http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=388708§ion=news
Thu 16 October, 2003 03:30 BST
U.S. general sees war in space
By Tabassum Zakaria
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Space may become a war zone in the not-too-distant
future, a senior U.S. military officer has said, hours after China became only
the third country after the United States and
former Soviet Union to put a man in space.
"In my view it will not be long before space becomes a
battleground," Lt. Gen. Edward Anderson, deputy commander of U.S.
Northern Command, said in response to a question at a geospatial intelligence
conference on Wednesday.
"Our military forces ... depend very, very heavily on space capabilities,
and so that is a statement of the obvious to our potential
threat, whoever that may be," he said.
"They can see that one of the ways that they can certainly diminish our
capabilities will be to attack the space systems," said Anderson, who was
formerly with U.S. Space Command.
"Now how they do that and who that's going to be I can't tell you in this
audience," he said at the unclassified conference.
The United States operates spy satellites in space.
Earlier in the day, Rich Haver, former special assistant for intelligence to
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said he expected battles in space within
the next two decades.
"I believe space is the place we will fight in the next 20 years,"
said Haver, now vice president for intelligence strategy at Northrop Grumman
Mission Systems.
"There are executive orders that say we don't want to do that. There's
been a long-standing U.S. policy to try to keep space a peaceful place, but
... we have in space assets absolutely essential to the conduct of
our military operations, absolutely essential to our national security. They
have been there for many years," he said.
"When the true history of the Cold War is written and all the classified
items are finally unclassified, I believe that historians will note that it
was in space that a significant degree of this country's ability to win the
Cold War was embedded," Haver said.
Responding to a question about the implications of China sending a man into
space this week, Haver said: "I think the Chinese are telling us they're
there, and I think if we ever wind up in a confrontation again with any one of
the major powers who has a space capability we will find
space is a battleground."
Chinese "taikonaut" Yang Liwei touched down in the grasslands of
Inner Mongolia early on Thursday local time after a 21-hour odyssey that took
him around the world 14 times.
Haver added that he was not implying that
China was the next great competitor or enemy of the United States.
The ability to launch devices into space is rapidly becoming a multinational
activity, Haver said.
