On Monday the Defense Department issued the 2008 edition of “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China”, an annual report that assesses Chinese military capabilities. There’s a brief section titled “Space and Counterspace” that offers a general overview, including a brief discussion of the January 2007 ASAT test and related developments. One sentence of the report claims that, in addition to its groundbased direct ascent ASATm “China is developing other technologies and concepts for kinetic and directed-energy (e.g., lasers and radio frequency) weapons for ASAT missions,” but goes into no further details.
That’s different from just a few years ago when, in the 2004 report, the DoD claimed that China was developing “parasitic microsatellite” technology: a small satellite that would presumably be able to approach and destroy or disable another satellite. The 2004 report cautioned, “This claim is being evaluated,” and, as it turns out, the claim was unsubstantiated: it was traced back to the web site of a “self-described ‘military enthusiast'” with little credibility.
This is an egregious example, but hardly the only one, of misinterpretation of information of Chinese space capabilities and intentions. In an article in Monday’s issue of The Space Review, I describe a recent presentation that examines the miscommunication between the US and China on space issues. Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists described research he performed where he examined 1,500 articles published in China since 1971 that mention ASATs. Most of those articles are general reviews or polemics, but get far more attention in the US than the much smaller number of technical articles that could provide more accurate insights into Chinese capabilities and intents. “A lot of the information that our analysts and intelligence officers are consuming—that’s driving their perceptions of Chinese intent regarding their civil and their military space programs—is based on very shoddy sources,” he said.
This creates an echo chamber involving the “polemical communities” in the US and China, who react to each others’ publications regardless of the quality of the information they contain. “There is this whole tiny dialogue between these two hawkish communities in these two countries that dominates the entire discussion on this in the public domain,” Kulacki said.
This doesn’t mean that China isn’t a threat to US security, in space or elsewhere (something that Kulacki acknowledges), but that the information that underlies the debate may sometimes be of questionable quality. Given that China’s civil space capabilities and plans are increasingly trotted out as arguments for continuing or accelerating NASA’s own exploration initiatives, that’s something to keep in mind.
It is always handy to have a bogeyman to help justify spending, and perhaps this is an example. The military has a long history of overheated claims about adversaries – sometimes it creates doubt rather than justifying programs.
In the space exploration area – hopefully we will spend more effort on cooperation than competition – for all of it’s failings it has helped establish some working relationships.
Charles
And the nuclear powered airplane is an excellent case in point: The Americans do it because the Russians might, the Americans cancel the program, the Russians are reported to build such an aircraft it in AW&ST and the program is revived at high priority, but the story is later debunked. Then, 30 years later (in the 1990s), we find out the Russians actually did bulid and operate a nuclear powered aircraft all along, and they did so because they thought the Americans would.
To get an opponent to occupy their science and engineering base in producing a strategically obsolete solution I would call a success if they spend more than we do (unclear in the example above).
I’m sure that the PLA keeps their most advanced military-related technological development activity behind firmly closed doors. And well-meaning civilian analysts here in the U.S. can probably only scratch at the surface of those doors. So one has to be careful not to jump to the conclusion that China isn’t working on more sophisticated space weapons. However, mulitlateral efforts to reduce the further weaponization of space are certainly worthwhile, in my mind, if only for the savings in scarce engineering and financial resources that results from it. Cooperation in the civilian arena also seems like a worthwhile endeavor, as long as technology transfers are strictly limited.
[…] article notes. However, claims that China was developing “parasitic microsatellites” were debunked a few years ago after people traced the source of the intelligence to a source with little credibility. (Perhaps […]