Space and Defense Issue – Volume Two – Number One – Winter 2008
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Space and Defense Scholarly Journal of the United States Air Force Academy Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies Editor: Dr. Eligar Sadeh Volume Two Number One Winter 2008 Editorial ii Dr. Eligar Sadeh The History of United States Weapons Export Control Policy 1 Taylor Dinerman The American Bubble: International Traffic in Arms Regulations 9 and Space Commerce Professor Roger Handberg Bureaucratic Politics Run Amok: 17 The United States and Satellite Export Controls Dr. Eligar Sadeh Chasing Satellites: Identifying Export Control Problems and Solutions 26 John Douglass Defense Industrial Base Assessment: United States Space Industry 36 President Issues Export Controls Directive 39 Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies Program Annals 40 National Space Forum 2007 41 Towards a Theory of Space Power Summer Space Seminar 2007 57 China Working Group 2007 58 China, Space, and Strategy Future of Space Commerce Workshop 2007 60 Space Based Solar Power Workshop 68 Improving Our Vision II: Building Transparency and Cooperation 72 Workshop on Space Situational Awareness Data Sharing i Editorial Dr. Eligar Sadeh Dr. Sadeh is Associate Director of the Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies There is a strong case to be made that space is in There is a need to address this export control issue the national security interest, but a much weaker at the level of policy by reforming the “rule set” case is to be made that space is in the national for how ITAR is applied. The current Presidential economic interest. In the United States (U.S.), Directive on export control reform is a start. The national security tends to trump commercial space Directive calls for reducing the export licensing concerns leading to policies and laws, like in the time to no more than sixty days, and for area of export control, that undermine space streamlining the process on how a technology is commercial development. looked at in regard to the ITAR Munitions Control List (MCL). More congressional funding This special issue of Space and Defense is is needed to push through the ITAR reforms focused on the current approach to export control suggested by the Presidential Directive on ITAR. of commercial space technologies, namely the The new Directive is a good step to help fix the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). competitiveness and licensing problems Simply put, ITAR is obtrusive, broken, and associated with ITAR. obsolete. ITAR has prevented international partnerships in commercial space, or made them Further ITAR reforms are needed. This exceedingly more difficult and bureaucratic to encompasses a reassessment of what technologies implement. It has dramatically reduced U.S. need to be controlled, and dealing with issues of domestic manufacturing capabilities for vital timing, review processes, transparency, and cost. space-related hardware and components. Congress needs to take on the issue by updating export control laws to better match 21st Century The great irony is that ITAR, in stark contrast to global space commerce. This starts with its intended goal of retaining domestic reforming the current approach to ITAR by preeminence for the U.S. in the aerospace and moving jurisdiction on all dual-use commercial defense fields, is having exactly the opposite space technologies from the Department of State effect. America’s leadership in commercial space to the Department of Commerce, to legislating capabilities has eroded, while Russian, European, new export control laws that update and replace and Asian entities have expanded and deepened the antiquated “Cold War” legislation that is still their growing dominance. The U.S. has fallen in place, e.g., Arms Export Control Act and behind in the global space commerce competition Export Administration Act. due in no small part to its counterproductive export control regime. The articles and documents published in this special issue of Space and Defense address many ITAR is not only harmful to commercial space, of the issues highlighted above. This includes the but it also damages national security by placing historical development of the U.S. export control legal and bureaucratic restrictions on the U.S. regime within the context to address Cold War military use of commercial space assets that rely foreign policy concerns, how ITAR is on a robust satellite industry and space industrial implemented today, and finally, what are the base. ITAR has led to the problem that “we are problems with ITAR implementation and how can denying our allies access to space protection those problems be addressed through policy and capabilities” significantly impacting how the U.S. law. deals with national security space issues. ii Space and Defense, Winter 2008 The History of United States Weapons Export Control Policy Taylor Dinerman Author and Journalist, New York City All nations regulate Arms sales, but the United a fear that they “…might eventually fall into the States (U.S.) has traditionally gone further than hands of the Bolsheviks.”2 As long as the U.S. most. After World War I, a conspiracy theory stayed more or less isolated from world power made its way into popular culture that blamed the politics, its decision on whether or not to export war, and specifically the U.S. intervention in weapons or technology mattered little, except to 1917, on the so called “merchants of death.” Ever the foreign states involved and to the U.S. firms since, this has been a powerful and enduring that were affected. During the interwar period, theme in politics and culture throughout the when U.S. technology slowly began to overtake world. Yet, nowhere have the effects of this that of Europe, especially in the aeronautical field, theory been more enduring than in U.S. policy these decisions became more significant. and law. Before World War II, export restrictions were At the time, arms sales were seen by European often informal, such as the case in 1932 when the governments as tools of statecraft. Referring to Army Air Corps pressured Boeing into refusing to the efforts by Britain and France to sell ships to sell their advanced technology Model 247 airliner the Baltic states, one recent study explained: to Japan. “In confidential correspondence, Boeing officials expressly reassured the Air Corps that ...winning the orders became none of the company’s advanced airliners would important to the economic health be sold abroad unless the government approved.”3 of both nations, but they also The Neutrality Acts of the late 1930s were an believed other benefits fell to the attempt to prevent the U.S. from getting power winning the bids. To the embroiled in the wars of Europe and Asia due to British and the French navies, arms exports. However, due to the depression, selling warships became a means few in the U.S. Congress wanted to cut all of propping up their respective weapons exports off entirely. So, the U.S. naval industries. To the British and continued to export weapons to a few selected French governments, and their belligerent nations such as Nationalist China, naval leaders, sales meant while denying them to others, such as Ethiopia or influence. And influence meant Spain. control. And control meant more orders. But this assumption proved From the beginning of World War II in September as wrong as much of British and 1939 until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in French thinking between the wars.1 December 1941, the Roosevelt Administration faced numerous legal and political obstacles in its In contrast, the U.S. refused to sell ships and efforts to aid first Great Britain and later the submarines to these small states both because of a policy of not wanting to sell ships at all and due to 2Ibid. 3Roger Bilstein, The Enterprise of Flight: The 1Donald Stoker, Britain, France and the Naval American Aviation and Aerospace Industry Arms Trade in the Baltic 1919-1939 (Frank Cass, (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, London, UK, 2003). 2001). 1 Dinerman, The History of United States Weapons Export Control Policy Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). much reason for thinking so. Take Occasionally, the administration flat out broke the one simple test, the ability to law as when it delivered half a million surplus withstand nationalism. It is often rifles to the British in the early summer of 1940. said that science is international, but in practice the scientific Driven by sympathy with China and by Japan’s workers of all countries tend to line aggressive overall policy, the Roosevelt up behind their own governments Administration began to increase pressure on with fewer scruples than are felt by Japan in 1938. While this policy failed to deter the writers and artists. The German Japan from attacking Pearl Harbor, it did serve to scientific community, as a whole, weaken the Imperial War machine. The State made no resistance to Hitler. Hitler Department began with what was termed a “Moral may have ruined the long-term Embargo.” On July 1, 1938, Charles W. Yost, prospects of German science, but chief of the Department’s Office of Arms and there were still plenty of gifted Munitions Control, notified the 148 U.S. aircraft men to do the necessary research manufactures and exporters who had registered on such things as synthetic oil, jet with his office that only with “great regret” would planes, rocket projectiles, and the he issue export licenses for warplanes and their atomic bomb. Without them the munitions without naming Japan specifically.”4 German war machine could never have been built up.5 The policy evolved into full scale economic warfare culminating in the dollar freeze of July After 1945, U.S. leaders were led to assume that it 1941, which effectively cut Japan off from would take the USSR at least ten years or more to purchases of oil and other essential commodities.