Anti-satellite Weapons, Deterrence and Sino-American Space Relations.

摘要

US national security experts spend years studying, seeking to avoid and sometimes helping to mediate or prosecute conflicts. Over time, veteran policy hands in the executive and legislative branches, as well as academia, thinks tanks and the media, come to believe that they understand all the important dimensions of security. And yet, for most, one dimension space presents a significant gap in their understanding. Space s importance is major, growing and underappreciated inside the Washington Beltway. Over a half century ago, the US-Soviet space race captured the imagination of the American people, and the manned space program from the 1960s onward bred national competence in the design, manufacture and launch of rockets, satellites and payloads with ever-greater capabilities. Scientific study, helped by access to space, flourished. Civil and military use of space-based communications grew fast as the internet, personal computing and cellular telephony gained widespread adoption beginning in the 1990s. By the end of the decade, the Pentagon recognized that the US military had developed a dependence on spaced-based communications, such that a sudden denial of space-enabled information in wartime could impair the effectiveness of combat units.