Space Force Must Include Intercept, Air Defense Capabilities

It is long past time to fulfill the promise of at least two initiatives of President Trump’s first term:

1. Protect the nation’s electric power grid, a major objective of President Trump’s March 26, 2019 Executive Order No. 13865 for “Coordinating National Resilience to Electromagnetic Pulses,” to be led by the National Security Council (NSC). Moreover, when Congress passed the 2020 Defense Authorization Act, this initiative became the “Law of the Land” (which is still in force), but the “powers that be” have not executed (nor even planned) an effective response; and
2. Empower the Space Force initiated by President Trump with an ability to employ force, especially with an effective space-based ballistic missile defense (BMD) capability, demonstrated over three decades ago to be cost-effective by President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

Our national survival could depend on an effective response to the first of these important initiatives, as discussed in my January 25, 2021 Newsmax article. As discussed, the Lake Wyle Pilot Study in York County, South Carolina, concluded that affordable needed protection was possible — protecting the countywide Distribution Grid was estimated to cost less than $ 100 per citizen, as discussed in my March 23, 2021 Newsmax article along with other background information.

With NSC guidance, sufficient funds were appropriated for the Department of Energy (DOE) to demonstrate this claim by funding appropriate York County authorities to protect the York County Distribution Grid and to develop a plan to protect the entire South Carolina Distribution Grid and extend that plan to protect the nation’s distribution grid.

This plan was to be executed the Rock Hill Municipal Power Company, the York County Co-Op, and Duke Power Corporation—involving its hydroelectric, nuclear and Coal Power Plants and associated Bulk Power Grid.

But somehow the DOE spent that appropriated funding somewhere else, unknown to this author, but certainly not for its intended purpose. President Trump should rectify this situation on Day One!

Our civil critical infrastructure is vulnerable to various threats, including electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Most important is our electric power grid — but little if anything has been done to provide this clearly needed protection.

Correcting this failure should be a top priority for President Trump’s second term.

Over 7-years ago, my December 4, 2017 Newsmax article identified the then emerging threat from North Korea (along with other threatening adversaries) — and also noted that we had limited ballistic missile defense to deal with that emerging threat, but that we should improve those capabilities, especially by deploying air-based and space-based defenses as soon as possible.

Since then, little has been done to defend against that growing threat — and growing threats from Iran, China and Russia.

As we discussed in our August 24, 2017 Newsmax article, Dale Tietz and I noted that we had pioneered the development of such capabilities during the SDI era of the late 1980s and early 1990s. I regret to say that little has changed since then.

In this regard, it should be noted that Retired USAF Lt. General Jim Abrahamson and I wrote in our August 14, 2017 Newsmax article disputing then-recent order-of-magnitude exaggerated cost estimates for space-based defensive interceptors — for which the Pentagon’s independent cost estimate in the late 1980s was $10 billion in 1988 dollars to develop, test, deploy and operate for 20 years a constellation of 1,000 Brilliant Pebbles Space Based Interceptors — all based on then-existing “off-the-shelf” technology in the private sector.

Shouldn’t we be able to do even better today? Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, how about that?

In his first term, President Trump launched the US Space Force, but, alas, to my knowledge it has not included developing a space-based intercept capability. Nor has it included an air-based defense capability like Raptor Talon of the SDI era.

In his second term, President Trump should rectify that mistake — and just as I advocated in my January 8, 2019 article, “Trump Must Build Missile Defenses to Defeat Existential EMP Threats.”

Even then, meeting this objective still will be a challenge, as illustrated by “Weaponizing Space” in the November/December 2024 issue of Air & Space Forces.

The author, Greg Hadley, seems to focus solely on how to counter anti-satellite (ASAT) threats to our space-based systems — presumably used for communications and surveillance missions. He does not consider how these space-based systems might be employed to attack other space-based and air-based and ground-based targets.

At least he notes a prior example of how the peaceful Merchant Marine before World War II evolved into the U.S. Navy with both offensive and defensive capabilities. As that kind of evolution hopefully also takes place for our Space Force, we should place a high priority on seeking the ability to protect the American people from space.

I think Ronald Reagan, who despised keeping America safe from nuclear attack from our enemies with only the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) “mutual suicide pact,” had it right when he launched SDI in his March 23, 1983 speech by asking, “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them?”

Back to the Future, please.

Ambassador Henry F. Cooper, a PhD engineer with a broad defense and national security career, was President Ronald Reagan’s Chief Defense and Space Negotiator with the Soviet Union and Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) Director during the George H.W. Bush Administration. Read Ambassador Cooper’s Reports Here.