I was reading about renewed U.S. threatening posture against Iran again today, and realized that there was something that Iran, or any perceived technologically capable “enemy” could do to virtually cripple our war machine in the event we launched a preemptive attack. An array of missiles, or a few nuclear weapons, each with ballistic targeting, launched from any or all of these countries could single-handedly destroy the U.S. GPS system, as well as communication arrays and remote sensing devices (spy satellites) with almost no chance of U.S. prevention. When we threaten other countries, I think we forget how our dependent our military might is on these floating, defenseless and very visible objects.
Without satellites, almost all of our precision weapons, including satellite guided bombs and missiles, as well as unmanned aircraft (Predators) would be rendered useless. As a country that prides itself (Donald Rumsfeld said so) on the “mercy” that goes into the production of weapons to limit collateral damage, these “safeties” would likely also be rendered useless, causing our weapons to miss their intended targets and likely kill innocent civilians instead.
In addition, manual navigation of aircraft and submarines would be required again, vastly closing the gap between automatic capabilities of militaries. Without communications satellites our boys in the Pentagon screening our phone calls would suddenly have no satellite transmissions to pick through (ironically, only calls coming to the United States could be monitored via fiber optics). And, yes, all of our DirectTV Dishes and TomToms would cease to function. Of course, we could happily oblige to knock out the enemy’s satellite capabilities as well, so both countries in a conflict (and maybe all countries) would end up blind and dumb – and in extremely vulnerable positions.
Satellites allow us to do a lot. They are expensive, useful and extremely hard to replace during peacetime, and impossible to replace during wartime. The way we keep our advantages with them is to not provoke other countries into military conflict. I would hate for the U.S. military to lose a conflict simply because we couldn’t find out where to bomb.
–Brooks Lastinger

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