Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s merely a Chinese satellite-killing warhead successfully tested earlier this month. While publicly assuring the world its intentions in space are benign (much like Iran assuring its nuclear program is solely for electricity), the Chinese military demonstrated new warfare capabilities US intelligence analysts incorrectly assumed China would not possess for another 10 years. The ability to destroy enemy satellites places China in position to directly confront the US successfully if necessary, but the more likely scenario, particularly in the near future, would involve China utilizing anti-satellite technologies to aid nations such as Iran or North Korea in the event the US and its allies attempt to dismantle the nuclear programs of either nation through military action.
An overlooked aspect of this development is the intelligence failure that underestimated Chinese capabilities. For analysts to estimate that China was 10 years behind US space warfare capabilities is puzzling, given the fact that in September 2006, National Reconnaissance Office Director Kerr confirmed that China had “painted” a US satellite at least once with a ground-based laser, a beam capable of illuminating the satellite for laser-guided warheads or damaging the satellite’s reception/transmission functions.
Intelligence analysts have a responsibility to be sensibly paranoid when assessing an enemy’s capabilities, and should approach such threat assessments from the perspective that erring on the side of caution is the safest course. Perhaps the American attitude of technological superiority holds too much sway within the intelligence community. To calculate that China, a nation that produces (and “acquires” the technology for) more electronics than any in the world would be 10 years behind the US military is truly a supreme act of cultural utopian arrogance by American intelligence analysts. China has proven most adept at infiltrating government agencies and contractors (and their databases) and have spirited away some of our most critically sensitive military technology, including designs for multiple warhead nuclear delivery systems.
China is far more advanced in the art of stealing our military technology than America is at noticing the theft or implementing measures to prevent it. For example, the Chinese theft of W-88 warhead technology occurred in the mid 1980s but was not discovered by US intelligence until 1995. Analysts would argue that such an example merely shows that even when possessing the stolen technology it took China nearly 10 years to successfully test the warhead, thus validating the predicted 10 year gap theory. However, considering that network intrusion is the gravest risk to our military technology and China is masterful in that craft, analysts should actually base their Chinese capability assessments on the assumption that American technology in the design phase 10 years ago has likely been acquired and developed by China along similar time lines as American development.
One wonders, given this incredible underestimation of China, a nation we know much more about and can monitor more closely than Iran, how accurate are analysts’ assessments that Iran will not have nuclear weapon capabilities until 2015? That estimate was made after a “major US intelligence review” in 2005, and analysts concluded that Iran was 10 years away from possessing the capability to produce a nuclear bomb.
These analysts were wrong about North Korea, wrong about China’s space weaponry, and it is prudent for current and future administrations to assume that the 10 year prediction for Iran is another dangerous underestimation. Ahmadinejad refuses to allow IAEA inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities, and he openly challenges America, the only obstacle to the goal of Iranian nuclear weaponry, to try to stop him. With the technological assistance of North Korea and the UN Security Council vetoes of China and Russia confidently in pocket, Iran will surely produce a deployable nuclear weapon much sooner than analysts predict.
Technorati Tags: Chinese Espionage Intelligence Estimates Space Weapons Satellite Killer Nuclear Secrets Intelligence Failures North Korean Nuclear Assistance Chinese Military Intelligence Analysts Iranian nuclear program Ahmadinejad Chinese Satellite Technology
No comments:
Post a Comment