More Sunday Perspective

• Wish List: Nonprofit organizations requests for help
• Perspective: Drawing the Line
• Phil Lewis: Press-ing issues, Naples forum

Tell us about it

• What would you add to this story? Tell us what we missed.
• Do you have photos from this event? Documents we need to see? Share with us.
• Upload photos & videos
• More ways to get your stuff online and in the paper.

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

Share and Enjoy [?]

There’s a space battle going on right now. But it’s not happening in the wild black yonder, with spacecraft zapping lasers at one another. It’s happening in Washington, mostly, and in the upper echelons of the U.S. Air Force.

The battle is over how our military should deal with operations in space. The Air Force, of course, is in charge of most military aviation. Since the advent of artificial satellites, in the late 1950s, the Air Force has assumed control of most of the nation’s military space operations as well.

Official Air Force policy is that the aerospace environment is one continuous theater of operations. Airplanes or spacecraft, as long it flies, it falls under Air Force control.

However, some Air Force officers feel that space is a very different operating environment, quite distinct from flying planes in the air. They are pushing for a space command that is a separate branch of the Air Force or perhaps even a space force that is totally separated from the Air Force itself.

This kind of struggle is nothing new to the military. Before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy was divided between traditional “battleship admirals” and the relatively younger proponents of aircraft carriers, who saw air power as the primary striking force of a modern navy. The Japanese helped to solve that dilemma by sinking most of the battleships of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor — using carrier-based planes to do the job.

The Navy became, perforce, based on aircraft carriers, whose planes eventually put the Japanese Imperial Navy on the bottom of the Pacific.

More recently, the Navy’s “submarine admirals” have been heard grumbling that in a full-scale war aircraft carriers would be little more than fat targets, while missile-carrying submarines are now the heart of the Navy’s striking power.

The Air Force itself began as part of the U.S. Army, and had to struggle to gain its independent status. All through World War II, our fliers were in the U.S. Army Air Forces. It wasn’t until 1947 that the Air Force became an independent service.

Now we have a move to separate space forces from air forces. Does it matter?

Space is vital to our national well-being. Instant worldwide communications, weather monitoring, global navigation systems all depend on satellites orbiting the Earth. A single Hiroshima-sized nuclear bomb exploded in low Earth orbit could knock out most of the satellites over that hemisphere, crippling Wall Street and business firms large and small, including your local banks and pharmacies, cutting off television broadcasts and telephone service, global positioning system (GPS) signals and more.

Our military forces spread around the world depend on satellites, too, for communications, weather data, global positioning, surveillance, targeting, etc.

Is space important enough to have its own military service, like the ground, ocean and air arenas?

The official position of the Air Force is that the aerospace environment is a single theater of operations, therefore the Air Force is perfectly capable of handling space matters. Physically, this is not so. Airplanes can’t operate in space, where there is no air, and spacecraft can’t orbit in the atmosphere, where air friction would burn them to cinders.

Space is different strategically too. Satellites orbit the entire Earth. Space operations are inherently global in scope.

Space advocates fear that the Air Force is run by “airplane generals” who regard space as of secondary importance. They point out that space efforts don’t get the attention, or the funding, that is due to such an important aspect of the nation’s defense. In truth, the space advocates are making much the same argument that the fliers made when they were struggling to establish an independent Air Force.

The Allard Commission on U.S. national security in space (named after its sponsor, Colorado Sen. Wayne Allard) recently recommended a bold new course for the nation’s military stance in space.

The commission recommended merging the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) with the space-related sections of the Air Force into a single, new entity that would be independent of the Air Force. The new entity would be called the National Security Space Authority.

NRO was created during the Cold War to handle satellite reconnaissance of Soviet Russia and other regions of importance to our security.

Any such recommendations raise cries against the “militarization” of space. Most Americans feel that space should be kept free of the military. But that pious hope was shattered in 1944, when Nazi Germany started firing V-2 missiles at London and Amsterdam.

Nuclear bomb-carrying missiles spend most of their flight times in space. Russia and China have both demonstrated anti-satellite weapons. Our armed forces depend on satellites every day. Space is already militarized.

You might as well complain about the “militarization” of the high seas. Nations have created navies to protect their interests on the oceans, and nations — or terrorist groups — will use space to achieve their own goals. As more and more of our commerce and industry come to depend on space for communications and other purposes, our satellites will become tempting targets for enemies. We must be ready and able to protect them — and, if necessary, to deny access to space to those who would harm us.

“Men cry peace, peace,” Patrick Henry warned long ago, “but there is no peace.” Sadly, that is the fact wherever human interests clash, whether it’s Bunker Hill or orbital space.

And a couple of thousand years earlier, the Greek historian Thucydides warned his fellow Athenians that, distasteful as it may be, it is necessary to be ready to defend what you hold dear: “To you who call yourselves men of peace, I say: You are not safe unless you have men of action at your side.” Let’s hope that the space battle now under way in Washington will allow us to protect and defend ourselves in space, as we do on Earth.

Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of nearly 120 books, including “Mars Life,” his latest futuristic novel. Bova’s Web site address is www.benbova.com.