on
military satellites, which aid navigation, reconnaissance and attack
warning.

In a statement, Representative Loretta Sanchez, a California Democrat on the
subcommittee who opposes the laser's development, thanked her Republican
colleagues for agreeing to curb a program "with the potential to weaponize
space."

Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, a private
group in Washington that tracks military programs, said the subcommittee's
action last week was a significant break with the administration. "It's
really the first time you've seen the Republican-led Congress acknowledge
that these issues require public scrutiny," she said.

In a statement, the House panel, the Armed Services Subcommittee on
Strategic Forces, made no reference to such policy disagreements but simply
said that "none of the funds authorized for this program shall be used for
the development of laser space technologies with antisatellite purposes."

It is unclear whether the Republican-controlled Congress will sustain the
subcommittee's proposed cut to the administration's request, even if the
full House Armed Services Committee backs the reduction.

The Air Force has pursued the secret research for several years but
discussed it in new detail in its February budget request. The documents
stated that for the 2007 fiscal year, starting in October, the research will
seek to "demonstrate fully compensated laser propagation to low earth orbit
satellites."

The documents listed several potential uses of the laser research, the first
being "antisatellite weapons."

The overall goal of the research, the documents said, is to assess unique
technologies for "high-energy laser weapons," in what engineers call a proof
of concept. Previously, the laser work resided in a budget category that
paid for a wide variety of space efforts, the documents said. But for the
new fiscal year, it has moved under the heading "Advanced Weapons
Technology."

In interviews, Pentagon officials said the policy rationale for the arms
research dated from a 1996 presidential directive in the Clinton
administration that allows "countering, if necessary, space systems and
services used for hostile purposes."

In 1997, the American military fired a ground-based laser in New Mexico at
an American spacecraft, calling it a test of satellite vulnerability.
Federal experts said recently that the laser had had no capability to do
atmospheric compensation and that the test had failed to do any damage.

Little else happened until January 2001, when a commission led by Donald H.
Rumsfeld, then the newly nominated defense secretary, warned that the
American military faced a potential "Pearl Harbor" in space and called for a
defensive arsenal of space weapons.

The Starfire research is part of that effort.

Federal officials and private experts said the antisatellite work drew on a
body of unclassified advances that have made the Starfire researchers
world-famous among astronomers. Their most important unclassified work
centers on using small lasers to create artificial stars that act as beacons
to guide the process of atmospheric compensation.

When astronomers use the method, they aim a small laser at a point in the
sky close to a target star or galaxy, and the concentrated light excites
molecules of air (or, at higher altitudes, sodium atoms in the upper
atmosphere) to glow brightly.

Distortions in the image of the artificial star as it returns to Earth are
measured continuously and used to deform the telescope's flexible mirror and
rapidly correct for atmospheric turbulence. That sharpens images of both the
artificial star and the astronomical target.

Unclassified pictures of Starfire in action show a pencil-thin laser beam
shooting up from its hilltop observatory into the night sky.

The Starfire researchers are now investigating how to use guide stars and
flexible mirrors in conjunction with powerful lasers that could flash their
beams into space to knock out enemy satellites, according to federal
officials and Air Force budget documents.

"These are really smart folks who are optimistic about their technology,"
said the senior Pentagon official. "We want those kind of people on our
team."

But potential weapon applications, he added, if one day approved, "are out
there years and years and years into the future."

The research centers on Starfire's largest telescope, which Air Force budget
documents call a "weapon-class beam director." Its main mirror, 11.5 feet in
diameter, can gather in faint starlight or, working in the opposite
direction, direct powerful beams of laser light skyward.

Federal officials said Starfire's antisatellite work had grown out of one of
the site's other military responsibilities: observing foreign satellites and
assessing their potential threat to the United States. In 2000, the Air
Force Research Laboratory, which runs Starfire, said the observatory's large
telescope, by using adaptive optics, could distinguish objects in orbit the
size of a basketball at a distance of 1,000 miles.

Another backdrop to the antisatellite work is Starfire's use of telescopes,
adaptive optics and weak lasers to track and illuminate satellites. It is
considered a baby step toward developing a laser powerful enough to cripple
spacecraft.

Col. Gregory Vansuch, who oversees Starfire research for the Air Force
Research Laboratory, said in an interview that the facility used weak lasers
and the process of atmospheric compensation to illuminate satellites "all
the time." Such tests, Colonel Vansuch emphasized, are always done with the
written permission of the satellite's owner.

He said that about once a month, Starfire conducted weeklong experiments
that illuminate satellites up to 20 times.

Though the House subcommittee recommended eliminating all financing next
year for antisatellite laser research, it retained money for other laser
development. Congressional aides said the proposed cut to the Air Force's
$21.4 million budget request for such work would eliminate two of three
areas of development, for a total reduction of $6.5 million.

At least one public-interest group has seized on the issue. Last week, the
Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, based in
Brunswick, Me., said that if Congress approved the antisatellite money, "the
barrier to weapons in space will have been destroyed."