Star Wars: US Tools of Space Supremacy

by Loring Wirbel

The expansion of space militarization forms a common thread with the explicit unilateral empire-building of the Bush administration. But just as Star Wars did not begin with the Missile Defense Agency, preventive war theory did not originate with Donald Rumsfeld. Advocates of military space always were on the front line of those demanding global dominance. Loring Wirbel argues that the seeds for the current space supremacy doctrine were sown at the end of the Cold War, in the early days of the Clinton administration. Examining the evolution of space-based tools, Wirbel shows that missile defense strategy is part of a dangerous US move to wage endless preventive war and demand global supremacy over allies and adversaries alike.Star US Tools of Space Supremacy provides a fresh look at the role of space as an enabler of the Bush administration’s plans for endless preventive war. It debunks the benign notions of missile defence, and expands the definition of space supremacy beyond that of weapons in space, to include the unilateral misuse of space-based intelligence, communications, and targeting technologies.

194 pages, Hardcover

First published December 20, 2003

Reviews

[Cody Hoeffel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A technical and policy overview of US military and planned use of space, while it is moderately dated today, it still shows the origins of some of the intelligence gathering systems as well as weapons programs that are still discussed in some form or another today. Wirb too, also takes the time at the end to posit what can be done and to analyze (and criticize) what is being done to return space to a state that is less militarized and more open to international cooperation. That being said, the formatting of the novel pushes you to read non-stop, you have chapters and very few paragraph breaks to give you a moment to stop and think about the constant flow of info.