2 thoughts on “Military Uses Of Space”

  1. OK, ..Just finished the paper. The first half is legal history of Space. The second half attempts to draw conclusions that reflect these sentences’ views of the military in Space:

    “In 2001, prior to the attacks on September 11, a commission headed by former United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, suggested that an ‘attack on elements of U.S. space systems during a crisis or conflict should not be considered an improbable act’.52 The Report went on to (in)famously warn of the possibility of a ‘Space Pearl Harbor’ – a surprise attack on the space assets of the United States.”

    When you speak of a warning as being “Infamous”, you are not speaking without bias. In short, he’d rather kill MilSpace in its cradle. Tooooooo Late, …by just short of 75 years, when the first V2 flew above 100 kilometers!

    Mr. Freeland attempts to use UN sources, including any number of UN General Assembly non-binding resolutions, as a basis for constructing his history, rather than talking at all about either the Discoverer or the Cosmos programs, or really anything that would describe the physical facts that law must be grounded in to work at making a legal basis for human activity in Space. He does not ven describe the orbital differences like LEO, GEO, and EML-1 within the Earth’s gravity well, much less elsewhere. In a sphere of activity where physical technology constrains what is possible more than anywhere else, he attempts to use the advance of that technology as a reason to fear what happens in the future.

    This means the second half of the paper is basically FUD, wrought as strongly as he can within the bounds of legal theory. He seeks to pretend that Homo sapiens is something other than a species of large, obstreperously violent primates, who can often be got to make violence *not* a matter of extermination, usually through using a professional military to do what is called “war”. His basic desire is restriction of human activity, in particular military activity, but also “dual-use” commercial activity.

    There is no mention, for instance, that his fears about assaults on low security “dual-use” satcoms could be deeply ameliorated by spending what is needed to provide a fully provisioned military capability, completely separate from commercial activity, in a US Space Force. That’s not the narrative he wants to contribute to.

    It is *no* surprise, after reading this, to hear that he is a supporter of the Moon Treaty.

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