Star Wars 2006

Every wonder why we spend such megabucks on defense and yet are having severe trouble keeping 135,000 troops operating in Iraq? One reason is that a lot of those bucks are being spent on high-tech, big-ticket projects that certainly provide plenty of green for war profiteers (though not necessarily for their shareholders). But often they are: complete boondoggles; pretty much useless for the wars we're actually likely to fight; or, make us less secure by promoting arms races.

John Arquilla of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey gives us an example in Rods from God: Imagine a bundle of telephone poles hurtling through space at 7,000 mph San Francisco Chronicle 03/12/06 (there's a podcast with it):

Right now, our plans are mostly defensive in nature, intended to figure out how to protect what we put up there. ...

On the offensive side, virtually all research is classified, but popular magazines often mention anti-satellite weapons of all sorts, from laser-beam-firing hunter-killers to kamikaze satellites that ram or blow themselves up near an enemy orbiter.
Ethical and legal issues aside, the difficulties with waging this kind of war in space are profound, and should keep us from pursuing such a path. The fundamental issue is that it is easier and cheaper to destroy things in space than it is to put them there and make use of them.

The cost of manufacturing each communications or monitoring satellite and putting it into orbit is at least $1 billion, while the cost of a ballistic missile capable of destroying it is about $10 million. ...

If instead the enemy simply wanted to blind our satellites, it could be done cheaply by having a few missiles detonate nuclear warheads, creating electromagnetic pulses that fry satellite information systems.

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