Reply #15: Chinese Threat to American Leadership in Space [View All]

[seemslikeadream]

“Deny Space to others”: the last chance to stop China

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As the situation currently stands, it is clear that the expression “to assure our continued access to space and deny the space to others if necessary” - recurrent, with little variations, in the US military plans - is specifically directed towards China. The Pentagon believes that China has the same intention towards the ousting the United States from Space, and considers its polemic declarations about the “rumoured” US plans of space weaponization - expressed in front of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space - as the weapon to diplomatically damage and slow down the action of the USA, while actively working in secret towards the same objective. According to Larry Wortzel, director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, the introduction by the Chinese of a draft treaty devised to act against the US's intent to develop space weapons is misleading (“…because they’re developing their own space-based weapons...”), having no other purpose than to diplomatically damage the USA and thus delay their Theater Missile Defense plan, while China continues with its own plans. According to Richard Fisher of The Jamestown Foundation, the People's Liberation Army is aware that the “control of space” concept - as theorized by the US military - is an objective that China must achieve: “China needs to be able to deny to the United States access and use of space, as they themselves exploit space to support their own forces”.

Several factors, therefore, let one foresee that the impact of the Space challenge between the USA and China will exceed previous expectations about the strategical-military use of Space (spy satellites) and the race to install weapons, both offensively and defensively (concepts that are difficult to distinguish from each other, particularly in regard to the US military ultimate objective to “deny Space to others, if necessary”, suggesting that the offensive dimension will prevail against the defensive one).

While we may not know much about the character of Chinese space policy (with the exception of the declarations of condemnation of any space weaponization plan -but the real intentions of China can be deduced from its will to expel the USA from its own area of infuence), we do know more about China's progress in Space. Meanwhile, it can be asserted definitively that the US is determined to maintain by all means possible (including denying the rest of the world access to Space) their own space leadership, the key to the “Full Spectrum Dominance” and the fundamental presupposition of the unipolar-imperialistic “New American Century”.

The relation between the space dimension and the imperialistic dimension (with “Manifest Destiny” echos) of the USA, is sealed by the conclusions of a book written in 1996 by arms experts George and Meredith Friedman: “Just as by the year 1500 it was apparent that the European experience of power would be its domination of the global seas, it does not take much to see that the American experience of power will rest on the domination of space. Just as Europe expanded war and its power to the global oceans, the United States is expanding war and its power into space and to the planets. Just as Europe shaped the world for a half a millennium so too the United States will shape the world for at least that length of time” - by dominating Space.

http://globalpolitician.com/articles.asp?ID=225