For the decision makers of today, it is clear that space is but another arena of international tension. Various diplomatic channels and treaties continue to safeguard the different powers’ clashes against more fatal crises or conflicts, but the reality is that the military Research and Development (R&D) continues to utilise space programs for defensive and offensive weapons alike. The 1983 Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) was the steppingstone of the United States’ (US) counteract against the space and Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) nuclear threats; there are even those who argue that it would need some degree of resurrection. This article aims to retrace and comment on the past and present implications of the SDI and its grounding on the warfighting domain of space.
By PABLO VILLAR BOLAÑOS
SDI, above all, was an exceptional policy initiative. In terms of relevance, it would be hard to overstate the international effect it once held; some say that it was one of the key military programmes in the entire 20th century. Most certainly, it was an unexpected step for the Reagan presidency, tinged with worldwide controversy.
Nowadays, however, several North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states have dedicated military space commands (France and the United Kingdom, for instance) while NATO’s Allied Air Command has also restructured itself to the space’s defence element too. The militarisation of space is not only a reality, but a capability that is no longer exclusive to global superpowers.
Space security is a concept that is weighing in with greater importance in today’s national security debates. The War in Ukraine, for example, has highlighted the importance of satellite communications once more. The much-publicised warnings of some states, such as the potential Russian Nuclear Anti Satellite Weapon, have led some authors to preconceive that combat actions will most surely extend into space in the coming years [1].
In response to this challenge, and incorporating the defence industries’ technical advancements in the core platforms for specialised space defence assets, the doctrine and security planning in the coming years will need to reassess its stance and measures for inter-agency and international coordination. The SDI experience, thus, could be exploited by both industry and government to better tackle the space-based missile defence plans.
A history of Reagan’s “missile-killer”
In early 1983, the US government publicly announced its decision to modify its nuclear strategy, leaving the era of nuclear deterrence behind, and focusing on the defensive forces instead. The launching of the SDI, a “means of rendering nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete”, was to rally an impressive array of scientists, military officers, economists, industrialists and politicians in a community effort that was only second to the Manhattan or the Apollo projects, per President Reagan’s speech [2].
The US had begun to develop missile defence systems in 1946, and implemented the “Sentinel” and “Safeguard” systems in the following decades. However, by 1972, Washington’s higher spheres decided to abandon those aforenoted projects; instead, the US would come to sign the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM). The public, and the Washington DC crowd especially, was not expecting a development of this type; they thought that the general consensus had been established on reducing the nuclear tensions by controlling the arsenal and silos, not by actively pursuing new technologies to destroy them, worst of all, in space. The sheer surprise for the vast majority of the American (and global) public at the beginning of the project cannot be overstated.
Other criticisms soon followed. The SDI seemed to garner a considerable number of questions around it, and those went wide beyond strategic considerations. What was the objective of the SDI, for once? Was it to develop a real space shield, changing the face of American nuclear strategy, and its stance towards the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)? Was it a mere travesty, a much-funded fantasy to gain some weight in the international balance of power?
There is some truth in those initial doubts and negative preconceptions and assessments for the SDI. A window of vulnerabilities was perceived (or even existed) in the 1980s in relation to Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) and the newer, more deadly Russian “monster” missiles. Western societies, fully aware of the dangers of nuclear technology, weaponry, and above all, their strategic component, were wary of the Soviet re-entry to the international bargaining table.
The Anti-Satellite (ASAT) technology of the USSR, moreover, continued to threaten and destabilise the space programs of the West, and added to the notions of vulnerability of the satellites that supported the land, sea and air forces operations globally. Reagan himself noted that ‘satellites can track a glove lost by an astronaut that is still circling the earth, they can track the missiles all the way from firing to know their time of arrival and their targets, and yet […] we cannot stop any of the weapons that are coming at us’ [3]. For the proponents of the new program, this defensive step would be key to redress the international balance of power, and to establish a new kind of national security for the coming decades.
Aside from nuclear security considerations, the SDI could be seen as an impactful counterblow from an economic standpoint as well. By the 1980s, the US was beginning to lose its number one status in regard to the computer and electronic engineering industry to the Japanese - an incredible fact for the nation who had invented computers, microchips, integrated circuits or transistors only a few decades earlier. SDI, consequently, was also a “economic revival”, in some other way, a technological offensive to be conducted through state-funded research [4]. A complex scientific proposition such as the SDI was not only about the American nuclear strategy, but about economic and industrial strategy as well.
Directing the SDI
The Reagan Administration, however, was to experience heavy Congressional filibustering around the structuring of the SDI program. The National Space Policy continued to declare that its primary purposes were ‘to deter threats to space systems of the United States and its Allies, and within such limits imposed by international law to deny any adversary the use of space-based systems that provide support to hostile military forces’ [5] . The opponents of the program, both in the governmental and industrial (as well as the wider public) spheres, claimed that the SDI was an impossible endeavour.
The Department of Defense (DOD) reports proved otherwise. Firstly, it was widely known that the aerial defence system of the USSR was many steps ahead of the US. Their early warning system was the world foremost example of a wide array of satellite, over-the-horizon and tracking radars. The coordination with ground-based air defences, underground silos, surface to air missile (SAM) sites and fighter interceptors was carried out through a roster boasting 175,000 key personnel [6]. The initial steps of the USSR to exploit space as a military domain were also known. It was logical, then, that the US would tend to a new impetus into the development of new beam technologies to create an effective protective missile defence system.
The electronic warfare component against Western space systems was an important addendum to this program. NATO officials claimed that the Soviets were behind some optic disabling attacks, as well as the general jamming of military reconnaissance satellites all through the late 1970s. An upgrade to a military infrastructure level akin to the Moscow one was not wholly impossible. Furthermore, the Soviets also had a laser-energy weapons program underway since the 1960s; the US claimed that the airborne laser for anti-satellite operations, airborne asset protection and ICBM defence was well past the prototype stage [7].
And yet, Reagan’s SDI program had to readdress its original form and objectives into a more limited outlook. Initially, the new American technologies would practically free the Free World from offensive nuclear missiles, by “rendering them impotent”, as Secretary of Defence Weinberger claimed [8]. The DOD, however, pushed for a more cautious setting for the SDI, cataloguing it as a deterrence-strengthening method, a “creator of uncertainties in the mind of an attacker” [9].
This overarching ambiguity, or rather undecidedness in the White House’s public addresses, was met with a growing concern of the NATO allies; it was understood that the promotion of the SDI program would also be met by a reduction in the inter-power arms reduction negotiation efforts.
In budgetary terms, the SDI program originally benefited from a five-year, USD 26 billion allocation from the DOD budget. This program sparked claims of exacerbated spending, and indeed, on its full scope, it would undoubtedly have required a continued expenditure that would have hardly justified the strategic reasoning behind it.
Consequently, the emphasis of SDI research was directed to new systems. Through the development of smaller devices than originally intended, the “Brilliant Pebbles” program was instead aimed toward a mid-course intercept, a miniature kill vehicle; the “Brilliant Eyes” would be its corresponding surveillance satellites. The same questions ensued: how reliable would it be? Which survivability would it have? Would it be cost-effective? The Bush Administration would have to decide on it.
The End of the Cold War and the End of the SDI
The far-reaching geopolitical changes of the 1990s would swerve the SDI program hard. The strategic defence concept moved forward, spirited forwards by the first Gulf War; however, its meaning was changing. The increasing warmness observed in Congress (even amongst the Republicans) towards the USSR, all but terminated the SDI, as well as other space military programs, only funding minimal research and preventing even a modicum of technology deployment.
Since the early 2000s, Beijing and Moscow were investing heavy into military space capabilities. The Gulf War had demonstrated that satellite images, increased bandwidth, and other satellite information, such as UAV guidance, were to provide “battlefield premiums”, elevating the tactical dimension to unforeseen heights. Counter-space technologies, especially, were seen as potential entryways into levelling the playing field in the occasion of a war with the US [10]. Anti-Satellite capabilities are once again the object of renewed national interests, and experts across the world have long identified satellite defence systems as key challenges of future war capabilities.
China, for instance, has long pursued ASAT capabilities in order to refine its space-war planning strategy, and is reported to have satellite-destroying technology since the mid-2000s [11]. The issue of space debris has also received much more governmental traction in the last years; the relevance of the fact of the US being the country with the majority of space assets has contributed to this reality. The deployment and use of any real ASAT weapons would effectively create considerable amounts of damage to vast swathes of satellites, irrespective of the shielding they may equip themselves with.
The warring use of outer space continues to be a fiery issue, and is critical in some conflict scenarios such as Taiwan, India and China or the NATO-Russia tensions. The relevant space players, however, have not produced legally binding treaties on the topic of space assets attacks, and satellite technology remains a highly critical, and highly vulnerable aspect of national security indeed.
Even if some actors might have failed to address it, space operations have become a very contested environment, and will remain so in the near future. Destructive space engagements merit the creation of the relevant military security doctrine, both in defensive terms and the “counter-counter” dimension, to ensure the survivability of spacecraft.
Directed energy technology, preconized in the early 1980s as the ideal medium for outer space defence in attention to the great range and lasting intensity of the beam over the vacuum effects [12], adds to the present and future complexity of this issue. The validity of the proposed counter-measures, such as quick rotation, reflective coating or shielding, become more challenging and have exacerbated research costs.
Conclusion
There is little doubt about the validity of outer space as a military medium. The space players continue to develop and have currently provided their armed forces and relevant space agencies with the capabilities that could potentially negate satellites and other spacecraft with not only their surveillance or communication abilities, but could destroy or render them impotent in times of conflict.
The abandonment of the SDI, and the state-funded research of multiple ASAT capabilities as part of President Reagan’s national security strategies, may have deprived the US of key defence systems and contributed to the increasing costs and hurry in the air- and land-based weapon technologies for space surveillance since 2019.
The original schedule for development of the revolutionary technology trumpeted by the SDI proponents would probably have passed the relevant acquisition program milestones and handed the US with the manoeuvrability to negate satellite targets through “hit to kill” or other means.
At present, the problem of the space arms race acceleration is simply impossible to freeze. The implosion of multiple technologies and ever-changing capabilities means that the deterrence aspect of a national security project is seriously impaired in 2024. The destabilising power that the SDI once held, however, could possibly be reenacted, allowing for the emergence of a “first strike” capacity again. The current technological climate, with far-reaching operational testing of unmanned vehicles or laser-based technologies, for instance, could produce a relevant breakthrough in space security. The SDI experience, in return, could offer precise insights into the military questions, as well as the clashing of the military and political outlooks in the framing and developing of the space policy and its defence technology.
References
[1] Bateman, A. Weapons in Space: technology, politics, and the rise and fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative. 2024. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (P. 215)
[2] Garvin, R. Reagan's Riskiness". The New York Times, March 30, 1983.
[3] Pignon, D. “The Strategic Defense Initiative and Europe”. Telos, nº67 (April), 1986. Pages 45-64.
[4] Broad, W. "Reagan's 'Star Wars' Bid: Many Ideas Converging". The New York Times, March 4, 1985.
[5] Lakoff, S., and Herbert F. York. A Shield in Space? Technology, Politics, and the Strategic Defense Initiative. 1989. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pages 66-72.
[6] Dahlitz, J. “ASAT and related weapons: proposals for the prevention of an arms race in outer space”. Arms Control, vol. 4, nº3, 1983. Pages 171-186.
[7] Reagan, R. NSDD-42: "National Space Policy". National Archives and Records Administration, July 4, 1982.
[8] Hildreth, S. "The Strategic Defense Initiative: Issues for Congress". Report IB85170, July 22, 1987.
[9] Office of Technology Assessment. Directed Energy Missile Defense in Space: A Background Paper. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Congress, OTA-BP-ISC-26, April 1984.
[10] Bjork, R. The Strategic Defence Initiative. 1992. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
[11] Gopalaswamy, B. and Ting Wang. “The science and politics of an Indian ASAT capability”. Space Policy, nº26, 2010. Pages 229-235.
[12] Scheffran, J. “Verification and Risk for an Anti-Satellite Weapons Ban”. Bulletin of Peace Proposals, vol. 17, nº2, 1986. Pages 165-173.
