Space is more important than ever for the security of the United States, but it’s almost like the Wild West in terms of behavior, a top general said today.

Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, spoke Jan. 24 at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. His talk was titled, “U.S. Strategic Command Perspectives on Deterrence and Assurance.”

Hyten said, “Space is fundamental to every single military operation that occurs on the planet today.” He added that “there is no such thing as a war in space,” because it would affect all realms of human existence, due to the satellite systems. Hyten advocates “strategic deterrence” and “norms of behavior” across space as well as land, water and cyberspace.

Otherwise, rivals like China and Russia will only threaten U.S. interests in space and wreak havoc for humanity below, he said. Most of contemporary life depends on systems connected to space.

Hyten also addressed other topics, including recent proposals by some to upgrade the country’s missile defense systems.

“You just don’t snap your fingers and build a state-of-the-art anything overnight,” Hyten said, adding that he has not yet spoken to Trump administration officials about the issue. “We need a powerful military,” but a severe budget crunch makes “reasonable solutions” more likely than expensive and unrealistic ones.

On the upgrade front, Hyten said he favors a long-range strike missile system to replace existing cruise missiles; a better air-to-air missile for the Air Force; and an improved missile defense ground base interceptor.

‘Critically dependent’

From satellites to global-positioning systems (GPS), space has transformed human life – and the military – in the 21st century, Hyten said. In terms of defining "space," the U.S. designates people who travel above an altitude of 50 miles as astronauts.

As the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, Hyten oversees the control of U.S. strategic forces, providing options for the president and secretary of defense. In particular, this command is charged with space operations (such as military satellites), information operations (such as information warfare), missile defense, global command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, global strike and strategic deterrence (the U.S. nuclear arsenal), and combating weapons of mass destruction.

Hyten explained that every drone, fighter jet, bomber, ship and soldier is “critically dependent” on space to conduct their own operations. All cell phones use space, and the GPS command systems overall are managed at Strategic Command, he said.

“No soldier has to worry about what’s over the next hill,” he said, describing GPS capabilities, which have fundamentally transformed humanity’s way of life.

Space needs to be available for exploration, he said.

“I watch what goes on in space, and I worry about us destroying that environment for future generations.” He said that too many drifting objects and debris exist – about 22,000 right now. A recent Chinese satellite interception created a couple thousand more debris objects that now circle about the Earth at various altitudes and pose the risk of striking satellites.

“We track every object in space” now, Hyten said, urging “international norms of behavior in space.”

He added, “We have to deter bad behavior on space. We have to deter war in space. It’s bad for everybody. We could trash that forever.”

But now rivals like China and Russia are building weapons to deploy in the lower levels of space. “How do we prevent this? It’s bigger than a space problem,” he said.

Deterring conflict in the cyber, nuclear and space realms is the strategic deterrence goal of the 21st century, Hyten said.

“The best way to prevent war is to be prepared for war,” he said.

Hyten believes the U.S. needs a fundamentally different debate about deterrence. And it all starts with nuclear weapons.

“In my deepest heart, I wish I didn’t have to worry about nuclear weapons,” he said. Hyten described his job as “pretty sobering, it’s not easy.”

But he also noted the mass violence of the world prior to 1945 when the first atomic bomb was used. Roughly 80 million people died from 1939 to 1945 during World War II. Consider that in the 10-plus years of the Vietnam War, 58,000 Americans were killed. That’s equivalent to two days of deaths in WWII, he said.

In a world without nuclear weapons, a rise in conventional warfare would produce great numbers of mass casualties, Hyten said. About war, he said, “Once you see it up close, no human will ever want to experience it.”

Though America has “crazy enemies” right now, in many ways the world is more safe than during WWII, Hyten said. The irony is that nuclear weapons deterrence has kept us from the type of mass killings known in events like WWII. But the U.S. must know how to use its nuclear deterrence effectively.

Looking ahead, Hyten said the U.S. needs to think about space as a potential war environment. An attack in space might not mean a response in space, but on the Earth.

Hyten describes space as the domain that people look up at it and still dream about. “I love to look at the stars,” but said he wants to make sure he’s not looking up at junk orbiting in the atmosphere.

‘Space geek’

Hyten has served in the Air Force for 35 years. He originally wanted to be an astronaut, but his eyesight was too bad. He got a waiver, and graduated Harvard in 1981 with an engineering degree on a ROTC scholarship. He entered the Air Force thinking he would only do four years. But then he had a close-up view of what a young Air Force officer could find in the last frontier of space as satellites and military space science were booming.

“God, I love space,” he said.

In introducing Hyten, Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC, described him as a person of unwavering dedication and profound insights who understands the gravity of situations. “A self-described space geek,” she said.

Hyten lauded CISAC for its research and educational work on national security, and said he enjoyed being around people willing to test out new ideas and discuss potential solutions for vexing problems.

Earlier in the day on campus, Hyten met with William J. Perry, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at CISAC; George Shultz, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; and Condoleezza Rice, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Hoover Institution.

General Hyten was nominated for reassignment to head the U.S. Strategic Command on Sept. 8, 2016. He commanded Air Force Space Command from 2014 to 2016.

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MEDIA CONTACTS

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

 Larry Diamond, FSI Senior Fellow and Hesham Sallam, CDDRL Associate Director and Research Associate Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, predict that state-led reforms will not be enough to alleviate public discontent in the Middle East. Read the whole article here http://bit.ly/2iSNmQU

"The book on Trump is still not written. We must to await the coming months to see which man, the deal-maker or the extremist, comes to the fore. But Trump’s victory also represents the latest stage in a global shift toward populist nationalism, a pattern whose meaning is starting to become frighteningly clear," writes our Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama in Prospect Magazine. Read the article here.

Improving the U.S.-China relationship is a focus at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

CISAC continued this tradition in co-sponsoring the 8th Sino-U.S. Security Relations and Cooperation Conference in Beijing from Dec. 14-15, 2016. The conference was hosted and co-sponsored by the Foreign Ministry's China Institute of International Studies (CIIS).

Ambassador Su Ge, president of CIIS, attended the conference and delivered an opening remark. FSI’s Thomas Fingar and Teng Jianqun from CIIS chaired the conference.

Fingar said, “Although held at a time of uncertainty about the future of U.S.-China relations, the conference included constructive exchanges on strategic stability, obstacles to cooperation in space, and other sensitive topics.”

He added, “The exchanges were frank and constructive because they built on the foundation of understanding and trust developed through years-long exchanges between CISAC and CIIS. In the next phase, small teams of American and Chinese experts will develop joint blueprints to enhance understanding of issues critical for nuclear stability and space cooperation.”

CISAC co-founder John W. Lewis has been active for many years encouraging and supporting better ties between the U.S. and China. He is an expert on Chinese politics, U.S.-China relations, China's nuclear weapons program, U.S. policy toward Korea and health security issues in northeast Asia.

During this most recent Beijing conference, scholars and security experts from both the U.S. and China held in-depth discussions on topics including cybersecurity, outer space cooperation, maritime dispute management, missile defense, grey zone cooperation, and China-U.S. nuclear issues.

The American attendees included scholars from CISAC (Fingar, Brad Roberts, and Joseph Torigian); Brad Roberts, director, Center for Global Security Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Major General Roger W. Burg, former commander, 20th Air Force; Vice Admiral Michael Connor (retired), U.S. Navy; Lieutenant General Susan J. Helms (retired), U.S. Air Force general and former NASA astronaut; Lieutenant General James M. Kowalski (retired), U.S. Air Force general; Steven M. Benner,chief, Strategy and Campaign Division, U.S. Strategic Command, among others.

The Chinese experts came from a variety of institutions – CIIS, China Academy of Engineering Physics, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force, Rocket Force College, China Defense Science and Technology Information Center, PLA Navy Academy of Military Science, PLA South Command, Chinese Academy of Social Science, Renmin University of China, National Defense University, Tsinghua University, etc. 

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Siegfried Hecker wrote the following op-ed for the Jan. 12 edition of The New York Times:

Since my first visit to North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear complex in 2004, I have witnessed the country’s nuclear weapons program grow from a handful of primitive bombs to a formidable nuclear arsenal that represents one of America’s greatest security threats. After decades of broken policies toward Pyongyang, talking to the North Koreans is the best option for the Trump administration at this late date to limit the growing threat.

North Korea broke out to build the bomb because President George W. Bush was determined to kill President Bill Clinton’s 1994 “Agreed Framework,” a bilateral agreement with the North to freeze and eventually dismantle the North’s nuclear program. Hard-liners in the Bush administration viewed it as appeasement. Mr. Bush labeled the North, along with Iran and Iraq, part of an “axis of evil” in January 2002.

At the first bilateral meeting with Kim Jong-il’s regime in Pyongyang in October 2002, Bush administration officials accused North Korea of violating the Clinton pact by clandestinely pursuing the uranium path to the bomb. Washington had already detected this effort in the late 1990s, but it was deemed an insufficient threat not worthy of jeopardizing the gains made by the plutonium freeze.

For the Bush administration, the clandestine uranium effort was all it needed to walk away from the Agreed Framework. Yet Mr. Bush’s team proved unprepared for the consequences and stood by as North Korea resumed its plutonium program and built the bomb.

During six visits between 2004 and 2009, I watched the North continue to try to engage Washington, while the Bush administration preferred the six-party talks led by China, believing that the North would have greater difficulty cheating in the context of multilateral diplomacy. In a 2004 visit, I was even allowed to hold a piece of plutonium — in a sealed glass jar — to convince me and Washington that North Korea had the bomb.

In September 2005, China orchestrated a six-party joint statement calling for a nuclear-weapon-free Korean Peninsula. When the Bush administration concurrently slapped financial sanctions on Pyongyang, the North Koreans walked out of the six-party talks and responded with their first nuclear test in October 2006.

I was in Pyongyang three weeks later and found that although the test was only partly successful, it marked a turning point in the North’s nuclear program. North Korea became a nuclear weapon state and insisted that all future negotiations proceed from that reality. Mr. Bush left office with the North most likely possessing up to five plutonium-fueled nuclear weapons and an expanding uranium program.

North Korea greeted the Obama administration with a long-range rocket launch, followed by a second nuclear test in May 2009 — this one, successful. Unlike the Bush administration, which faced the prospect of the North’s violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Obama administration faced the North’s steady march to an expanding arsenal.

Mr. Obama was also unwilling to engage directly with Pyongyang, insisting instead that the North denuclearize before starting talks. It appears the Obama administration also viewed the regimes of Kim Jong-il and his son and successor, Kim Jong-un, as repugnant and hoped for their collapse, while also staying in step with two conservative South Korean administrations. Mr. Obama’s preferred path has been to tighten United Nations and United States sanctions and to pressure Beijing to rein in Pyongyang. Neither strategy has stopped the Kim regime from expanding its nuclear program.

Pyongyang upped the ante on its nuclear program with a remarkable revelation during my seventh and last visit in November 2010: the existence of a modern uranium centrifuge facility in Yongbyon. That facility served notice that the North was now capable of pursuing the second path to the bomb. No outsiders are known to have been in Yongbyon since my 2010 visit.

Satellite imagery of the Yongbyon complex combined with official North Korean propaganda photos and three additional successful nuclear tests point to a robust and rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal. My best estimate, admittedly highly uncertain, is that North Korea has sufficient plutonium and highly enriched uranium to build 20 to 25 nuclear weapons.

The North also launched some two dozen missiles in 2016, including partly successful road-mobile and submarine-based missiles that could potentially carry nuclear warheads.

President-elect Donald J. Trump faces a much graver threat from the North than his two predecessors. Pyongyang can most likely already reach all of South Korea, Japan and possibly even some United States targets in the Pacific.

The crisis is here. The nuclear clock keeps ticking. Every six to seven weeks North Korea may be able to add another nuclear weapon to its arsenal. All in the hands of Kim Jong-un, a young leader about whom we know little, and a military about which we know less. Both are potentially prone to overconfidence and miscalculations.

These sensitive nuclear issues require focused discussions in a small, closed setting. This cannot be achieved at a multilateral negotiating table, such as the six-party talks.

Mr. Trump should send a presidential envoy to North Korea. Talking is not a reward or a concession to Pyongyang and should not be construed as signaling acceptance of a nuclear-armed North Korea. Talking is a necessary step to re-establishing critical links of communication to avoid a nuclear catastrophe.

Mr. Trump has little to lose by talking. He can risk the domestic political downside of appearing to appease the North. He would most likely get China’s support, which is crucial because Beijing prefers talking to more sanctions. He would also probably get support for bilateral talks from Seoul, Tokyo and Moscow.

By talking, and especially by listening, the Trump administration may learn more about the North’s security concerns. It would allow Washington to signal the strength of its resolve to protect its allies and express its concerns about human rights abuses, as well as to demonstrate its openness to pragmatic, balanced progress.

Talking will help inform a better negotiating strategy that may eventually convince the young leader that his country and his regime are better off without nuclear weapons.