Today is the day we remember when the Americans relied on a Welsh poet to rally humanity save Earth from aliens.
"Original Sin achieves the feat of bringing a breath of fresh air to an expert community accustomed to operating in a vacuum, rehashing reductionist postures, while shaking up an academic or scientific community whose refusal of political relevance anchored in a solid idealism is too often synonymous with disconnection from the issues it claims to describe, explain and understand."
https://politique-etrangere.com/2023/07/03/original-sin-power-technology-and-war-in-outer-space/
Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space
Cette recension a été publiée dans le numéro d’été 2023 de Politique étrangère (n° 2/2023). Guilhem Penent propose une analyse de l’ouvrage de Bleddyn E. Bowen, Original Sin: Power, Tec…
Yes the article is as bonkers as that front page splash.
‘Mr Prime Minister, we cannot allow a cosmic moon nuke gap!’
Is Twitter finally dead now?
A US FOBS will do little to stop China bombarding enemy bases across the region, will not help Taiwanese forces repel an amphibious invasion, and does not provide new capabilities for the US. Similarly for China - no new capability. Yet it's described as 'game-changing'...?
Also I'm not sure how much of a gap it is in the space surveillance network. In the Chinese FOBS test US systems were good enough apparently for an anon USSF source to say it 'defied the laws of physics' and landed within 12 miles of its target.
This is a particularly odd thing to say - ICBMs effectively provide the ability to strike anywhere on Earth through space. It's what US Prompt Global Strike was all about. And FOBS will provide no countermeasure to Chinese strike options, hypersonic glide or ballistic!
A great irony is that the presumption that missile defence either works well or soon will means that arguing for FOBS involves trashing suborbital ICBMs (hard to intercept in space) and replacing them with orbiting vehicles (easier to intercept in space)!
Again, as Cameron and I wrote, FOBS will be very expensive to build, doesn't change the China-US nuclear condition, and won't be the technological solution to political problems e.g. toppling a regime from a distance.
I rant about this in
#OriginalSin - you can't really understand or do deterrence if you haven't thought through what a war would look like (as H Khan argued), which also involves understanding the politics of such a war too. Politics is missing in much US-China war discussions.
