Tales of the United States Space Force, page 15
Indeed, in a 1962 interview with journalist Merle Miller, President Truman reportedly said he had been “damn glad” when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik because it had demonstrated the principle of free overflight and made it easier for the United States to launch its own reconnaissance satellites. Whether that’s really true, the legal principle has since been instrumental in making impending attack or military buildup increasingly difficult to conceal, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And of course, that’s not all. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S. military began to develop and deploy early-warning and surveillance satellites for use in missile defense. The Air Force also began to develop and test antisatellite (ASAT) weapons, which were designed to destroy enemy satellites in orbit.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. military continued to develop and deploy advanced surveillance and communication satellites, as well as space-based missile defense systems. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan proposed a bold initiative to use American technical know-how to “render nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” Never mind the trillion dollar price tag, the over-ambitious goals, the vulnerability of such technology to on-obit attack, the risk of disrupting the balance of power that for over thirty years had staved off the next world war or the fact that an adversary, deprived of intercontinental missiles, might be tempted to use sleeper agents with delivery trucks instead. Never mind all that, the nation had yet another space-defense-related component to staff, fund, and manage.
And observers started to see that as the real problem. By the end of World War II, air combat had developed in breadth and import to a point that made the need for a dedicated service branch obvious, but space technology and defense concerns emerged slowly. Control of missiles was given to the Army, because the Army used rockets as long-range artillery. Then it moved to the Air Force, which used missiles in place of strategic bombers, and the Navy, which used them in a whole new class of strategic weapon, the ballistic missile submarine.
Today’s U.S. space defense efforts descend from postwar and Cold War antiballistic missile defense and the Cold War use of space as a high ground from which to conduct surveillance. For decades, government space activity was strongly segregated into three parts, the civil space program run by NASA, intelligence gathering mostly by the National Reconnaissance Office and the CIA, and nuclear missile deterrence and defense, which itself was distributed across an ever-changing mosaic of military organizations.
By the 1990s, the Soviet Union was gone, and with it much of the Cold War threat of a widespread missile attack. But at the same time, technology had marched on, bringing new fears of terrorism, and rogue nuclear states, and making space increasingly central to the entire global economy. Threats, some said, were being missed and undervalued, important work was being lost in the bureaucratic cracks.
Simplifying a bit, the United States Armed Forces consist of six military service branches under three military departments, plus two executive departments and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At any given time, it also comprises multiple Unified Combatant Commands, each of which consists of units drawn from two or more service branches to fulfill some broad and continuing mission.
One such unified combatant command was the Air Force Space Command formed in 1982 to handle various aspects of procurement, launch, operation, and defense of space assets and access required by the various service branches. AFSPC comprised 26,000 personnel at facilities all over the world, launched satellites from both coasts, maintained a worldwide network of satellite tracking stations, and operated ground-based radars, optical tracking stations, and all manner of advanced sensors to protect the United States and its interests from ballistic missile attack, orbital space attack, and threats from deep space (asteroids).
Space Command itself was formed from space-related units scattered across the Armed Forces as rocketry matured from advanced artillery to strategic deterrent, and space from the province of science fiction to a vital theater of military and commercial interests. These units principally included Aerospace Defense Command (established in 1968 from units involved in Air Defense since World War II), Air Force Systems Command (established in 1951), and the Strategic Air Command (established in 1946 with the creation of the United States Army Air Force).
So much for the history, which convoluted and somewhat arcane though it may be, illustrates clearly the decades-long debate over how best to incorporate rapidly progressing space and rocketry capabilities into existing military organizations. And in this, the U.S. was not alone. Russian space defense has jumped from the old Soviet Air Force to a dedicated space defense and antisatellite force, back to a more general aerospace defense force, and more recently back to a dedicated “Space Force.” Similarly, Chinese space defense has at various times been combined with, or split from, its civilian space science programs and national cybersecurity efforts.
The first proposal for a U.S. military service branch for space defense was in 1957, when in the shadow of Sputnik, congressmen joined then secretary of the Air Force Donald Quarles in proposing the creation of a separate military service branch for space, known as the “Space Corps.” The proposal, in hindsight significantly ahead of its time, went nowhere, and instead the Air Force was given primary responsibility to develop and manage the military’s space capabilities.
Then, during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, calls were again made for a dedicated Space Corps. Chief among these came from Air Force General James Hartinger, then commander in chief of U.S. Space Command. He argued that given the increasing importance of space as a domain of military operations, the Air Force was not giving it the attention it needed and that a separate space corps would better address the problem.
Then in 1986, a report by the Defense Science Board Task Force on Space, headed by then secretary of the Air Force Edward “Pete” Aldridge, also called for creation of a space corps. The report argued that the Air Force had failed to develop a coherent space strategy and that a separate space corps would better address the problem. These proposals too, however, went nowhere.
The idea resurfaced in 2001 while George W. Bush was in the White House. Air Force Chief of Staff General John Jumper and other senior Air Force leaders again proposed creating a Space Corps as a way to better organize and manage military space operations. The idea, this time formally presented by the Rumsfeld Space Commission, was to create a separate service branch within the Department of the Air Force responsible for military space operations, similar to how the Marine Corps is a separate service branch within the Department of the Navy.
The proposal again failed to garner support, but in 2016, the final report from the congressionally mandated, Obama-era National Defense Panel made essentially the same recommendation yet again, and Republican Representative Mike Rogers added a provision to act on it into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2017. However, committee negotiations dropped the provision from the final bill. Instead, the NDAA tasked the secretary of defense with conducting yet another study on the establishment of a Space Corps within the Department of the Air Force. The study was to assess the potential benefits and drawbacks of creating a separate military branch focused on space, as well as the feasibility and costs associated with doing so.
The next year, Republican Representative Mike Rogers, on the House Armed Services Committee, again proposed an amendment to the NDAA for 2018 creating a Space Corps within the Department of the Air Force. Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson did, too, but the new Trump administration, which had taken office in January 2017, wanted nothing to do with it. In fact the new secretary of defense, James Mattis, spoke out against it, and took the unusual step of intervening to request removal of the proposals, saying the sixty-one-year-old idea needed yet more study.
But by now, threats to America’s space assets were becoming less theoretical. The Chinese and the Russian Federation had both created huge orbital debris clouds by testing direct-assent antisatellite weapons. China was known to be developing a wide range of military space technologies, including direct-ascent kinetic kill vehicles, co-orbital satellites, directed-energy weapons, jammers, and cyber capabilities. China had tested a satellite system believed capable of grappling another satellite, towing it to a new orbit, or cutting off its solar panels. A Russian satellite, Kosmos 2499, had approached a U.S. surveillance satellite close enough to force it to take evasive action.
Representative Jim Cooper (D-TN), then ranking member of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee on the House Armed Services Committee, had worked with Representative Rogers for years on legislation to establish a space service and on efforts to convince others in government, arguing that the U.S. military was not sufficiently focused on space and that the country was falling dangerously behind in space defense capabilities. In this environment of heightened concerns, the two lobbied other members of Congress and promoted their ideas to the public and the new president, negotiating the details of the new service with other legislators and together, agreeing to call it a “force” rather than a “corps.” This negotiated proposal made it into the final version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2020 that was passed by Congress and signed into law on December 20, 2019.
After that, Jim Cooper, who’d originally been skeptical of the idea, issued a statement congratulating the Air Force and Space Force on their successful collaboration in the creation of the new service branch which, he said “should make America stronger and more competitive in space.” Mike Rogers, who’d been a vocal proponent of the Space Force for years, praised the establishment of the new branch as “ensuring our strategic advantage in the final frontier.” Both Cooper and Rogers acknowledged the bipartisan nature of their efforts to establish a separate military branch focused on space, and expressed optimism for the future of U.S. space policy.
In the final analysis, however you feel about the man who signed the paperwork, the Space Force was created not by Mr. Trump but by Congress, and after literally decades of consideration and debate.
* * *
*The Roswell Report: Fact Versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert: McAndrew, James: Headquarters, United States Air Force.↩
It’s Classified
Martin L. Shoemaker
“Moron,” I said to myself under my breath as the latest test run once again glitched.
I don’t know why I said it under my breath. It’s not like there was anyone else around to hear me. The guards were around somewhere, and certainly cameras were recording anything I said. But I doubted the guards cared that I called myself a moron when chasing down a really difficult bug in the code.
What code? Sorry, it’s classified. As a fully cleared contractor to Space Force, I know what I’m not allowed to talk about. The nature of my assignment is not subject to disclosure.
There are things you could pick up from public records. It’s not like our enemies can’t. But still . . . The phrase “I can neither confirm nor deny” is one they trained us to use often.
I’m a software contractor at the Space Force facility in Nebraska, which specializes in orbital object detection, identification, and tracking. It’s public record that my thesis was on the mathematics of multidimensional variances and moments as applied to shape recognition.
So no, if I didn’t just spell it out for you, I can’t spell it out for you. But in general terms, our latest software was crashing. I can tell you that without telling you what it was. There was something that only happened with real data. No matter what test data I used to validate the code, I never saw this crash in test. But after five, ten, or fifteen minutes of a real data stream, the whole system would crash, and take nearly thirty minutes to set up for another run. As you might imagine, the base commander was not happy with that—nor with me, nor my company. So I was working as many extra hours as the military would let me. It was a sign of Colonel Hale’s frustration that he authorized me working so late—under constant guard, of course, but it was still unusual. It wasn’t a threat to national security, but it was making his command look bad, and he wanted that to stop.
I added diagnostics all throughout the code, but to no avail. Wherever the bug hid, it wasn’t someplace I could even imagine to put diagnostic code. Out of frustration, I stopped trying to diagnose the code, and I started trying to diagnose the data. Set by set, entity by entity, I started looking for patterns in the test data that weren’t in the real data—or vice versa.
Something was different between the test entities and the real entities. No, I can’t tell you what an “entity” is in this context, the definition is classified. It’s a thing in a data stream gathered by a classified system using classified instruments pointed at classified targets within a classified field. From the code’s point of view, it’s just a hunk of data in a larger sea of data.
I spent another two hours with two screens up, one with real entities and one with test entities, trying to discern the differences. I’d put significant effort into randomizing the edges of the test entities so they weren’t smooth like an artist’s creation. My girlfriend Kylie might’ve looked at representations of the entities and picked up the differences. She has that artist’s eye that I lack. But as best I could tell, by eye or by data analysis, the character of real data and the character of test data were fundamentally the same. I just couldn’t see what was different, and the math couldn’t either.
Well, except for one object in the real data. That one was . . . different. Size, cohesiveness, albedo . . . No, scratch that, you never heard me mention albedo. But there were a number of factors that made it different from the other entities in the data field. I tried to visualize it from the data, but it didn’t match my experience. Was that anomaly the cause of the crash?
I couldn’t say it wasn’t, not without tracking the exact moment when the anomaly emerged within the data and comparing it to the timing of the crash. I spent another hour playing the data stream back and forth, looking for any correlation.
After an hour, I still had nothing. I was falling into the common debugging trap: assuming that because I saw one anomaly, it had to explain another anomaly. That two different anomalies don’t happen at the same time without reason. Assuming that can bite you in the ass.
But the other thing that can bite you in the ass is ignoring that coincidence might equal cause. And that’s why I love my job. So many easy answers, so many wrong answers. I live to find the right answers.
I was scrolling the video back to view the anomaly’s passage one more time, when I heard the crisp clack of boot heels on tile. I checked my clock just as Lieutenant France’s voice said, “Mr. Simpson, it’s time to pack up.”
“Roger, Lieutenant,” I answered before he could even come around the partition wall and into my work area. “Let me just make some notes here.”
“Now, Mr. Simpson,” he said.
I spread my hands. “Now?”
He gave a small smile and nodded. “One minute, Mr. Simpson. Pack it up.”
France had escorted me from the premises on many long nights in the past month. He was a good officer. He followed orders, but he knew just how much liberty he had to interpret them to fit the situation. The colonel really wouldn’t care about a couple minutes here or there in the schedule, not when I was trying to save his project; but by being firm, France ensured that he was covered in his reports—and then by giving me an extra couple of minutes, he knew he wasn’t interfering with my work, either.
So I made some notes in the metadata for the test set and the real set, and I particularly noted the timestamps where the anomaly came in. I could pick up with those tomorrow, but I didn’t want to forget.
Not that I was likely to. Kylie said I was obsessive about the data, that I had to understand everything. I didn’t want to say she was right, but she was close. I was no good at letting go of a puzzle. I probably wouldn’t sleep well that night.
I was still thinking about the anomaly when I got home. I hated letting that anomaly just sit there, unresolved, even if only for one night.
And it wasn’t just my obsession that was driving me. The glitch in the system had almost eaten through our bonus, and soon we would be into charge-backs. The longer the system was delayed, the lower our profit margins got. In another two weeks, we’d be into the red. My bosses at Warriner would not be happy about that.
So when I walked up the stairs to our apartment, I was still thinking over the problem. Oh, only in my head. I had no data to work with. The Space Force systems were kept in a secure chamber within the base. My work computers were in there; and there they would stay, permanently, paid for property of the U.S. government. Their data never left there through any channel I had access to. And God help me if any of the data ever left with me, on any sort of mechanism! You had to leave phone, Fitbit, Bluetooth headpiece, even USB desk toys all in a secure drawer outside the quarantine zone. Every contractor who went in there received a lecture that if we ever were ever caught taking any data out, even accidentally, we would be subject to a strip search every time we exited or entered for the duration of the contract. And if that didn’t get through to us, they’d move up to cavity searches.
So I didn’t have any data with me; but the one thing they can’t make you leave in quarantine is your brain. Your memories, your experience, your intuition . . . You get to keep those.
“Kylie, I’m home!” I shouted as I closed the apartment door, but I got no answering shout. I went into the kitchen, and I noticed a note stuck to the refrigerator. Peter, Professor K is taking us to an art exhibit. Sorry you couldn’t join us. Next time? But she followed it with a smile. She knew the chances of that were slim. There was one final bit at the end: Roast beef in the fridge is for you. I hope you found your glitch. WE deserve a break. She underlined we. She’d been saying lately that we needed things when she really meant I did. I found it annoying, but also endearing. She meant that I was overworked, and she wasn’t wrong. I just didn’t see an answer for it; and being reminded of something I couldn’t fix only made me more irritated.
