Security

'Seconds' per Day to Take Out Satellite

The U.S. military will only have seconds per day to shoot down an ailing spy satellite. And the decision to fire will be made by the Secretary of Defense himself. At a Pentagon press conference today, an unnamed "senior military official" briefed reporters on the details on the satellite take out attempt. "Each day there […]

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The U.S. military will only have seconds per day to shoot down an ailing spy satellite. And the decision to fire will be made by the Secretary of Defense himself.

At a Pentagon press conference today, an unnamed "senior military official" briefed reporters on the details on the satellite take out attempt. "Each day there will be one window," he said. "It will only exist for a matter of tens of seconds, and so you have to be at exactly the right place, exactly the right time, and all criteria have to line up exactly right."

Two factors will be proper lighting, and the orientation of the satellite. Officers would rather take the shot during the day, "so that we have the best chance of knowing what we did or didn't do." And they are looking for a time when the satellite is oriented "so that the following three revolutions [around the Earth] go over the water as much as possible or over unpopulated areas as much as possible."

As *Global Security Newswire *notes, there are all kinds of players, throughout the military, participating in the effort. "U.S. Strategic Command, based at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Neb., is set to command the satellite-destruction mission. The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., led by the Air Force, would coordinate space-based sensor tracking for the intercept. Additionally, the Army-led Joint Integrated Missile Defense Team in Colorado Springs, Colo., plans to use large, ground-based radars and telescopes to observe the mission." And, of course, Navy cruisers are the ones who'll actually shoot the SM-3 missile at the satellite.

But, despite all the technical criteria, and despite all the layers of bureaucracy, it is the Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, who is going to make the call whether or not to launch.

*Q: Who is the person who makes the call, today’s go? And how long before the actual shot, before that seconds-long window, do you have to make that decision? *

*SR. MILITARY OFFICIAL: Command and control, as we refer to it, is always a challenge here. In the chain there are a series of no votes
-- my words -- but people who can say stop because my criteria, weather, is not being met. There are very few yes votes, and the question is, where do you have that yes vote? The commander of U.S.
Strategic Command will give the secretary of Defense a recommendation, and then the secretary of Defense will look at that recommendation, make a judgment based on it. He will have more than one opportunity during the day to do that because we keep re-looking at it through the day. So there are multiple opportunities. We'll have a point of no return, so to speak, that's down in the minutes area, and it will be based on whatever it is that has kept us potentially holding, if it were weather or something like that. But -- *

Q: Minutes as in 60 minutes, or minutes as in five minutes?

SR. MILITARY OFFICIAL: It could go down. It just depends. It depends on what criteria it is that's holding us back, how serious that criteria is and what the expectation of maybe being able to clear that criteria is. If we're swapping missiles, if we're just worried about wave height -- not just, but each one of them will be different. But we'll have the opportunity. But we'll get down to a point of no return, where we turn it over to the ship to execute....

*Q: Can you explain exactly on what basis Secretary Gates would make a decision? I mean, that is to say, sort of why he's involved in the process? Once all your technical experts, you know, make a determination, what's left for him to decide? *

*SR. MILITARY OFFICIAL: He takes the advice of the commander at
Strategic Command, who has pulled all of -- it's STRATCOM's job to pull all of the pieces together from all these agencies and all of the people who have an equity in the technical side of this thing as well as any other considerations that we're making. He makes that recommendation to the secretary. *

*The secretary has retained it, because normally in a tactical scenario to launch, say, an SM-3 in an operational scenario, that would be delegated down to the ship's captain. Here, because this is so unique, because we've done modifications, because it has got substantial attention and because there are issues here with making sure that, okay, are there any parameters that we're close on/not close on, we're going to bring that decision back. And because we have -- even though the shot window is small, the number of days are reasonably large, there's enough time to make a judgment at that level and so we're going to do it for this particular issue. So it is unusual to take a tactical system and bring it all the way back to the secretary of Defense for a cleared/not cleared type of scenario. *

*Q: So he's basically going to decide whether whatever amount of risk -- because you said you're going to take very little today but maybe a little more later on. So the secretary will look at the amount of risk that General Chilton brings to him and decide whether he's comfortable with it? *

SR. MILITARY OFFICIAL: That's correct. That's correct.

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