[Opinion] Business Week: Satellites: The Pentagon’s Big Blind Spot

[jodeexue]

Business Week on Oct 28 published an article entitled Satellite: The Pentagon’s Big Blind Spot, analyzing the invunerablity of the US toward China’s attack from space.

The Article said that since the first missile launch of China in January 2007, the military experts of the US have become concerned about that space could become the next battleground for global conflicts. Their particular concerns lies in the lack of visibility with some missile strikes.

The US major Satellites allocation picture

Some experts say that if an enemy were to launch a similar attack against an American satellite over the Southern Hemisphere, the U.S. military might not know about it. The southern half of the world is something of a blind spot for military space tracking systems, say both senior defense officials involved in space policy and private satellite operators.

The U.S. military uses land-based radar to track its satellites, but it has no such radar installations in the Southern Hemisphere. The gap is a legacy of the Cold War, when the U.S. was focused on missile threats from the Soviet Union, and there were no nuclear-armed adversaries in the Southern Hemisphere.

The U.S. military is heavily reliant on satellite systems for communications, the targeting of sophisticated weapons, and spying, with 104 active military satellites. In recent years the military has used satellites to guide unmanned Predator drones that launched missiles to assassinate suspected militants in the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The loss of a single spy or communications satellite could have a serious impact on military readiness because many systems don't have backup.

simulated picture of the US 2nd & 3rd GPS Satellite