[Infowarrior] - USAF Scare-Mongering Ad Shoves Facts Out of the Airlock

[Richard Forno]

Air Force's Scare-Mongering Space Ad Shoves Facts Out of the Airlock
By Noah Shachtman EmailMay 07, 2008 | 3:13:00 PM
Categories: Money Money Money, Paper Pushers & Powerpoint Rangers,  
Space, Video Fix

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/05/usaf-ridiculous.html

No one expects commercials to be word-for-word accurate -- not even  
ads from the U.S. military.  But a new Air Force commercial, about the  
perils of an attack in space, does more than stretch the truth, a  
bit.  It snaps the truth into tiny little pieces, experts and former  
officers say -- violating the laws of physics and common sense, while  
flying in the face everything that's known about the world's  
constellation of satellites.

"What if your cell phone calls, your television, your GPS system, even  
your bank transactions, could be taken out with a single missile?" the  
military ad asks. "They can."

No, they can't.  Not unless there's some new missile out there that  
can strike dozens and dozens of targets, spread out over thousands and  
thousands of miles.  Even a nuke in space wouldn't do the trick.

Communication, television and navigational systems are handled by  
different arrays of satellites.  Each craft in the constellation is  
set apart by hundreds, if not thousands, of miles.  And each  
constellation is thousands of miles from the other.  At least ten  
thousand miles, for example, separates the arrays of communications  
and GPS satellites.  The communications birds are typically positioned  
in geostationary orbit, or GEO, about 22,000 miles away from Earth.  
The ring of 32 GPS satellites, on the other hand, circle the planet in  
a Medium Earth Orbit, or MEO, approximately 12,000 miles up.  There's  
no missile that can hit two targets that far away from one other.  (In  
fact, there's no anti-satellite missile, taking off from Earth, that  
can even reach GEO or MEO.  China's satellite-killing missile only  
reached up to about 540 miles.)

And even if such a weapon was one day invented, it still wouldn't  
cause much more than hiccups in your GPS or bank service.  Because  
"while it is true that a single ASAT [anti-satellite weapon] could  
theoretically take out a single satellite, none of the services  
mentioned in the commercial rely on a single satellite," says Brian  
Weeden, who served nine years in the Air Force's space and missile  
corps.  "I find it distressing that the Air Force would resort to such  
fear-mongering."

Take GPS.  There are 24 of those satellites.  Blasting one of them  
might slow up your car's navigational system for a little while. But  
one missile could in no way bring down the entire constellation. "It  
is impossible, period," says the Center for Defense Information's  
Theresa Hitchens.

"We do lose satellites, you know.  They die all the time," adds our  
own Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on space security (among other things) at  
the New America Foundation. "When the Galaxy IV [telecommunications  
satellite] croaked, there was a real problem for the pagers in the  
U.S. But we got over it. Even if you whack one satellite (which is  
really a collection of transponders), the service could simply lease  
more space. The point is that with debris, the harsh environment of  
outer space and Murphy's Law, that we don't have a single satellite in  
orbit that is irreplaceable.  Because it would go dead at the worst  
possible time."

And, of course, not all of the services mentioned in the Air Force's  
ad rely solely on satellites to function.  "Cell phone calls are not,  
generally speaking, dependent on satellites. Indeed, that is why they  
are not called satellite phones," Lewis quips.  "Nor does television  
(or radio), with the exception of DirectTV and satellite radio. So,  
you lose porn and Howard Stern, but PBS keeps going."  Even banks --  
which do use GPS to track the timing of their transactions -- have  
terrestrial, fiber optic backups.

"It is clear that the Air Force is preying on the lack of public  
understanding of the threat (and space in general) in an attempt to  
convince voters that space is important too and only the US Air Force  
can protect America in space,' Weeden notes.  "After years of trying  
to convince the politicians that areas such as space situational  
awareness needed more funding and failing, the Air Force has turned to  
another method to get its message across: fear."

Because Air Force Space Command can't even do that much against the  
kind of satellite-killing missile depicted in the ad, Hitchens observes.

     It's pretty nigh impossible to protect current LEO [Low Earth  
Orbit] sats unless you have time to move them (which is doubtful) and  
GEO sats are relatively safe only because of the booster power  
required to get something there. The primary USAF [US Air Force]  
efforts at space protection currently center of space situational  
awareness (knowing what is happening in space), and research on  
distributed architectures (i.e. constellations) and rapid resupply.   
The latter two capabilities once developed would help ensure redundant  
capability but it wouldn't "protect" any individual satellite from a  
DA [direct assent] ASAT [a satellite-striking missile that takes off  
from Earth]. There are also efforts to convince commercial folks to  
take steps like encryption and electromagnetic hardening; again  
nothing to help... The only sure way at the moment to protect against  
a DA ASAT is to bomb the launch pad before it takes off. The last time  
I checked, Air Force Space Command does not drop bombs.

The anti-satellite ad is part of an $81 million marketing push to  
"reinvigorate America's love for fighter jets and high technology, and  
to highlight the service's wartime activity," as the Washington Post  
put it.  Most of the commercials in the series make no explicit  
attempt to recruit new airmen.  And the service is currently looking  
to pare back, rather than increase, its workforce.

Which leads John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, to say, "I am  
at a loss to understand the statutory authority under which the US Air  
Force can spend my money in propagandizing to me that they are doing a  
great job of spending my money. This advertising initiative is without  
precedent, and if it is not illegal it should be."