U.S. intelligence analysts have been tracking a couple of Russian satellites, known as Cosmos 2542 and 2543, for months. Or rather, they’ve been watching them since they formed a single satellite, deployed via a Soyuz rocket that took off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on 26 November 2019. It was 11 days after this launch that the first satellite was split in two, the moment one somehow “was born” the other, and no one in the army was proud of the hot arrival. By mid-January, the 2 Russian satellites had floated near a billion-dollar spacecraft called KH-11, one of the most challenging spying machines in the army, component of a reconnaissance constellation called Keyhole/CRYSTAL. It was not transparent if Cosmos satellites threatened or followed kh-11, which would have the solution force of the Hubble Speed Telescope, but it turned out that this was just the birth of the twins’ surprises.
After the United States expressed concern in Moscow through diplomatic channels beyond this year, the couple walked away from KH-11 and whistled around the Earth at more than 17,000 m.p.h. Then, on July 15, as U.S. analysts continued their follow-up, the “born” Russian satellite Cosmos 2543 fired a projectile at speed, said General John “Jay” Raymond, the general leader of the fiery U.S. Speed Force. Time. It was the first time the army had publicly demanded sufficient control of anti-satellite weapons of velocity evidence, a worrying new progression in the emerging theater of orbital warfare.
For Raymond and supporters of the Sspeed Force, which is the first new branch of the Army in 72 years, moscow’s “nesting doll” satellites, as the army called the triplets of Cosmos, pose a threat not only to an over-beloved American piece. . curtains of espionage still for the intellectual functioning of fashionable America itself. “Russia is coming to capture orbital captures that seek to exploit our dependence on deceptive systems,” Raymond says.
Regardless of the assignment of Russian handicrafts, and Moscow says it is inconceivable nonviolent, Raymond is never mistaken to mention that Americans have come to rely on satellites in some way that are only born to appreciate them. Even when Cosmos 2543 announced its assignment, Air Force satellites modified a series of day-to-day civilian jobs at home in the United States, street lighting devices synchronized with the Global Positioning System (GPS) were circulating around the country, and corporations had GPS on time. – credit card purchases. Weather satellites transmitted data for weather forecasts. Most of the approximately 650,000 911 calls made daily in the United States have satellite overloads.
But despite all the tactics that civilians and the military have, the networks of some 1,000 satellites are virtually unprotected best friends. And just as lightly defended access to deep-sea ports or herbal resources has been a source of war in the past, leaders and strategists fear that vulnerable U.S. satellite networks. Raymond tells TIME that Russia executed an unreported projectile launch previously in February 2017. China has begun teaching specialized sets with weapons capable of detonating goods in orbit. Both countries have deployed laser and gcircular communications interference devices capable of disabling satellites.
In short, an arms race has begun for deception. This is the story of the efforts to hit ahead.
The wrong mission to provide direct protection to vulnerable orbital networks in the United States is the duty of Sspeed Command and Sspeed Force, which since December has the same prestige as the army, navy, air force, and Marines. The Pentagon has decades of delight in the design and deployment of satellites, the army operates to the fullest of the largest and possibly has the highest requirements of productive strategic manufacturing plans of a large apple organization on the planet. It also employs another 20,000 Americans whose daily work includes monitoring and managing deceptive systems for GPS, communications, meteorology, and ballistic missile warning.
But less than 8 months after its launch, Sspeed Force is looking for a position to justify its existence. Some critics say that international relations and a new foreign treaty, not a strengthening of the army’s power, are the most productive way to secure speed. Others mean that the Pentagon overesteered the danger of Russian and Chinese weapons systems during the Cold War. And few establishments have an amount of waste, fraud and abuse as the Pentagon does: the Watchdogs point out that the Sspeed Force budget for 2021 is $15.4 billion, with an expected design of $2.6 billion over the next five years, maximum actually due to ranked programs. .
Aleven, while the price is just a fragment of the Pentagon’s overall budget of $7four0 billion, convinces Americans that a new service is also reliable for our satellites and not just to create a huge new wing in the army advertising complex will require work. It’s not helpful that things were given away to a comedic start that marked more friends: pop culture has dubbed the “Sspeed Farce” command, thanks in part to its great advocate, President Donald Trump. He made it a component of his re-election speech, and his crusade sells Sspeed Force merchandise. Trump, even his best friend, signed the official Sspeed Force seal and made recommendations on the path of his uniburocracy, four U.S. officials told TIME. When news of Trump’s superficial interest in this complex high-risk military business came to light, he fed countless memes and evening comedy routines. In May, Netflix launched a satirical series through Steve Carell founded on the launch of the service, adding uniburocracia designed to provide camouflage on the moon.
For more than nine months, TIME conducted a chain of interperspecies with Raymond and other executives, analysts, and operations experts at Sspeed Command in Washington, D.C. and Colorado, documenting the birth of this new branch of the Armed Forces. The image that emerges is mixed. Sspeed Force includes committed professionals who verify and mitigate genuine threats. But he has paintings to be made to convince Americans that he is carrying out an operation essential to his safety and lifestyle, not just an assignment too expensive of militarized vanity.
The U.S. trooplaystation only took more than a minute to get to safety, and they didn’t yet have it. At 1 a.m. local time on January 8, more than a dozen Qiam-1 and Fateh-313 ballistic missiles were ripped from their launch sites at 3 bases in western Iran. In a matter of seconds, infrared sensors on U.S. satellites. Orbiting 22,000 miles up searched the thermal signatures of the missiles in the Circumference of The Earth and transmitted the facts to the 460th Operations Group at Air Force Base and in Aurora Buckle, Colorado. The most important things about real-time missiles such as rows behind rows of intelligence analysts, bathed in the bluish glow of computer screens, triangulated their things and launch trajectories.
Over time, a new series of U.S. Army communications satellites sent to two Iraqi bases, Al Aunchuffed and Erbil, where many Americans were stationed. The first missiles hit 1:3four a.m., its 1, 4,000 pounds. Warheclassified ads turning buildings, planes and homes into smoldering debris. The concussions caused by the explosions wounded 10 nine American soldiers, but with maximum control to take refuge in underground bunkers and trenches. No one died.
The foiled Iranian attack was a validation of the five-year U.S. strategy of attacking satellites to deceive in producing tactical merit in the design of the conflict. But in recent decades, the concheck has changed: they are never just missiles, there are more players and all build constellations of more complex cargo ships. Since October 2014, a Russian satellite called Luch has “visited” five other communications satellites, adding a French and Italian army, according to Bob Hall, a former satellite operator Lockheed Martin who now works as technical director at Analytical Graphics Inc. (AGI), in Exton, Pennsylvania. The incident led French Defense Minister Florence Parly to announce last year that France would expand laser-armed “bodyguard” satellites. “If our satellites are threatened, we intend to blind our adversaries,” he said. The Chinese also entered the game, deploying the Shiyan-17 satellite (SY-17) in 2016 to hold a “meeting” with no less than four other satellites, all Chinese, discovered AGI. “They perform this orbital dance where they fly very close to a satellite,” Hall says.
Both China and Russia reorganized their militaries in 2015, emphasizing the importance of space operations, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment published last year. “They view space as important to modern warfare and view counterspace capabilities as a means to reduce U.S. and allied military effectiveness,” it said, adding that America’s dependence on space is perceived by adversaries as the “Achilles heel” of U.S. military power.
The U.S. government He has responded with his own deceptive new technologies, the big apple of which is the ultimate logical secret. The X-37B cargo drone, which resembles a miniature cargo ferry, is the declassified best friend. The X-37B is their sixth misideirectly to check “captains had to maintain superiority in deception,” the army says. The last completed assignment was a 780-day flight that ended in October.
Threats to deceptive formulas also come from Earth. On April 15, Russia tested an anti-satellite missile and in December the Russian army deployed a new laser formula designed to blind spy satellites above it. GPS users in North Scandinathru since 2017 have reported interruptions in signs every time Russian army training is conducted in the region; The Norwegian government says the Russians are stirring up the signals. China is preparing blockers to target satellite communications in a variety of frequency bands, adding very high-frequency communications through the military. And China demonstrated its own anti-satellite missile capability in 2007 when it destroyed one of its old weather satellites, creating a cloud of more than 3,000 pieces of deceptive debris, a turning point that undoubtedly triggered today’s arms race.
Behind two degrees of mesh fences crowned with razor wires at Schriever Air Force Base, east of Colorado Springs, is Building 400, one of Sspeed Command’s smallest facilities. On either floor, hoax squadrons paint in temperature-controlled rooms vault-shaped doors for 190 Minischeck satellites outside the Defense, called birds, role-controlled. Today, when something goes wrong, operators no longer assume they face a technical challenge. “A challenge you have could be because an opponent created it for you,” the lieutenant says. Colonel Michael Schriever, Director of GPS Operations, whose grandfather lent his call to the base. “Sspeed is no longer a benign environment.”
This new mindset, called orbital warfare, the main drivers of Sspeed Force creation. Until recently, deception was an almost quiet concept: satellites like GPS were too far away and too expensive to aim. Not anymore. The Navy began astronomical navigation education for its officials after concluding that their recent dependence on GPS has made them vulnerable to deceptive attacks. The Army has awarded contracts for miniaturized inertial navigation systems that are also attached to the soldiers’ boots to track them in the design of a satellite fault. “Our doleading systems are vulnerable,” says Todd Harrison, director of the Cinput aerodoleading security task for Strategic and International Studies. “That’s why it’s time to organize a separate service without modification.”
Another explanation of why for the creation of the Sspeed Force is that national satellites are recently controlled across multiple centers and agencies, which can also generate the maximum logical secret and loss of shared information known in global intelligence as hyper-sharing. Under the Obama administration, it took officials four months to hang a briefing on deceptive U.S. captains for Vice President Joe Biden, because the data was scattered among so many top logical secret classifications and few officials had access to all of them, Robert Cardillo recalls. , former director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.
But reorganization presents its own challenges. As for a workplace in the circular circumference of the Pentagon, behind an unmarked gate and with an access card in Corridor 8, army planners have charted the long run of the hot branch of the army. Enter and look to the right, where the organization’s plans are glued to the wall. At the top of the army hierarchy is General Raymond, recently 88 official members of the Sspeed Force. Below him is Chief Chief Sergeant Roger Towberman, the first chief adviser indexed, and then cascading rows and rows of commonly empty maximum rectangles meaning commanders, deputies and other positions.
Some of Sspeed Force’s paintings are superficial, like how to call its members. If you’re in the army, you’re a soldier. The Navy? Marine. Marine Corps? Marine. Aviation? Aviator. But the speed force? You… an astronaut? (The Pentagon sent surveys to service members for their contribution.) But other aspects are more complicated. The backbone of being the Sspeed Force is approximately 16,000 civilian air force personnel without damage. On July 16, the hot service announced that it had desperately that 2,410 airmen from more than 8,500 active duty volunteers would be transferred as of September 1. Everyone will have to transfer contracts, salaries and benefits to the bureaucracy of the speed created.
If you sound like a powerful friend, dear, you’re not alone. In an additional ordinary act of fiscal prudence, the Hill prevented the Sspeed Force from adding new positions in the military; instead, they will have to be transferred from other services. However, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that it will charge up to $3 billion in one-time use over the next five years to establish the force, plus approximately $1 billion additional to pay for new checkpoints and administrative. Government oversight agencies certainly have a new bureaucracy bring with it greater funding from the federal military. “The initial fees for the creation of the Sspeed Force are probably a small down payment on an apple that can also charge tens of billions of bills in the coming years,” says William Hartung of Cinput for International Policy.
Sspeed Force’s attitude has stimulated the enthusiasm of the aerodynamic industry, which relies on expensive defense contracts, as well as high-tech study centers and think-of-the-art centers, which rely on the government’s investment to produce their expertise. This in turn creates opportunities for the popular bureaucracy of pentagon waste, fraud and abuse. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the congressional control agency, warned that the creation of the Sspeed Force can also exacerbate fragmentation and vain control and complicate surveillance by purchasing new satellite systems. This is a major concern because misleading projects exceed the budget through billions of bills and years of delay, the GAO said. Deborah Lee James, Air Force Secretary under President Obama, concluded when she was at the Pentagon that deceptive force makes no sense. “Bureaucratic division is inherent in a major reorganization of the apple,” she says. “For me, it’s just an extra thing that’s going to waste time, attention and money.” Convincing Americans otherwise is difficult.
It was an abnormally mild day in Washington, D.C., on January 15, when General Raymond arrived at the White House to meet with President Trump. The visit, which was described to TIME through four U.S. officials, was more than just a consultation for Trump. For the past two years, the Sspeed Force has connected to its political perspectives. The mentions of the Deceptive Force are a line of applause from the regime in political demonstrations. Supporters are buying Sspeed Force hats, T-shirts and decals on their official 2020 Crusade website, putting it on par with “Building the Wall” and “Making America Great Again” as a war cry for re-election. Trump, a businessman who browsed samples of his multimillion-dollar design projects, made transparent to Pentagon officials looking to have a non-public percentage on decisions about everything from undrawing and logos to the service anthem and rank names. .
Then, after being taken to the Oval Office to sit in a semicircle in front of The Resolute’s office, Raymond and other army leaders, adding Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, introduced Trump to the first of what can be a long list of Sspeed Force decisions: be the official seal? Four options, produced from several months of deliberations with advertising agencies and air force chiefs, were published on foam posters and placed in front of the President. Trump studied any of them before deciding on one with a silver delta symbol surrounded by a speed shipment in white orbit over a blue balloon. To make it official, Trump pulled out a black Sharpie marker, drew an arrow pointing at the seal and scraped his signature on top. Before it skyrocketed, the president advised a suggestion: first lady and beyond the genre Melania Trump deserve to help design the uniburyness of the Sspeed Force’s impeccable fashion sense. The incident then served as a comic strain in the bowels of an episode of the fictional Netflix series of the same name.
Nine days after the meeting, without notifying the Pentagon, Trump turned to Twitter to post his resolution on the hot label, which he mistakenly called a “logo.” This provoked a mockery of tastes. Thousands of users noted the remarkable resemblance of the seal to the Star Trek emblem for the fictional Starfleet organization. Paramount Pictures officials then requested a conference call with the Pentag directly to link their trademarks were not infringed, U.S. officials told TIME. The U.S. military issued a prescribed complaint to quell the complaint that the main elements of the seal date back to the 1940s and serve to honor the proud pride of the air force and the long-standing track record of providing the world’s deceptive highest productive captains.”
Dust highlights what could well be the biggest challenge facing the Pentagon in the early stages of hot service deployment: Sspeed Force is a simple concept as a joke through American giants. Raymond insists that Apple’s news is the right news and that the taunt will only increase the mission record. “We have a pop culture plot that we take advantage of,” he says. Privately, army officers say, he even imagined how to make an appearance on the Netflix series. “We have some education for average Americans about how their lives have deceptive abilities,” Raymond says.
Behind the humor there are serious considerations about the war: the set of vulnerable satellites and the Russian and Chinese festival has even worried the pigeons of the direction that things are taking. The Trump administration, and most House Democrats who voted in December to create and finance the Sspeed Force, agree that to limit the danger of a deceptive war of the 21st century, the United States will have to deter nations through the expansion of the capabilities of the U.S. military.
Russia and China say it’s what militarizes the deception. Both criticized the creation of the Sspeed Force as a contravention of the foreign consensus on the non-violent use of external deceptions, which they said undermines global balance and strategic stability. On the same day as Russia’s arms control on July 1, Dmicheck, Rogozin, head of Russia’s deceptive program, delivered a speech to his opposing numbers in Brazil, India, China and South Africa through a video conference in which he called “weapons- loose load of a big apple ” to reaffirm his suitability for sustainable and long-term use as it is today.
Regardless of Russia’s conflicting positions, some U.S. critics and gun control analysts say the creation of the Sspeed Force makes the crash more likely. A new orbital arms race has transformed deception into a “great war,” such as air, land, and sea, and could channel billions of green bills into the new generation that increases the option of war, up and down. A separate branch of the forces of deception, fear the critics, the dangers of militarizing America’s policy of deception. And sell weapons in deception. On June 17, the Pentagon unveiled a deceptive defense strategy that made it transparent that the United States would counter Russian and Chinese deceptive weapons, coordinate with its allies, and prepare for a deceptive war.
Those seeking a less martial alterlocal invoke Cold War treaties that diminish the threat of confrontation with the USSR. Despite advances in deception weapons, there are no applicable regulations for army action in deception. The 1967 External Speed Treaty prohibits countries from deploying “nutransparent guns or other weapons of mass destruction” to deceive. But this language is broad, arms analysts say, and neither could expect the prompt speed of generation in development. “In the absence of foreign agreements on satellite security and the stage in foreign deception, more countries are uploading weapons capable of destroying satellites in orbit,” says Laura Grepass of the Union of Worried Scientists.
A deceptive treaty has its own challenges. Diplomatic and U.S. military talks are underway to bring together more allies and partners to lock up the security of deception, however, the White House says it is never very curious about forging new deceptive weapons treaties. A U.S. State Department official. He told TIME that defining a “deceptive weapon” is complicated and verifying that it is never a weapon is an even more challenging problem. “It’s different that I might be able to pass by and inspect it: a satellite is passing by to look like a satellite,” the official said. “For that bureaucracy of reasons, we don’t help gun control” in deception.
Treaty advocates say difficulty will be more difficult over time. The UN recognizes 90 deceptive nations. In March 2019, India tested its anti-satellite system, destroying its own doleadingcraft. He proudly proclaimed that he had joined the “elite club of deceptive powers.” Other countries such as Iran, North Korea and Pakistan have shown deceptive weapons captains or a preference to expand them.
One way or another, falcons and pigeons agree that everything that has been done to move the fiery arms race of their current trajectory. It is an ancient truth, after all, that wherever humans have ventured, violence has followed.
“With reports through Julia Zorthian