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Alan W. Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes on the full range of topics relating to national defense, foreign policy and international security. Dowd’s commentaries and essays have appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, Military Officer, The American Legion Magazine, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, The Claremont Review of Books, World Politics Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Sacramento Bee, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, The Landing Zone, Current, The World & I, The American Enterprise, Fraser Forum, American Outlook, The American and the online editions of Weekly Standard, National Review and American Interest. Beyond his work in opinion journalism, Dowd has served as an adjunct professor and university lecturer; congressional aide; and administrator, researcher and writer at leading think tanks, including the Hudson Institute, Sagamore Institute and Fraser Institute. An award-winning writer, Dowd has been interviewed by Fox News Channel, Cox News Service, The Washington Times, The National Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and numerous radio programs across North America. In addition, his work has been quoted by and/or reprinted in The Guardian, CBS News, BBC News and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dowd holds degrees from Butler University and Indiana University. Follow him at twitter.com/alanwdowd.

ASCF News

Scott Tilley is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes the “Technical Power” column, focusing on the societal and national security implications of advanced technology in cybersecurity, space, and foreign relations.

He is an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was with the University of California, Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, and IBM. His research and teaching were in the areas of computer science, software & systems engineering, educational technology, the design of communication, and business information systems.

He is president and founder of the Center for Technology & Society, president and co-founder of Big Data Florida, past president of INCOSE Space Coast, and a Space Coast Writers’ Guild Fellow.

He has authored over 150 academic papers and has published 28 books (technical and non-technical), most recently Systems Analysis & Design (Cengage, 2020), SPACE (Anthology Alliance, 2019), and Technical Justice (CTS Press, 2019). He wrote the “Technology Today” column for FLORIDA TODAY from 2010 to 2018.

He is a popular public speaker, having delivered numerous keynote presentations and “Tech Talks” for a general audience. Recent examples include the role of big data in the space program, a four-part series on machine learning, and a four-part series on fake news.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Victoria (1995).

Contact him at stilley@cts.today.

Russia showed it can attack. Is U.S. Space Force ready to defend?

Friday, December 10, 2021

Categories: ASCF News Missile Defense

Comments: 0

Source: https://spacenews.com/on-national-security-russia-showed-it-can-attack-is-u-s-space-force-ready-to-defend/

Source: citizentruth.org

Russia’s anti-satellite missile test has raised calls for the United States and its allies to push for international norms to ban such tests.

But reaching an agreement on space arms control could take years or even decades. And until that happens, there is no guarantee Russia or another country won’t attempt to blow more satellites out of the sky, including those belonging to the United States.

The Russian military on Nov. 15 launched a Nudol ballistic missile that intercepted a defunct Soviet-era satellite in low Earth orbit. The U.S. government said the strike created an estimated 1,500 pieces of trackable debris. U.S. Space Command, as of Dec. 2, had identified orbits for 207 debris items from the event and will continue to catalog more objects in the coming weeks and months.

If Russia can destroy its own satellite, “you can bet that they can destroy an American satellite, military or commercial,” said Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno, director of staff of the U.S. Space Force.

The Space Force, established by Congress and the Trump administration two years ago as the sixth independent branch of the U.S. armed forces, is responsible for keeping space safe for military, civilian and commercial operations.

While the service has been derided as a vanity project of the former president, the recent Russian missile test is a reminder that the Space Force serves a legitimate role in national security.

U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, the top civilian leader of the Air Force and the Space Force, said Russia’s test was hugely irresponsible but served as a wake-up call.

Access to space is vital to national defense, Kendall said in an interview with SpaceNews. Further, the functions performed by satellites are woven into people’s daily lives, enable the global economy and are vital to U.S. military operations.

“The Space Force in terms of size is very small relative to the other services. But in terms of importance, it’s at least equal to the other services,” said Kendall. “If you cannot operate effectively in space and deal with the threats that you face from space, then it’s hard to conduct terrestrial operations. That’s increasingly true as technologies mature and people become more dependent on space and on the support functions you can get from space.”

The challenge for the Space Force, Kendall said, is to make its constellations more resilient to attacks, not just from missiles but from electronic jammers or lasers now being developed by China.

Kendall said this is not a traditional arms race where rival powers build up their forces and arsenals. China has been pursuing anti-satellite weapons for years, motivated by their assessment of satellites as “attackable assets the United States relies upon.”

How should the U.S. respond? “We need to get on with building resilient architectures,” he said. Work is underway to design future satellites with more maneuverability and deploy them in larger numbers to create disaggregated networks that would be harder to target.

The Pentagon’s deputy chief of space operations, Lt. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, noted that the satellites the U.S. military currently operates were not designed for space warfare. “When I started flying satellites, our primary concern was the longevity of the system. It was so expensive to put these capabilities on orbit that we did trend analysis on batteries and solar array efficiencies.”

These satellites clearly were not intended to operate in a “contested domain,” he said. “So now we have to shift.”

The Space Force stood up a warfighting analysis center to lead the design of future space architectures using modeling and simulations.

Saltzman cautioned that the transition to easier-to-defend systems would not happen overnight, but the Space Force is taking the first steps of what will be a long journey.

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