It ain't gonna be easy, says Bruce Sterling, but that won't stop enemies from trying. Thirteen strategies they might use to knock the eagle out of the sky.
__1. BUILD YOUR OWN __
Method: Duplicate American space assets: surveillance, navigation, telecom, the works.
Upside: Legal. Can be accomplished largely using commercial products and services. American contractors might even build a lot of it for you.
Downside: Cripplingly costly; Russians tried it and went broke. Looks suspicious. Takes years. Yankees in good position to blow your assets to smithereens.
__2. DECAPITATION __
Method: Never mind fancy space assets. Obliterate Washington with a truck nuke.
Upside: Massively destructive, highly destabilizing. Heavy casualties among governing elite. Deadly shock to US national morale. Can be repeated in other cities.
Downside: Nukes hard to build. Sets dangerous precedent that puts your own cities at risk. US space assets still up there, available to US allies even if US no longer exists. Loss of Congress and Washington bureaucrats might be dangerous tonic to US military.
__3. ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE __
Method: Detonate nuclear warhead in upper atmosphere, disabling spacecraft circuitry.
Upside: Inexpensive, quick, ruthless. Disables civilian assets, including pagers and TV, by stripping circuits on ground. To evade detection, bomb can be disguised as something benign, like a commercial satellite.
Downside: Some military sats hardened against radiation. Might destroy your own space hardware, if you have any. Unlikely to destroy distant sats; might destroy very little, in which case you've gone nuclear against a superpower.
__4. SPACE PARASITES __
Method: Infest space with armed mobile nanosatellites. Sneak them up to expensive American space machines. Attach like limpets. Detonate on signal.
Upside: Sneaky, insidious, inscrutable.
Downside: Hard to test. Americans likely to build fleet of nanosats teensier and sneakier than yours.
__5. SANDBAGGING __
Method: Spew sand into paths of orbiting Yankee assets, turning them into Swiss cheese.
Upside: Ultracheap. Slowly suffocates space power. Might be done persistently in tiny quantities by some unorthodox launch method, say electromagnetic rail-gun launch or Jules Verne space cannon.
Downside: Space too big to pollute. Armor countermeasures possible. Retaliation by all space users likely. Sand sifts down into atmosphere after a while.
__6. SPOOFING __
Method: Mimic American datastream. Hack satellites, own them.
Upside: Bloodless, sexy, wired. Gains huge military advantage.
Downside: Requires vulnerable ground stations plus better hacking, crypto, and dongle skills than NSA and Air Force. Still can't launch, repair, or replace space assets.
__7. JAMMING __
Method: Deploy huge electromagnetic noisemakers that thwart US communications.
Upside: Disables guided missiles, turns smart bombs into dumb bombs. Good for locals who communicate via fiber optics.
Downside: Ineffective beyond theater. Noisemakers make obvious targets.
__8. ATTACK GROUND STATIONS __
Method: Use mortars, bombs, or missiles against satellite ground stations.
Upside: Kills highly trained analysts, destroys specialized equipment. Bases generally easy to find, not well fortified.
Downside: Secret mobile backup facilities likely to exist. US has large techie population, can train more space geeks.
__9. DENIAL AND DECEPTION __
Method: Hide facilities underground. Scatter armadas of fakes on surface. Broadcast phony transmissions to fool spy sats. Camouflage everything.
Upside: Effective during wartime. Forces US to waste expensive munitions.
Downside: Windowless cave quarters bad for soldier morale. Constant, consistent deception hard to maintain. Avoiding surveillance increases cost of all operations.
__10. ESPIONAGE __
Method: Bribe or coopt Yankee sat personnel, obtain manuals, secrets.
Upside: Cheap, traditional. Proven success with Pollard, Walker, Falcon and Snowman.
Downside: Satellites return to US control once mole is discovered.
__11. DEATH RAY __
Method: Build laser or particle beam. Blind or cook satellites from ground.
Upside: Unexpected, shocking, repeatable. Appealing to Aum Shinrikyo-style tech-literate madmen.
Downside: Ambitious, expensive, hard to conceal. Requires huge power source. Works only in clear weather. Invites swift conventional retaliation.
__12. WAR BY OTHER MEANS __
Method: Abandon conventional warfare. Go nuclear, descend into terrorism, or both.
Upside: Everybody's doing it.
Downside: Going nuclear is expensive, destabilizing, dangerous. Terrorists lack secure bases, logistics, traditions, esprit de corps; "masterminds" hard to distinguish from deranged amateurs. American social, economic, cultural pressures irresistible. Your war may devolve into reading Noam Chomsky while sipping Coke.
__13. WAIT IT OUT __
Method: Wait for US to get careless, go broke, forget, sell out, and/or collapse from inherent contradictions of postindustrial capitalism.
Upside: Easy. Basically indistinguishable from giving up.
Downside: Capitalist democracy has buried many competing systems. Top challenger blatantly suicidal and feared by all. Huge American sums spent on space strengthen US economy by creating Tang instant orange drink and heat-trapping pizza delivery bags. US will commodify your discontent, sell it back to you on DVD.
