An Assessment of Anti-Satellite Capabilities and their Strategic Implications

ABSTRACT

The success of space-based communications, navigation and reconnaissance programs – in both the commerical and military arenas – presents a significant vulnerability. Intuitively, as the economic importance and military indispensability of space systems grows, so will their attractiveness as targets. Although attacks against satellites would involve significant operational challenges, economic costs and diplomatic risks, it is well within the realm of technological possibility. For example, China's decision to research ASATs is an indication of its long-term strategic goal of weakening America's monopoly on military space capabilities. This essay describes the current capabilities of anti-satellite (ASAT) technology, assesses its military impact and considers its broader policy and security implications. In light of the broad implications of ASAT weapons on the debate about missile defense in particular and space weaponization in general, the author concludes that the best way to protect America's space-related economic and military functions is to avoid ASATs development.     

Documentation: Space-Based Solar Power as an Opportunity for Strategic Security

Preventing resource conflicts in the face of increasing global populations and demands in the 21st century are high priorities for the United States Department of Defense. All solution options to these challenges should be explored, including opportunities from space. In 2007, the National Security Space Office's Advanced Concepts Office presented the idea of space-based solar power as a potential grand opportunity to address not only energy security, but environmental, economic, intellectual, and space security as well. First proposed in the late 1960s, the concept was last explored in NASA's 1997 “Fresh Look” Study. In the decade since this last study, advances in technology and new challenges to security have warranted a current exploration of the strategic implications of space-based solar power. For these reasons, the National Security Space Office sponsored a no-cost Phase 0 Architecture Feasibility Study of space-based solar power in 2007.     

Restructuring for resilience: The NASA model

Two decades of incremental decisions have locked in a vision of human space exploration through an interdependent civil space program centered on the Shuttle and the Space Station. The program lacks the resilience necessary to contain cost overruns, schedule slips, and capability cutbacks. The result is overcommitment, which makes it difficult to sustain the program in a budget-constrained environment. Coping with overcommitment through budget cuts in space science, applications, and technology could split the post-Apollo coalition and jeopardize NASA as an institution. Alternatively, terminating the Space Station could eliminate overcommitment, strengthen NASA's political base, and facilitate restructuring toward a resilient program that is sustainable. A restructured NASA might once again become a model for other agencies.     

Killing the Messenger: Mark Lilla’s “End of Identity Liberalism” and its Critics

Decades of mind-numbing political correctness on the academic far-left robbed the humanities and social sciences of their legitimacy, generated the alt-right as its very own dialectial alter-ego, and provided an essential catalyzing ingredient in Donald Trump's electoral victory—understood as the clearest expression of a weary nation's revulsion at p. c.'s intolerable moralizing. The illiberal, antisemitic, white nationalist alt-right and the illiberal, antisemitic, anti-American alt-left mirror one another perfectly! Faced with competing totalitarianisms at both extremes, the liberal center should defend itself first of all by forthrightly reclaiming the univeristy as a space for education and not indoctrination. Yet the politically correct professoriate do not want to hear this—and their over-the-top hostile overreactions to the news that they are to blame for what they hate most prove that it's so. Time to repeal and replace political correctness.     

Adaptive governance for the Internet of Things: Coping with emerging security risks

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a disruptive innovation known for its socio-economic potential, but also for generating unprecedented vulnerabilities and threats. As a dynamic sociotechnical system, the IoT comprises well-known cybersecurity risks and endemic uncertainties that arise as IoT adoption increases and the system evolves. We highlight the impact of these challenges by analyzing how insecure IoT devices pose threats to both consumer protection and the Internet's infrastructure. While recent regulatory responses are starting to target IoT security risks, crucial deficiencies – especially related to the feedback necessary to keep pace with emerging risks and uncertainties – must be addressed. We propose a model of adaptive regulatory governance that integrates the benefits of centralized risk regulatory frameworks with the operational knowledge and mitigation mechanisms developed by epistemic communities that manage day-to-day Internet security. Rather than focusing on the choice of regulatory instruments, this model builds on the “planned adaptive regulation” literature to highlight the need to systematically plan for a knowledge-sharing interface in regulatory governance design for disruptive technologies, facilitating the feedback necessary to address evolving IoT security risks.     

Exploring Space: NASA at 50 and Beyond

In 2008, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and has been embarked on a mission to put astronauts on the moon, possibly by 2020. Is this goal “back to the future”? Or is it “the way forward” as a prelude to a mission to Mars? An advisory panel to President Obama has recommended alternatives to the moon as routes to Mars. At the time of writing, Obama has yet to decide. Of course, NASA has already arrived on Mars with robots, a tribute to the agency's remarkable technical prowess. However, the ultimate challenge would be to send men and women to Mars. Why? That, of course, is the big question. The answer lies in the human heart rather than in the rational mind. NASA's exploration of this unknown frontier has more in common with the expeditions of Columbus and Magellan than the missions of most other federal agencies. Any list of discretionary expenditures would prioritize space exploration as an extreme example of an unnecessary luxury that can be postponed. So why should NASA continue to explore space? That question takes on an acute meaning during a time of intense domestic economic and foreign policy challenges. But imagine: what would be lost to America if NASA did not exist?     

A Really Hard Case: Iranian Space Ambitions and the Prospects for U.S. Engagement

On 27 October 2005, the first Iranian satellite—Sinah-1—was launched. The satellite failed soon after launch, but it represented a significant technological step by the Islamic Republic, and was also a statement of intent on behalf of Iranian space ambitions. Current and projected Iranian space capabilities are highly dependent upon foreign technologies and expertise, but the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile programmes offer a glimpse of how Iran's space programme may yet develop. This essay provides an overview of Iranian space capabilities, and places it within contemporary Iranian domestic and strategic contexts. It also offers an insight into how Iran's space programme is organized, and lastly, offers a view on how best the United States might influence Iran's space programme.     

Uncivil society and social policies in Brazil: The backlash in the gender,sexual, and reproductive rights and ethnic and racial relations fields

This paper analyzes how dynamics between Brazil's right-wing populist government and civil and uncivil organizations affected the role of civil organizations, especially rights-based ones, and Brazil's democratization process. These dynamics contributed to stripping policies of their progressive nature and rejecting the values of diversity, freedom, and equality. Our analysis relies on the inhabited institutions approach to comprehend the role of action, interaction, and meaning in institutionalized spaces. We analyzed two policy fields—gender, sexual, and reproductive rights, and ethnic and racial relations—through documents and in-depth interviews. Our analysis shows that Bolsonaro's government mobilized mechanisms related to institutional changes, the replacement of actors, and their interactions to inhibit civil society organizations' influence in policy formulation and provision and strengthen the participation of uncivil groups, thereby legitimating conservative ideas and discourses, and closing civic space for NGOs with rights-based agendas.     

Crisis for the State or Crisis of the State?

The Conservative‐Liberal Democrat government's policy risks turning the financial crisis into a crisis of the state. This article argues that the current trajectory of the British state risks exacerbating the very social antagonisms which it has fought so hard to contain in recent years. It contends that the crisis (2007–09) was a crisis of neoliberalism and yet, paradoxically, neoliberalism—in the form of further depoliticisation and a new politics of debt—is being re‐invoked to deal with the post‐apocalyptic condition of the British economy. The article suggests that the state lacks the necessary political discourse to secure popular consent and—as a result—is resorting to a more coercive form of political management; and that the effects of austerity are being offset through an increased indebtedness of the British public. Both risk igniting social conflict. In the conclusion several points are indicated for an alternative political agenda.     

Influencing Public Opinion of Space Policy: Programmatic Effects Versus Education Effects

The public is generally supportive of space policy, but less supportive of spending for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) compared to other government programs. Previous research has helped identify who is more likely to be supportive of NASA spending, but not why. This study seeks to understand the causal mechanisms that influence support for NASA. Using natural between-survey and induced within-survey experiments, this study attempts to identify factors influencing changes in public support for NASA spending. Short-term programmatic and related media effects appear to have no influence on public support for NASA spending. However, correcting information asymmetries in regard to NASA's budget appears to have a significant positive effect on public support for NASA spending. The findings speak to the importance of the public being well informed on policy issues in order to make a correct policy choice, and demonstrate that individual programmatic aspects may not be as important as overall agency direction.     

Viewpoint: The Strategic Context of the Moon Echoes of the Past,Symphony of the Future

A strategic framework for the Moon must weave together the economic, social, scientific, national security, and civil aspects that have evolved largely in isolation since the inception of the space age. The United States—based on its historical dependence upon space assets, exploration heritage, and global leadership position,—has the most to gain and lose by the tenor of its leadership in this framework's development and implementation. A permanent presence on the Moon, combined with the use of lunar and space resources, offers the means to create a new space age. Lunar exploration offers many scientific and cultural benefits and has significant historic implications. In addition, this extension of human reach beyond low Earth orbit, and the ability to regularly access and use cislunar space is critical for addressing emerging national, economic, and scientific challenges. An analogy to this strategic moment is the development of United States maritime policy at the beginning of the 20th century.     

Why the BBC Matters: Memo to the New Parliament about a Unique British Institution

The new Parliament will be asked at some point to make critical decisions about the BBC's future at a time when it is facing full‐frontal assaults from competitors who view the BBC as a major barrier to their own advancement. Whether it be newspaper groups seeking to monetise their online activities, commercial children's channels, terrestrial competitors or the owners of music radio stations, media conglomerates rail against the BBC's size and public funding with increasing regularity. Our aim is to remind our legislators of the vital contribution this institution makes to British life: from a journalism inscribed with values of fairness, integrity and impartiality—and valued throughout the world for its professional engagement with foreign affairs—to its creative commitment to British story‐telling, music, comedy, arts and children's programmes, the BBC's contribution to our democratic and cultural welfare is immense. It is a beacon for Britain, which provides social glue for its citizens at a time of fragmenting audiences and identities, within a uniquely non‐commercial space, accountable to both Parliament and its licence payers. It may distort the market, much as the National Health Service distorts the market for health care, but is held in high esteem by the British public and is admired throughout the world. This article explains why the BBC is a national treasure that underpins our creative economy as well as our cultural vitality, and argues that it must be protected from those who argue self‐interestedly for its diminution.     

Rethinking the marketing of World Heritage Sites: Giving the past a sustainable future

Despite significant global prestige and a strong brand presence, UNESCO World Heritage Sites remain underfunded with many unable to self-sustain. Increasing government budget constraints have further restricted funds and UNESCO's “World Heritage Fund”—UNESCO's sole source of financial assistance available to sites—has fallen to approximately $3M USD per annum. Few sites are able to fully offset these budget constraints through tourist revenue alone, and those able to do so often require additional repairs due to damage from visitors exceeding the site's capacity. Although this situation is widely acknowledged within the heritage literature, few papers have proposed long-term strategic solutions beyond marketing and management plans for individual sites. The authors address this pressing issue by questioning whether World Heritage Sites in general are currently being marketed in an optimized manner and proposing a new framework for creating stronger and more appropriate relationships between visitors and sites using Berthon et al.'s the Aesthetics and Ontology model. The authors argue that clarifying and optimizing the marketing of World Heritage through this lens with its focus on the consumption experience of visitors and other stakeholders will yield positive results for both the management of the sites and for their impact on surrounding communities. Furthermore, the authors recommend that policies surrounding the management of these valuable resources and sources of tourist revenue be modified to reflect these findings.     

Neoliberalism,Nationalism and the Decline of Political Traditions

The three great Western political traditions (conservatism, liberalism, social democracy) incorporate three of the four possible combinations of the core political axes: traditional, unchanging authority versus the challenge of change, and egalitarianism versus inegalitarianism. The fourth possibility—egalitarian conservatism—has appeared in various guises, but has usually become submerged within the right, including its most authoritarian forms. Current xenophobic movements claiming to represent those suffering from excessive change—for example, those involved in the UK 's EU referendum and Donald Trump's victory in the USA —are seeing an apparent resurgence of this neglected tradition. What are its implications for politics in general?     

Mutual efforts for mutual trust: Impacts of citizens' knowledge and governmental communication channels on trust in participatory budgeting

Since participatory budgeting (PB) has been advocated by both theorists and practitioners of public administration, its adoption has become a global phenomenon. As of 2017, all local governments in South Korea are legally mandated to operate a PB system as a policy for inviting citizen participation in local budget decision-making. Using an impact assessment tool completed by PB managers in local governments, this research tested two sets of independent variables—citizens' participatory capacity and the diversification of communication in the PB process—that could be associated with the dependent variables “citizens' trust in government (CTG)” and “government officials' trust in citizens (GTC).” The paper presents the three major findings on the common drivers behind CTG and GTC: (1) citizen participants' knowledge on budget and budgeting process; (2) local government's efforts in gathering citizens' inputs for PB; and (3) the mutual efforts to understand the needs and limitations of both citizens and the local government. The paper concludes by exploring the implications for the design and delivery of effective PB implementation.     

Incrementalism: Dead yet Flourishing

Charles Lindblom's 1959 essay “The Science of ‘Muddling Through’” is best known for the strategy of decision making—disjointed incrementalism—that it recommended. That famous paper and Lindblom's related work also provided two theories: a critique of the conventional method (the synoptic approach) and an argument for using incrementalism instead. Both are applied theories: they are designed to help solve complex policy problems. Lindblom's negative applied theory has stood the test of time well: the empirical foundations of its main micro‐component (cognitive constraints of individuals) and its central macro‐component (the impact of preference conflict on policy making) have grown stronger since 1959. The picture regarding the positive applied theory is more mixed. As a coherent decision‐making strategy, disjointed incrementalism has almost disappeared. Yet its key elements, the major heuristics identified in “Muddling Through,” are thriving in many applied fields. Intriguingly, they are often accompanied by subroutines—especially optimization as a choice rule—typically associated with the synoptic approach.     

Politics and enlightenment: Kant and Derrida on cosmopolitan responsibility

Walter Benjamin once remarked of the enterprise of translation ‘that it is nowhere’: that the labour of transcribing the sense, inflection and difference of any particular language and text must always situate the translator in a space which is neither ‘of the original, nor ‘of the language into which it is to be transcribed. This ‘non‐position’ of the translator—between the original and its analogue, between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’, the difference and the acceptability of the text—marks the labour of translation as an ethical responsibility: that of communicating the significance of something—a gesture, a story, a custom, a tradition—which has appeared to this/our socio‐linguistic culture as strange and unfathomably alien; and to achieve this communication without annulling its strangeness, its alterity. The purpose of my comparison of Kant and Derrida's remarks on cosmopolitical responsibility therefore, is fourfold. First, I want to suggest that it is this ‘stricture’ of translation—this difficult responsibility of both judging and respecting the difference of foreign’ cultures—which marks the (non‐Kantian, non‐situated) ‘territory’ of cosmopolitical responsibility. Second, by using Kant's remarks on the relationship between the political evolution of European Enlightenment culture and a possible world confederation of sovereign states, I want to point up the hierarchies and secondarizations involved in the determination of universal standards of moral, ethical and political conduct (even if these standards are originally prosecuted as the legislative conditions of a ‘radical democracy'). Third, I want to look at the ways in which the stricture of translation has been articulated as a theory of ‘global’ responsibility—particularly in the divergent ethical and political approaches of Jurgen Habermas and Jean‐Francois Lyotard. Fourth, I want to suggest that it is Derrida's idea of a ‘dual responsibility’ of critical thought to the political and philosophical resources of European Enlightenment and to the difference of non‐European nations and cultures, that marks the difficulty (the stricture) of acting responsibly within the global economics of power, identity and legislation. I want, in other words, to show that the ‘nowhere’ of Benjamin's translator, is a ‘place’ whose possibility demands a certain ‘Kantian’ right of reflection; that is, the right to pursue the ‘transcendent’ principle of respect for the other.     

Microblogs and the Adaptation of the Chinese Party‐State's Governance Strategy

The Chinese party‐state is currently adapting its governance strategy. The recent debate in China on the role of microblogs in the governance process, as documented in the reports issued by Chinese research institutes and advisory bodies, illustrates the efforts being undertaken by China's political elites to integrate microblogs into their new public management strategy. Mass protests and large‐scale online criticism—voiced via microblogs—directly threaten the regime's survival. As a consequence, legitimacy is no longer regarded as being inherent, but as something that has instead to be permanently regained and reaffirmed. To increase the system's efficiency and to generate a new kind of symbolic legitimacy, China's political elites tend to base the political decision‐making process on strategic calculations intended to be reflective of public online opinion. The turn toward a more responsive way of governing by the Chinese party‐state demonstrates once more the adaptability of authoritarian one‐party states in the digital era.     

What consideration sets can teach us about electoral competition: A two-hurdle model

Consideration set models (CSMs) offer a novel way to study electoral behavior. Until now, they have been mostly studied at the micro-level of the voter's decision process. By contrast, we focus on the implications of CSMs for understanding the phenomenon of party competition. We propose a two hurdle model whereby parties compete for both consideration and selection, pursuant the consideration and choice stages of the CSM. We operationalize these hurdles in terms of a party's inclusivity—is it being considered?—and exclusivity—is it considered on its own?—and formally derive lower- and upper-bounds for the electoral fortunes of the party. We also show how consideration set data can be used to sketch the competition landscape in an election and to characterize the system-wide competitiveness of a political system. We illustrate our concepts and ideas using data from the 2010 Dutch and 2014 Swedish parliamentary elections.     

Linking strategy and performance: Developments in the New Zealand public sector

In recent decades, many governments have sought to improve their systems of strategic management and priority setting. Few of these attempts have met with unequivocal success. In particular, the systems for “whole-of-government strategizing” have not been well integrated into the ongoing budgetary processes and departmental performance management systems. In 1993—1994, as part of its comprehensive reforms of the public sector, the New Zealand government instituted a new system of strategic management. The new approach—which in part grew out of the National government's attempt to outline its long-term vision in a document titled Path to 2010—involves the ministers specifying a series of medium-term policy goals, referred to as “strategic result areas” (SRAs), and then translating these into more detailed departmental objectives, known as “key result areas” (KRAs). More specific “milestones” are subsequently identified to serve as benchmarks against which the achievement of departmental KRAs can be assessed. This article describes and evaluates this new approach and considers its possible application in other countries.