Excerpt
December 26, 2016
Pearl Harbor II — U.S. Attacked
by Bob Kowolski
WORLD NEWS SERVICE (Excerpt)
WASHINGTON — At 4:16 a.m. (EDT) this morning, unknown military forces initiated a surprise attack against U.S. military units, government centers, and industrial facilities including attacks in the greater Washington area.
The full extent of the damage is currently unknown. Early news reports indicated that several military bases across the country, as well as overseas U.S. bases, were struck.
Early indications are that the attack was carried out by non-nuclear reentry vehicles, or RVs, reentering the atmosphere from space. Occasionally, if one was looking in the right direction, several bright streaks of light would flash out of the night sky, ending in the blinding light of an explosion. Only then would one hear the sonic booms and the blast of the explosions. As far as can be determined, there is no evidence of chemical or biological weapons. This reporter heard approximately 20 explosions and saw several groups of RVs reentering over about one hour.
Preface
Just over a quarter-century ago, I examined what spacefaring capabilities the United States would need by 2020. In 1995 I published a forecast of these abilities online under the broad title of United States Aerospace Forces 1.1.2020. Embedded within this forecast was a fictional war scenario—Pearl Harbor II—written as a series of news reports of a non-nuclear space attack on the United States in the year 2016—twenty years after the forecast was first published. The above excerpt is taken from this fictional account.
Of interest is that I wrote this while a civilian employee of the U.S. Air Force. It was approved for public release by the Air Force and was, for a time, posted on an Air Force website. This effort grew out of my involvement in futures wargames that involved space warfare. In the mid-1990s, there was little appreciation within the U.S. military that the existing paradigm of airpower dominance, on which the Air Force was established in 1947, was coming to an end with the emergence of space weapons and the growing ability of nations to launch into Earth orbit.
At the end of this blog posting, a link takes the reader to the start of Pearl Harbor II.
Why the historical reference to Pearl Harbor I
A founding principle of American national security lies in the right of its citizens to arm themselves to protect their individual freedom and, in times of war, to protect the nation from attack. What made this paradigm valid was the two-dimensional nature of land and sea warfare. An attack required the insertion of invading ground forces to seize and occupy territory. Against such armed incursions, comparably armed citizens were able to defend themselves as happened at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775. This paradigm survived the test of American history until 7 December 1941 when superior airpower was successfully used to attack the United States.
The attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 changed this paradigm forever. Superior airpower made conventional land and sea forces vulnerable to attack despite the preparation of traditional surface two-dimensional defenses. An effective defense against airpower requires superior airpower.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was the culmination of many factors. While historians often describe this as a “surprise” attack, the fact that the United States was to be attacked somewhere on or about that date was well understood. Naval intelligence was actively working to identify where the attack would occur, knowing that the attacking fleet was somewhere at sea. Diplomatic activity also signaled that something substantial was about to happen. Why the three Navy aircraft carriers then stationed at Pearl Harbor were not on sea patrol around Pearl Harbor to provide early warning and a mobile air defense has never been properly explained. Instead, they were out of harm’s way, leaving the anchored fleet quite vulnerable to attack. Also, available military intelligence was apparently not shared with the commander of the naval forces at Pearl Harbor further endangering the fleet.
The primary lesson learned from the attack on Pearl Harbor and the ensuing historic naval air battles that occurred over the next half-year was that the presidential administration—then in office since 1933—and Congress had failed in its responsibilities to adequately fund sufficient U.S. military airpower to deter aggression and, when aggression occurred, to readily defeat it. This failure invited attack by an enemy that embraced the development of airpower as a primary means of offensive military power projection to seize and control territory and key industrial resources. This enemy believed that its airpower superiority, combined with air-dropped torpedoes designed for the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor, opened the door to attack the United States Navy at Pearl Harbor with acceptable losses. On 7 December 1941, it acted on this belief.
What Congress failed to understand after World War I, despite well publicized attempts by airpower “champions” such as Billy Mitchell, was that the emergence of air power substantially and forever altered the nature of warfare. (This was first anticipated by U.S. Army Lt. Benjamin Foulois in 1907.) From that time until belligerent air warfare was already well underway in Europe and the Pacific by the end of the 1930s, Congress as a whole failed to adequately fund the development of adequate American airpower. Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution directs the Congress to “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” During the 1920s and 1930s, this fundamental obligation of Congress was not met. Currently, the same is happening with respect to American preparedness for space warfare.
From early in American offensive operations during World War II, achieving local air superiority and the ability to project power through aerial bombardment was essential. This was true during the early key naval battles at the Coral Sea and Midway when both naval and land airpower capabilities were used to (fortunately) achieve decisive victories. Consequently, as America entered what became World War II, the American aeronautics industry expanded tremendously in terms of size, employment, and war funding. As the war progressed, total funding on airpower rose to over 40 percent of the war budget. The industry was producing 100,000 aircraft a year to sustain what became primarily an air war in advance of the final ground assaults needed to achieve total victory.
What enabled this “come from behind” measure to work during World War II was that the United States homeland and its industrial capacity was not air attacked as were the industrial capacities of both allied and enemy nations. Now, eighty years later, the United States is capable of being directly attacked from space using both nuclear and non-nuclear weapons. There will be no “grace period” for national industrial mobilization as happened during World War II. Comparable weakness against an adversary armed with substantial space warfare capabilities will not only invite attack, as happened at Pearl Harbor, but will bring defeat. The United States would be forced to fight with what remains of its military capabilities.
American national security since World War II has been built on the strategy of “mutual assured destruction”—to deter nuclear war—combined with substantial American airpower global reach and battlefield air superiority for conventional warfare. America’s airpower dominance has enabled it to “police” the world to help hold the “wolves” at bay.
The ability of a belligerent nation to develop non-nuclear spacepower superiority with the ability to project force against terrestrial U.S. targets effectively will end this American airpower national security strategy. Just as airpower a century ago made battleships obsolete as a primary form of naval power defense and projection, spacepower is now making American airpower obsolete!
Will it take a space Pearl Harbor to wake Congress up to the changing threat?
Will the United States survive a space Pearl Harbor as a world power?
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James Michael (Mike) Snead is an aerospace Professional Engineer in the United States, an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and a past chair of the AIAA’s Space Logistics Technical Committee. He is the founder and president of the Spacefaring Institute LLC (spacefaringinstitute.net) which is focused on space solar power-generated astroelectricity and the astrologistics infrastructure necessary to enable the spacefaring industrial revolution that will build space solar power energy systems. Mike Snead has been involved in space development since the mid-1980s when he supported the U.S. Air Force Transatmospheric Vehicle (TAV) studies, the National Aerospace Plane program, and the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X) project. In 2007, after retiring from civilian employment with the Air Force, he began to study the need for (and politics associated with) undertaking space solar power. Beginning in the late 1980s, he has published numerous papers and articles on various aspects of manned spaceflight, astrologistics, and energy. His technical papers are located at https://www.mikesnead.com and https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike-Snead/research. His blog is at: https://spacefaringamerica.com. His eBook, Astroelectricity, can be downloaded for free here. He can be contacted through LinkedIn or through email sent to spacefaringinstitute@gmail.com.