EELV

Space Policy Needs A Reset Too

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OSD recently appointed a new acting deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for space policy, and, assuming he keeps the job beyond January, he (or his replacement) might consider shifting his attention to some of the very difficult challenges facing space programs in the Defense Department.

First among those would be efforts to build military space systems that better serve the joint fight. We have long known that our dependence on space ensures that adversaries will try to negate its advantages. Russia and China have been exploring various ways to do so, and India has announced that it, too, perhaps for other reasons, is interested in developing anti-satellite capabilities. Making sure that military missions depending on space will be assured is one of the loud imperatives in the current US National Space Policy. Keep reading →

Published September 25, 2012 at 5:01 AM

Appropriators’ Airbase Angst Previews BRAC Brouhaha To Come

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There’s a lot going on in the U.S. Air Force, but for the Senators at this morning’s Appropriations subcommittee hearing on the USAF budget, just one mattered: How budget cuts would impact their home states. While such parochialism is as shocking as gambling in Casablanca, it raises a red flag for the full-scale Base Realignment And Closure round the Pentagon has requested. The Defense Department is already considering recommendations from the bipartisan Council of Governors to roll back some of the changes. If politicians are this unhappy about the relatively small cutbacks to bases and reshufflings of squadrons in this year’s budget request, how receptive are they going to be to BRAC? Keep reading →

Published March 14, 2012 at 12:52 PM

In Space, Doing More With Less Much Scarier Than Budget Cuts

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We hope professional staff at the House Armed Services Committee, as well as their colleagues on SASC, HAC-D and SAC-D, will read this commentary by the respected space and intelligence expert, Bob Butterworth, before Thursday’s HASC hearing on national security space. I spent much of my five years at Space News covering the enormous problems caused the last time America tried to save lots of money on space hardware and operations. Butterworth argues here that, essentially, we blew it after the last defense downturn when we tried to do more with less in space. Read on.

The scariest part of the projected budget for national security space is not the cuts. It is the ensuing proposals that promise ways to do more with less. Adopting them without close and careful analysis can easily bring on far more damage to national security space capabilities than the cuts ever will. Keep reading →

Published March 5, 2012 at 4:00 PM