Space war--now we're jammin'!(Bulletins)(Operation Iraqi Freedom)

ON DECEMBER 14, 2004, Gen. Lance Lord, commander of U.S. Air Force Space Command, made a startling announcement: "The war in space," he said, "began during Operation Iraqi Freedom." The general has made similar proclamations for more than a year. Which raises an intriguing question: How did the Iraq War spill into the first-ever space conflict--without anyone noticing?

Space war, you might think, would certainly promise some real "shock and awe." For years, scholars, science-fiction enthusiasts, and weaponeers have fantasized about it. "Small winged rocket missiles with atomic warheads could be launched from [a space] station in such a manner that they would strike their targets at supersonic speeds," famed rocket scientist Wernher von Braun said in 1952. "By simultaneous radar tracking of both missile and target, these atomic-headed rockets could be accurately guided to any spot on the earth."

Thankfully, General Lord and his fellow space warriors offer a far more tenuous idea of space war, claiming it began when Saddam Hussein attempted to jam the reception of radio-frequency signals from U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, which serve as linchpins in the military's info-tech-rich way of precision warfare. Hussein simply put a half-dozen or so jammers on the ground in and around Baghdad--no U.S. ground stations or satellites in space were threatened, much less touched.

Hussein's "space war"--his attempts to thwart the U.S. technological advantage--didn't last long. Within 72 hours, two B-1 bombers had destroyed the jammers with satellite-guided munitions. General Lord appreciated the irony. "It was both intellectually and operationally pleasing that we used GPS-guided munitions to eliminate the counterspace attack to our GPS constellation," he told the Air Force Association's National Air and Space Conference in September 2004.

But the quick "space war" victory does not keep General Lord from worrying about the future. "If we find ourselves spending most of our time reacting to the actions of others," he said in his December 14 speech, "it probably means we are losing our advantage."

Losing our advantage? Don't bet on it. U.S. prowess in high-tech warfare makes difficult tasks look easy. The United States is the global leader in jamming and counter-jamming--U.S, armed forces first encountered radio-frequency jamming early in World War II and rapidly became proficient at these now arcane electronic arts. The latest U.S. innovation: the "Counter-Communications System," a transportable ground-based device designed to render enemy satellite communications useless.

In recent years, U.S. space warriors have formulated an aggressive, preemptive "defensive" and "offensive" counterspace posture. (Offensive counterspace ranges from simply jamming an adversary's radio frequencies to outright destruction of the offending satellites.) The air force released the first-ever public counterspace doctrine last August.