Strategic Defense Initiative

Space Weapons to Counter China and Russia

September 5, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Dave Makichuk August 28, 2020 (asiatimes.com)

• The Pentagon and President Trump consider space to be a warfighting domain on par with land, air and sea. And the newly established US Space Command indeed faces a clear and present danger. China has already tested anti-satellite missiles, while Russia has deployed on-orbit systems that could threaten US satellites. America’s adversaries now have the ability to use jammers, ground-based lasers, ground- and space-based kinetic weapons, attack ground facilities that support space operations or even carry out a nuclear detonation in space.

• “As a geographical combatant command focused on the space domain, those are the things that keep us up at night,” says Army National Guard Major General Tim Lawson. But Lawson told the virtual audience at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Space Warfighting Industry Forum (on August 21st) that America has new capabilities are on the way to mitigate the threat. But these capabilities classified as “black budget” projects, and he can’t tell you about them.

• “A lot of times you listen to that threat picture and you kind of get a little dismayed at what you’re seeing, but then you look at our side and — trust me — we’ve got some things coming. So, it’s good news,” said Lawson.

• Lawson highlighted the need to have resilient space architectures that utilize large networks of small communications and intelligence-gathering satellites that would be less vulnerable to enemy attacks. “If you had hundreds of small satellites up there in a constellation … the enemy can take out quite a few of those and it will really never have an impact on us,” he said. “That really is the resiliency piece that we’re seeking out there and we need.” The ‘Spacecom’ command is also interested in developments in space logistics such as on-orbit refueling or servicing of satellites. Lawson says that if American industry could put assets into orbit to overwhelm adversaries’ ability to shoot them down, “it would be a game-changer”.

• But it’s not the first time a US president has launched a major military defense project in space. President Ronald Reagan envisioned a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) as an array of space-based X-ray lasers would detect and deflect any nukes headed toward the United States. On March 23, 1983, Reagan called upon the US scientists who “gave us nuclear weapons to turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”

• But politicians and scientists argued that SDI was overambitious. Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy referred to it as Reagan’s ”reckless ‘Star Wars’ schemes.” The “Star Wars” moniker stuck. Over the course of 10 years, the government spent up to $30 billion on developing the concept without achieving operational status. It was scrapped by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

• [Editor’s Note] So where did this $30 billion go? By coincidence, the 1980’s was when the US Navy created and deployed its deep space fleet of eight oversized submarine-type warp drive spacecraft known as ‘Solar Warden’, unbeknownst to the public.

To say that officials at the newly established US Space Command face a clear and present danger, is an understatement.

America’s adversaries now have the ability to use jammers, ground-based lasers, ground- and space-based kinetic weapons, attack ground facilities that support space operations or even carry out a nuclear detonation in space.

China has already tested anti-satellite missiles, while Russia has deployed on-orbit systems that could threaten US satellites.

But according to Army National Guard Major General Tim Lawson, new capabilities are on the way to mitigate the threat — he just can’t tell you about them, because they are classified under the umbrella of “black budget” projects.

“As a geographical combatant command focused on the space domain, those are the things that keep us up at night,” said Lawson, who made the remarks at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Space Warfighting Industry Forum, which was held virtually due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I would love to sit behind some closed doors and have this discussion on some of the things we really think we need,” Lawson said when asked about the types of capabilities Spacecom is seeking.

“A lot of times you listen to that threat picture and you kind of get a little dismayed at what you’re seeing, but then you look at our side and — trust me — we’ve got some things coming. So, it’s good news.”

Significant portions of the US military’s space programs are classified, making it difficult for outside observers to know what’s coming down the pike.

Meanwhile, Lawson highlighted the need to have resilient space architectures that utilize large networks of small communications and intelligence-gathering satellites that would be less vulnerable to enemy attacks.

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Do We Want a Piece-Meal Space Force?

April 17, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Henry F. Cooper April 10, 2020 (newsmax.com)

• In the 1980s, during Ronald Reagan’s era of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), America’s defense against the enemy’s use of ballistic missiles was to create a space-based ballistic missile defense. The “Brilliant Pebbles” space-based interceptor system could shoot down Soviet missiles in their “boost phase,” while their rockets still burned and before they could release its warheads. Brilliant Pebbles was considered our most cost-effective SDI system.

• In 1972, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was signed wherein the U.S. would lead the way in reducing offensive nuclear weapons by agreeing to end the deployment of our Minuteman ICBMs. But it was dubious whether Russia also ended the production and use of its ICBMs. So Reagan turned to the space-based SDI program. At the 1986 Reykjavik Summit, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to negotiate the restriction of such space-based systems in principle, but Reagan refused to concede to this. Political observers say that this SDI system gave Reagan the leverage to negotiate a true bi-lateral reduction in nuclear weapon development and a ban on all Russian Mirved ICBMs. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stated: “SDI ended the Cold War without firing a shot.”

• In 1993, Clinton Administration Defense Secretary Les Aspin returned to a defense strategy based on “mutual assured destruction” by strengthening the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, and abandoning the SDI program. Then in 2002, the George W. Bush administration withdrew from the ABM Treaty altogether, without reviving the SDI program. This is where things stand today.

• Now, the Department of Defense is concerned about Russia’s hypersonic missiles able to evade our ballistic missile defenses. A ‘boost-phase’ SDI system would have been able to defeat these hypersonic missile systems. The development of the ‘Brilliant Pebbles’ system might have discouraged the Russians from developing such a next-generation ballistic missile system to deliver nuclear weapons in the first place.

• Now America’s strategy seems to be a new hypersonic nuclear weapon arms race with Russia, even though the U.S. ended its development of hypersonic weapons decades ago. We seem to have abandoned any interest in space-based missile defenses to defeat these new hypersonic weapons.

• Current plans for the new US Space Force reveal an inability to defend against the growing offensive intercontinental ballistic missile threat, particularly those with hypersonic capabilities. The Trump administration’s apparent strategy is to play “catch-up” with Russian and Chinese hypersonic missile capabilities, and to rely on the Cold War scenario of mutual assured destruction as a defense strategy.

• This article’s writer, Henry Cooper, served as Reagan’s chief Defense and Space Talks negotiator with the Soviet Union, and later he served as SDI Director in the George H.W. Bush administration. Cooper advocates a return to a Reagan-era SDI program by deploying 1,000 Brilliant Pebbles for $20 billion, to be operational within 5 years.

• [Editor’s Note] Perhaps this article’s writer, Henry Cooper, and others are missing a big piece of the puzzle. What if our global “space race” went far beyond the hypersonic ballistic missiles that the public is aware of? What if there were numerous secret space programs having technology far beyond ICBM or SDI technology? And what if we already had orbital platforms in space that could shoot energy beams and kinetic energy weapons at any target or missile on Earth? Such a reality would render ballistic nuclear missile treaties and Reagan-era space-based missile defense systems moot.

Current plans for the new U.S. Space Force and its implied underpinning strategy reveal a key deficiency — an ability to defend against the growing offensive intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) threat, particularly those that employ hypersonic capabilities.

In effect, the Trump administration’s funding priorities display an apparent strategy to play “catch-up” with the growing Russian and Chinese hypersonic threat capabilities — and to rely totally on the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) strategy of the Cold War.

Do we really want a new Cold War, now involving a multilateral offensive nuclear arms race?

Ronald Reagan had a very different idea based on a vital role for truly effective ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems that could defeat such threatening ballistic missiles.

In President Reagan’s administration, that idea led to his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) that emphasized space-based defenses. I was privileged to serve as his chief Defense and Space Talks negotiator defending his perspective with the Soviet Union — and later to serve as SDI Director during the George H.W. Bush administration.

Space-based defenses always had a central role during the SDI era — 1983 until early 1993 when Defense Secretary Les Aspin “took the stars out of Star Wars,” ending Ronald Reagan’s vision and heralding a return to the MAD doctrine of strengthening the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty “as the cornerstone of strategic stability,” as became the oft-stated claim of the Clinton administration.

And even though the George W. Bush administration withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002, nothing was done to revive the central role of the most cost-effective product of the SDI era — the Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptor system.

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Human Evolution Will Soon Turn Geometric

October 2, 2019
ExoNews Editor

EXONEWS FLASHBACK
Listen to “E112 10-2-19 Human Evolution Will Soon Turn Geometric” on Spreaker.
Article by Come Carpentier De Gourdon November 1, 2016 (sundayguardianlive.com)

• [This article is from 2016, but is highly relevant today. The writer, Come Carpentier de Gourdon, is the Convener of the Editorial Board of the World Affairs Journal, a quarterly publication sponsored by the Kapur Surya Foundation in New Delhi, India. He has lived and traveled in more than fifty countries on four continents. He is an associate of the International Institute for Social and Economic Studies (IISES), Vienna, Austria, and a consultant to various companies and foundations in India and Europe. He is also the author of various books and over 200 articles and essays on such topics as the history of culture and science, geopolitics, exopolitics, and philosophy.]

• In 1992, I (De Gourdon) was in Moscow discussing the economic disarray after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union with the Deputy Chairman of the KGB and a military intelligence general. The KGB boss said, “[T]he Americans are trying to take away the most valuable inventions. Our country must be reorganised to protect itself.” “Our best scientists and engineers are leaving because we cannot pay them.”

• I brought up the secret Blue Files. The KGB boss remarked, “The Blue Files are our equivalent of the US Blue Book.” Over the years I had learnt about the extensive work that American scientists had done to reverse-engineer downed interstellar craft, which have been observed for centuries, if not millennia. In a conversation with the director of the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1987, he conceded that Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ project was mainly a cover for an ongoing multi-national endeavor to build a space shield, intended to protect mankind from a feared invasion by highly advanced organizations operating in outer space.

• Ten years later I was able to connect the dots with the publishing of the book: The Day After Roswell by Colonel Philip Corso, which related how an undisclosed array of military satellites equipped with weapons capable of hitting incoming targets from outside the atmosphere had been deployed. We needed a protective system from alien forces more than arms to fight each other. This protective system was set up in the greatest secrecy through a panoply of “black” programs consuming untold billions of dollars. All those without a need to know would be kept in the dark. Too much was at stake.

• Back in 1954, President Eisenhower had met with a team of extraterrestrial envoys and entered a treaty for technology transfers, reportedly to fend off other dangerous and predatory species from outer space. To facilitate this transfer, “sanctuaries” had been allocated for those extraterrestrial guests to reside and operate away from prying eyes. The ETs would make subtle neural and genetic modifications in certain humans in order to make them intellectually capable of working in an expanded technological reality. The U.S., Russia, Canada and Australia among others had set aside vast, inaccessible areas where closed communities of technicians worked under the strictest protocols, and where national laws did not apply.

• In the beginning, these sanctuary communities experienced an ‘incubation period’. The UFO issue went underground, beneath a cloak of official denial and censorship. But it was promised that, once this new knowledge burst out, progress would become ‘exponential’. This occurred at the end of the 20th century with multiple validations and confirmations as pertinent documents were gradually declassified or leaked.

• Human evolution has gone at an arithmetic pace over the last few centuries. Soon it will become a geometric progression. We will discover travel at the speed of light, how to increase our lifespan and eradicate disease, and how to accumulate knowledge endlessly with the aid of cyber-electronics. Our brains and senses will merge with information networks. Computers and robots will harness the laws of quantic physics and will no longer be assembled, but grown like biological beings. We will create things out of subquantic stuff with plasma waveguides and machines of the size of atomic particles.”

• Military officers and civilians in positions of authority told De Gourdon during the 1980s and 1990s: “We will cease to be humans; we know that is possible because those we are following are already there. They move in unified field space-time in their subtle bodies and vehicles which they can materialize or tele-transport at will and they visit the past and the future like pages of a book opened at leisure without any particular order.” We now can see this transhumanist process at work. Yet it carries the gravest threats to our survival.

• Electromagnetic pulse and zero-point energy, warp drive propulsion, quantum radars and communication systems, gravito-magnetic engines, 3D printing, Artificial Intelligence, molecular and atomic machines, the interplanetary Internet of Things—all have obvious and terrifying applications for warfare. Their development is driven by defense labs and then quietly outsourced to military-industrial corporations. New companies are hatched out of Silicon Valley garages when algorithms and formulas come into the hands of whiz-kid entrepreneurs discreetly funded by government-related “angel investors”.

• In a leaked correspondence from former Apollo astronaut Dr Edgar Mitchell to John Podesta, the special adviser to President Barack Obama in the summer of 2014, Mitchell relates: “Five decades of UFO information have dramatically shifted the public awareness of an extraterrestrial presence. And yet, our government is still operating from outdated beliefs and policies.” “Three disclosure issues are prominent: 1) planet sustainability via next generation energies such as zero point energy, 2) galactic travel and research undertaken as an advanced species aware of the extraterrestrial presence, not as uninformed explorers who revert to colonialism and destruction, and 3) the example of a confident, engaged government who respectfully regards the wisdom and intellect of its citizens as we move into space.”

• Still, only a fraction of the cosmic disclosure iceberg has yet emerged out of the dark ocean of official secrecy.

Statements made in this article are documented, but many readers may prefer to view them as “faction”: speculations and inferences based on real facts.

On a grey spring afternoon of 1992, I was in a restaurant near the Lubyanka in Moscow. Across from me were the Deputy Chairman of the KGB (6th Directorate) and a General from the GRU. Those were gloomy days in Russia, an economic disarray after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.

My hosts, like several other officials, were working to find solutions to the crisis. Investments from abroad were sought in many sectors, including secretive high tech industries related to space, psychic research and warfare, but the KGB boss made his views clear: “We could go into joint ventures with other nations on certain projects,” he said, “but the Americans are trying to take away the most valuable inventions. Our country must be reorganised to protect itself. We are being ruined and will become a Third World nation otherwise. Our best scientists and engineers are leaving because we cannot pay them.”

In the United States in previous years, I had noticed the frequent arrivals of Soviet scientific teams into American universities. The visitors worked in frontier areas of research. In Moscow, I had been taken to some laboratories and given cryptic briefings on esoteric projects: parapsychology, bio-electromagnetics, plasma and lasers. However, I went to the point and I brought up the Blue Files. The two officials remained impassive, but they did not draw the curtain as I suspected they might.

“The Blue Files are our equivalent of the US Blue Book,” the KGB Deputy Chairman said matter-of-factly. “For decades we collaborated with certain NATO states on many aspects of our investigations. Now that we are down, the US wants to leave us far behind but we will keep our aces.”

I had learnt a lot over the years in America about the extensive work done to reverse-engineer awe-inspiring, exotic technologies retrieved from downed interstellar craft that are frequently tracked in the sky or spotted when they land. They have been observed for centuries, if not millennia. During a conversation held in 1987 in Boulder, Colorado the director of the Strategic Defense Initiative had conceded that Ronald Reagan’s controversial Star Wars project was mainly a cover for an ongoing multi-national endeavour to build a space shield, intended to protect mankind from a feared invasion by highly advanced organisations operating in outer space.

Ten years later in 1997, the “Holy Grail” appeared when Colonel Philip Corso’s book, The Day after Roswell was published. Corso, a veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, disclosed many secrets and connected the dots. I then understood better why an undisclosed array of military satellites equipped with weapons capable of hitting incoming targets from outside the atmosphere had been deployed. The superpowers had concluded that we needed a protective system from alien forces more than arms to fight each other, although the former did not exclude the latter.

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Tag: Strategic Defense Initiative

Space Weapons to Counter China and Russia

Do We Want a Piece-Meal Space Force?

Human Evolution Will Soon Turn Geometric