Compass Points - Satellite Killers
Opportunities for Innovation
Compass Points - Satellite Killers
Opportunities for Innovation
May 23, 2024
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The killer satellites are here. Russia has launched an attack satellite and positioned it in orbit near a US satellite.
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WASHINGTON, May 21 (Reuters) - Russia last week launched a satellite that U.S. intelligence officials believe to be a weapon capable of inspecting and attacking other satellites, the U.S. Space Command said on Tuesday as the Russian spacecraft trails a U.S. spy satellite in orbit.
Russia's Soyuz rocket blasted off from its Plesetsk launch site some 500 miles (800 km) north of Moscow on May 16, deploying in low-Earth orbit at least nine satellites including COSMOS 2576, a type of Russian military "inspector" spacecraft U.S. officials have long condemned as exhibiting reckless space behavior.
"We have observed nominal activity and assess it is likely a counterspace weapon presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit," a USSPACECOM spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters. "Russia deployed this new counterspace weapon into the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite."
-- Reuters
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What will US military forces do when the satellites go down? What will Marines do? Warfighting is a series of events, some predicted and some unpredicted. The force that can deal best with unexpected events is the force that wins.
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During a recent CSIS interview reviewing the two-year history of fighting in Ukraine, one of the participants, Dr. Eliot Cohen, emphasized the critical importance of innovation in daily fighting.
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I think the other way in which, though, the World War I analogy is misleading – and again, it’s because people don’t know the history, the real kind of tactical and operational history of World War I – is the assumption this is just butchery and there are very heavy casualties – I don’t want to minimize that – and it’s mindless and there’s, you know, no particular innovation. Actually, this is a war in which there’s a lot of innovation, in which the – I would put it this way. I think the Ukrainians innovate from the bottom up and the Russians tend to innovate from the top down. The Russians have a very top-down command system, so they can be flexible and learn and so on. The Ukrainians, it’s a free society, so you get a lot of guys with kind of interesting ideas who go out and try stuff and they experiment. Both ways of doing it have their advantages and their disadvantages. But it’s – what it’s certainly not is, A, it’s not static; and, B, it’s not a conflict in which it’s just people battering their heads against each other without genuine kind of innovation and improvement on either side.
-- CSIS, Dr. Eliot Cohen
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When General Al Gray signed FMFM-1 Warfighting back in 1989, he codified a Marine way of fighting that emphasizes creative and aggressive offense. Using low level initiative and leadership, Marines improvise, adapt, and overcome. They aggressively exploit opportunities. Once in contact with the enemy, they do not wait for orders. They do not sit and wait for the satellites to come back on. The satellites going down is like the sun going down, it is an opportunity for offense.
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Eighty years ago this month, May 1944, Marines were preparing for an offense against the Marianas Islands including Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. The Marines could not predict how the fighting would go, but they trained hard.
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(These) months were busy, hard-working ones. The replacements that arrived to fill the gaps left by Namur’s casualties (in the Kwajalein battle) had to be trained in all the complexities of field work. Most of these replacements were boys fresh from boot camp, and they were ignorant of everything but the barest essentials. Week after week was filled with long marches, field combat problems, live firing, obstacle courses, street fighting, judo, calisthenics, night and day attacks and defenses, etc. There were also lectures on the errors we’d made at Namur. Added emphasis was placed on attacking fortified positions. We worked with demolition charges of dynamite, TNT, and C-2 [plastic explosive], and with flame throwers till everyone knew them forward and backward.
-- Breaching the Marianas: The Battle for Saipan by Captain John C. Chapin, USMCR (Ret)
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Weeks later, the Marines had arrived offshore Saipan ready to land. What happened next? Captain Chapin describes what he experienced as a young Lieutenant that first day and night.
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All around us was the chaotic debris of bitter combat: Jap and Marine bodies lying in mangled and grotesque positions; blasted and burnt-out pillboxes; the burning wrecks of LVTs that had been knocked out by Jap high velocity fire; the acrid smell of high explosives; the shattered trees; and the churned-up sand littered with discarded equipment.
Suddenly, WHAM! A shell hit right on top of us! I was too surprised to think, but instinctively all of us hit the deck and began to spread out. Then the shells really began to pour down on us: ahead, behind, on both sides, and right in our midst. They would come rocketing down with a freight-train roar and then explode with a deafening cataclysm that is beyond description.
It finally dawned on me that the first shell bursts we’d heard had been ranging shots, and now that the Japs were “zeroed in” on us, we were caught in a full-fledged barrage. The fire was hitting us with pin-point accuracy, and it was not hard to see why—towering 1500 feet above us3 was Mt. Tapotchau, with Jap observation posts honeycombing its crest.
. . . [That first night]
Slowly, very slowly, the hours of my watch passed, and at last I leaned over and shook my runner awake. “It’s time for your watch,” I whispered. “Look out for that place over there, maybe Japs in it. Keep awake.” With that I rolled over on the ground and was asleep in an instant.
Right away, it seemed, someone was shaking me and insisting, “Wake up!” I jerked bolt upright—in combat your reflexes act fast and you never go fully to sleep. A glance at my watch showed that it was almost dawn.
I turned to my runner who was lying against me, asleep. “Let’s go!” I said, “Pass the word to the squad leaders to get set.” He didn’t stir. I shook him. He still didn’t move. He was dead. With the callousness that war demands, I rolled him over, reached for his canteen, and poured the precious water into my own canteen. Then I left him lying there....
-- Breaching the Marianas: The Battle for Saipan by Captain John C. Chapin, USMCR (Ret)
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Russia has launched a killer satellite. What will US military forces do when the satellites go down? What will Marines do? Marines will do what they have always done, innovate, fight, and win. When the satellites go down -- and they will do down -- it is an opportunity for offense. Compass Points salutes all the Marines training today for the battles that may be only months, weeks, or hours away. Compass Points also salutes Captain John C. Chapin who survived the fighting in the Pacific, returned home, and wrote his history, so that Marines who came after him would be ready.
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Reuters - 05/21/2024
US assesses Russia launched space weapon in path of American satellite
By Joey Roulette
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CSIS - 02/22/2024
Ukraine in the Balance: A Battlefield Update on the War in Ukraine
https://www.csis.org/analysis/ukraine-balance-battlefield-update-war-ukraine
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Breaching the Marianas: The Battle for Saipan
Marines in World War II - Commemorative Series
By Captain John C. Chapin
U.S. Marine Corps Reserve (Ret)
A comment from Dr. Cohen piqued my interest: "I think the Ukrainians innovate from the bottom up and the Russians tend to innovate from the top down. The Russians have a very top-down command system, so they can be flexible and learn and so on."
The Russians have a top down command system, so they can be flexible and learn???
This fallacy of "top-down C2 that knows best" has consumed our think tanks and our senior leaders lately. As we trained and equipped against the Soviet Union, the doctrine of Maneuver Warfare was developed knowing it would target their weakness, specifically, their top-down C2 and lack of initiative among the NCO and junior officers. Indeed, we quickly saw through the propaganda as the central planning system began to buckle. How did our officers come to admire the PRC model?
I have recently heard several...no, actually MANY senior officers speak semi-favorably about the PRC system, its centrally-managed economy, modernization programs, and military hierarchy. To loosely paraphrase, they seem to wistfully imagine that we would be able to keep pace, if only we had a similar centrally-managed system. Capitalism and republican democracy, tactical initiative, and bias for action are, to them, unfortunate impediments to military modernization and technological parity.
Of course, they insist in the same speech that ours is the best system, but we must recognize that our system makes it difficult to keep pace.
How have our leaders fallen under this insidious lie that top-down C2 is more effective against a thinking enemy with a free will?
It may seem like a tangent from this article, but this senior leader thinking, incentivized by the NCR think tanks that benefit, fuels the drive for big tech at the expense of training Marines that can adapt, improvise, and overcome. A drive for systems, missiles, and technicians, means that procurement, recruiting, and warfighting focus are pointed in those directions. If you budget for and focus on one thing, the other thing suffers. This is why Combined-arms and maneuver warfare are quickly becoming passe'.
We must diligently train without using space-based communications and navigation systems. We must always be able to fight and win independent of both. We must also plan to fight in an EMP, HEMP environment.