In February, 2008 the U.S. Army introduced its new Field Manual for Operations or “FM 3-0″ for short. What makes it exceptional is that the U.S. military is becoming operational in the domain of knowledge or the so called Information Domain. The whole 7th chapter of this manual is dedicated to “Information Superiority”. The last time we saw that was obviously the conquest of the Space Domain. This is when it happens again. And we’re not just talking about opportunities or theoretical possibilities to do that. It’s actually happening now and here (wherever you are). The U.S. Military is entering the Information Domain.

The Army will tell you that it is part of Full spectrum operations. That is absolutely correct. The term “Full spectrum operations” embodies at least two concepts of military thinking. One is that for almost all the time we know the Army was driven by the rationale to control everything. It’s true now again. No changes here. What is more, the contemporary situation of diversified threats causes the Army to transform from inside, because we can no longer grasp and categorize the threats that are outside. So the Army almost blindly is creating forces that can literally defeat everything and everywhere in the form of unified, joint forces driven by objective operations and linked together with a unified command and control.

I have argued previously that evolution of military action in a brand new domain can be summarized in three steps: (1) engage/enter, (2) utilize, gain superiority over your adversary and (3) control and secure your position. For example, in the Space Domain the U.S. with Donald Rumsfeld has progressed to the third stage and now is trying to secure its position in Space. Same thinking rules apply when we consider the Information Domain. To become fully operational in this domain the U.S. Military has to engage, gain superiority, secure the position — done.

The U.S. Military has outlined five tasks so far in this domain. These are: (1) information engagement, (2) command and control warfare, (3) information protection, (4) operations security, and (5) military deception (FM 3-0, 7-6). Take a closer look at these 5 tasks. Traditionally we know that military tasks can be divided into 2 categories: offensive and defensive. Now they have at least 9 categories, but let’s stick to the traditional point of view. Information protection, operations security and military deception can be seen as defensive tasks, information engagement does not belong to any of these categories and only 1 task is offensive, that is, command and control warfare. Let’s explore this one in more detail.

Command and Control Warfare

The manual states that “Command and control warfare is the integrated use of physical attack, electronic warfare, and computer network operations, supported by intelligence, to degrade, destroy, and exploit the adversary’s command and control system or to deny information to it” (FM 3-0, 7-6). This really sounds like an offensive task: attack, degrade, disrupt, destroy, exploit, control, warfare, etc — doesn’t it?

What’s really interesting about this type of task is that it’s going to be an absolutely different way the Army will interact with the enemy. Firstly, there won’t be a clear line between lethal and non-lethal actions. Secondly, the military will have to put a lot of effort in synchronizing physical attack, electronic warfare and computer network operations. This is a wide open question or even a challenge, if you will.

The manual does not enlarge the picture of these 3 ops of the Command and control warfare, but let me try to define elements of the Information Domain here in more detail:

1. Information platforms or elements responsive to physical destruction, such as: energy sources, electronics, stations, hardware, etc.
2. Telecommunication systems: cellphone lines, radio, television signals, wireless, etc.
3. The Internet: networks, streams, web services, web sites, databases, etc.
4. The Economics: transactions, banking, purchases, etc.
5. The Knowledge: news, messaging, reports, hearings, ideas, etc.

Now let me put these elements into force (in terms of offense):

1. Attack and destroy information platforms, energy and electronic lines.
2. Disrupt and degrade telecommunication systems.
3. Disrupt, exploit and take control over adversary’s internet networks and sites.
4. Disrupt financial operations, freeze bank account.
5. Disrupt or stop the flow and expansion of adversary’s news and ideas.

In short this is what it’s like to exercise Command and control warfare in order to gain information superiority. Some of these objectives have been known from before. But I want to stress again that it’s no longer an exclusive case, rather a full-time project. Using the intelligence the U.S. military will attack, disrupt and take control or destroy Information Domain elements in order to gain information superiority.

Particularly, I find it important to know that the military will be operating in the Internet (bullet no. 3). Again, most military operations in the Internet are defensive so far. Nevertheless the manual foresees military “actions taken through the use of computer networks to disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy information resident in computers and computer networks, or the computers and networks themselves” (FM 3-0, 7-6).

Weaponization of the Information Domain

Let’s talk ultimate. It begs the question whether and what type of “weapons” there will be in the Information Domain. There is actually very little information on this issue in the manual. The only hint I was able to find is a reference to electromagnetic weapons most probably for disruption of telecommunication systems. One can also think that in order to attack and destroy physical objects the military will be using existing weapons and lethal force — that’s probably true. These kind of weapons would be used for objectives 1 and 2 and could be called Electronic warfare. What about other objectives?

There is no official title for them. But we could call them Computer network warfare. This type of warfare would include computer network operations and actions in the Internet as described above. Interestingly enough the military is not ready yet to use word warfare here, so they use operations instead and call them Computer network operations. I guess the reason for that is simply because it’s very difficult to think of and develop weapons that could “disrupt, exploit and take control over adversary’s internet networks and sites”. By weapons I mean not a simple domain shutdown as performed by the FBI, but a forceful data attack over the internet by a software-based weapon or strategy.

As far as the the ground ops, you can not shut it down, make it disappear, you have to take control over it. Same definition should be applied to military ops in the Internet. To destroy the enemy means not to disconnect it, but to take over its data, its territory, if you will. You can not leave the enemy somewhere with its weapons. A full exercise of force requires that the adversary would be harmless even if it could access the particular domain.

CNN has recently reported that a U.S. Air Force colonel is suggesting the U.S. military build its own “botnet” as cyberspace weapon. This is exactly what the U.S. military will be looking into. In the same article Alan Paller, director of research for the SANS Institute, is cited saying that it “would be easier for the military to lean on Internet providers to shut off traffic from hostile computers than to adopt the “carpet bombing” approach Williamson advocates”. I say, you got that wrong, Mr. A. Paller. The military is looking for offensive ways to operate in the Information domain. The military is looking for actual cyber-weapons. So it’s not just about solutions, it’s also the bigger picture of operating in the Information Domain.

The U.S. military might be thinking that it will be enough to destroy information platforms to avoid Computer network warfare. That’s a legitimate way to consider it. However, I would suggest giving thought to these notions of Computer network warfare.

U.S. Information Domain Forces?

Obviously, each domain requires special forces in the military. Now they have US Army, US NAVY, US Air Force. The Space domain will be handled by the Air Force. But what about the Information Domain?

I would guess that a special branch in the US Army might be created. I actually think it’s time for that, because thus far these tasks have been assigned to existing commands, but these tasks require more explicit insight, attention to detail, etc.

Also we have to remember that the whole U.S. military is performing unification from the inside and this process is driven by the objective force — a goal to have a very precise, optimized, synchronized command and control — the idea taken from the rationale of economical thinking. Though this idea is under controversy, I will just say that I would see this new branch not only as a part and participant of this process, but also as a huge contributor in moving forwards to the objective force.

Conclusions and Suggestions

The U.S. Military is at the first stage of its military operations in the Information Domain — it’s still week. But the fact itself that the U.S. Military is entering the Information Domain which includes the Internet is enough to make this maneuver exceptional. However, the Army has to see the other two steps ahead of it.

For that reason the U.S. Military requires more offensive tasks in the Information Domain. In the next Field Manual of Military Operations the U.S. Army should expand the section that deals with Command and control warfare in the Information Domain and add more offensive tasks to the general list.

The Pentagon is going to need a lot of professional and good quality intelligence to deal with these sort of things. The Army still has to define the term “intelligence” very carefully. It’s not enough to say that we’re going to use intelligence for all these tasks. It is necessary to analyze thoroughly what kind of intelligence and roles are required.

This is a wide open discussion. It’ll be really interesting to see it evolve. If you got any comments, please leave a reply.

The main features of this layout are: (1) it’s fully flexible or fluid, if you will, — it occupies the full height and width of the browser window and readjusts itself on window resize; (2) it has 5 commonly used spaces or bars, as they call it, that is: header (static), sidebar (scrollable), mainbar (scrollable), ad space (static), and footer (static); (3) built-in flexibility — it can be modified easily to fit your personal needs.

Also check out the technical specifications. It’s (1) pure, valid CSS with no invalid CSS hacks; (2) tableless, JavaScript free; (3) cross-browser friendly, tested on IE5+, FF1+, Opera7+ and Safari2+; (4) fully accessible, no frames whatsoever.

However, this time I won’t be explaining CSS code line by line as I had been doing previously. I just want to draw your attention to things and limitations that have to be taken into account, if you want to successfully use this project.

Use a CSS reseting tool

It is becoming more and more common to use a CSS resetting tool. Same here. I am using my own reset.css file. This resets the default browser styling, saves time and space. It will be included in the project files — please note that.

Keep CSS layout sep

Thing number two is to keep the CSS that defines and controls the layout in a separate CSS file. As you will/can see in the project files I have the layout defined in a separate layout.css file. I can think of two good reasons for that: (1) it will keep you organized, there is a great practice of discerning two types of CSS definitions, that is, layout and theme; (2) another technical issue is that we want IE5 to ignore and not read some of the CSS lines that might lead it to a crash. So we put those lines at the very bottom of this separate CSS file and break line above them with an inline high pass filter:

i{content:"\"/*"}

This is an absolutely valid CSS code. It will make IE5 ignore everything that is below this line.

Put IE in ‘quirks mode’

That’s right, this approach works only if IE6 or earlier is in the so called ‘quirks mode’. This is mainly because I want to exploit IE’s box model glitch. For those who still don’t know how to put IE into ‘quirks mode’, I have two bits of code. To do that you need to put something that would look like a HTML comment on the very first line of your HTML document, before the doctype element. It can be the xml prologue:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

…or just a simple HTML comment:

<!-- -->

Some of you might consider this as a drawback and, yes, I agree that in some cases, having IE with this mode on, is inconvenient. So we have to keep this limitation in mind.

Download & Preview

• Full Window CSS Layout demo (with some content)
  
• Full Window CSS Layout demo (empty, totally clean)
• All zipped project files

If you manage to keep everything else you add clean, you should have a nicely working, valid CSS only Full Window CSS Layout solution.

If you got any comments, questions or bug reports don’t hesitate to leave a reply below. Also you can check other related pure css topics for more css driven solutions.

Have fun!

Are you a company or individual looking for the best CSS Drop-Down solution? If yes, this proposal might be just for you! However, there is an option to use it for free, if you can put my demos on your website.

A Non-Commercial Solution

NOTE: This non-commercial Pure CSS Drop Down Menu Suite is experimental. It is not recommended that you use it on public websites. If you want a cross-browser solution, please see here. The goal of this project is to identify the issues and challenges of creating a perfect CSS Drop Down Menu for the next generation of web browsing. Specifically, this suite will not work on IE6 or earlier, and will be buggy on IE7 and other older browsers. You can alternatively skip the article and preview or download files right away.

Personally, I’ve always admired CSS only drop down menus (hereinafter dropdown). I think it is a perfect impression of what CSS is for as well as where it is headed. Therefore, I thought that it is in my intention to show you my take on this issue and at the same time give you heads up on what else CSS can do apart from styling and give it a little of dynamics or action, if you will.

Technically, CSS2 has all necessary capabilities in order to create a nicely working dropdown menu with no help from JavaScript whatsoever. That’s basically because of the dynamic hover selector, which can be a great substitute for JavaScript functions. This is the core reason for which pure CSS dropdowns are possible in practise. Of course, there are other great CSS2 features that can also be used and contribute to this type of project. You should keep that in mind.

However, as you might know, widely used Internet Explorer browser version 6 or earlier does not support this selector. To make matters worse, IE browser 7 or earlier has major issues in terms of CSS2 support. This leads us to the problem that I can not show you the ideal CSS dropdown solution having all browsers on board. So I’ve decided to not include cross-browser support and I will simply give you a taste of what I call CSS Strict.

CSS Strict is still in my labs, but inevitably it will payoff, hopefully in the near future. I surely want to be ready. Coding in this mode is also a lot of fun, because you can use literally all the great features of CSS2 or even CSS3.

So let’s explore the main dropdown module — horizontal dropdown — and its secondary components — vertical left-to-right direction and vertical right-to-left direction dropdown — in detail.

Main Dropdown Module: dropdown.css

Okay, the first thing you should notice is that the best HTML structure for this type of project is the unordered list or ul for short. That’s why I’m going to apply our new dropdown class to the ul tags only. Any valid unordered list will do — no biggie here.

The other very important thing is that you must have some kind of CSS resetting tool that would remove the default styling of HTML elements. I am using my own reset.css file. There are other similar tools out the: on Yahoo!, Eric Myer has one too.

Now, keep in mind that you might have multiple dropdowns on the same page or other absolutely positioned elements that form the stack of layers which can sit on each other. We want to make sure that our dropdown menus don’t appear behind any such elements, so we respond to this by relatively positioning the dropdown and automatically putting it in the stack at a chosen point 596, which is pretty high and should be enough to keep it and everything it has inside on top of everything.

ul.dropdown {
 position: relative;
 z-index: 596;
}

Ok, great. The next thing we do is work on the inner lists. Since this structure supports hierarchies, which of course it does, normally we want only the first level list to be visible. So by default, we hide all inner list. Display parameter is set to none for this reason.

What we also do to all inner lists is, of course, position them absolutely. We basically want to give them an absolutely autonomous position with one important condition — they must generate from the list item that they belong to (hereinafter the parent). I will get back to this later in this article, but having that in mind, let’s think of the dropdown as a drawer which is not static and it can move, but at the same time it is constrained by some basic rules — you can imagine that. Well, we have rules here too, just slightly different. Rule number one is to put the dropdown just right below the parent. So the top margin will be the whole height of the parent or 100%, the left margin will equal to 0, and the width — 100%. Please note that these values correspond to the size of the parent item. Rule number two, since this is a absolutely positioned element, you have to set the stack order to 597, which is one point higher than the previously positioned root list.

ul.dropdown ul {
 display: none;
 position: absolute;
 top: 100%;
 left: 0;
 z-index: 597;
 width: 100%;
}

So far so good. Here comes another specific rule. Remember we just put all inner lists below their parent items? Well, it turns out that this is only good for the 1st level dropdown lists. The 2nd and all other higher level dropdowns should normally appear on the starboard side if their parents. That’s why we have to override top and left parameter values for all these lists. Again, these values correspond to the size of the parent item. 2px that you can see below is my free choice.

ul.dropdown ul ul {
 top: 2px;
 left: 100%;
}

Now we get to the point when we have to format the list items or li tags for short. Potentially each list item can hold a new list, it can be what I called the parent. But the absolutely positioned inside list won’t rest against this item, unless we assign to it the relative position. Such position requires us to set the z-index. The next number in the stack is 598, because we want each following list to be higher than the preceding.

ul.dropdown li {
 position: relative;
 z-index: 598;
}

This one below is a contingency line. I’ve seen situations in which the active list appears behind other lists of the same dropdown menu. I’m just being consistent and careful and I think this definition here makes sense:

ul.dropdown li:hover {
 z-index: 599;
}

Another short line here will place all top level list items in a horizontal row, but only the top level!

ul.dropdown > li {
 float: left;
}

Last but really not least, we do the action stuff. This line here will send a command to show the first successive list that belongs to the list item that the user has rolled over. Remember we previously hid all inner list? Well right here we do the opposite, but only to the list that has been triggered.

ul.dropdown li:hover > ul {
 display: block;
}

Vertical Left-to-Right Direction Dropdown Component: dropdown.vertical.css

In this section I’m going to deal with the vertical left-to-right direction dropdown menu component. It’s only a component, it relies on the main dropdown module, so the first task is to import a css file that has all the above lines that I’ve just discussed.

@import "dropdown.css";

Now, having all module lines on-board it’s time to fix this thing to our new liking. Easy. Before that, note that I’ve extended the dropdown class definition with additional class name vertical. So now all the lines in this section will work if the unordered list has both class names: dropdown and vertical.

Our vertical dropdown will of course list its items vertically. We probably don’t want it to be too wide, so the first constrain we apply is to the width. I’ve just set a default value to 200 pixels, which I think is an optimal width. It’s a free choice.

ul.dropdown.vertical {
 width: 200px;
}

Remember on the main module we have placed the 2nd and all other higher level dropdowns on the starboard side if its parent? In this case, all inner lists should be in this position. Same css definitions, only applies for all lists.

ul.dropdown.vertical ul {
 top: 2px;
 left: 100%;
}

And finally top level list items should not be in a horizontal row here. We override this definition and set the float parameter to none, like this:

ul.dropdown.vertical > li {
 float: none;
}

Vertical Right-to-Left Direction Dropdown Component: dropdown.vertical.rtl.css

The vertical right-to-left dropdown component extends the vertical left-to-right or the default vertical component. It’s no need to import the main dropdown module here. The default vertical component will do.

@import "dropdown.vertical.css";

I have now added the third extension or the third class name to the menu. I call it rtl, which stands for right-to-left obviously. You can see that all CSS definitions now work even under 3 conditions: (1) when the unordered list has all 3 class names: dropdown, vertical and rtl; (2) if the html tag has its dir attribute set to rlt (usually for Arabic and Hebrew support) or (3) if the unordered list itself has a dir attribute set to rtl.

Obviously, the first thing is to move the whole menu to the right side, because it reads from right to the left. Float parameter is set to right for this reason.

ul.dropdown.vertical.rtl,
html[dir=rtl] ul.dropdown.vertical,
ul.dropdown.vertical[dir=rtl] {
 float: right;
}

Here we place all inner lists at the port side of their parent list item. We override the left parameter to auto which in the previous component was set to 100%. Finally, we do the opposite with the right margin and set it to 100% which will move the inner lists to the left of their parent items.

ul.dropdown.vertical.rtl ul,
html[dir=rtl] ul.dropdown.vertical ul,
ul.dropdown.vertical[dir=rtl] ul {
 right: 100%;
 left: auto;
}

Below is the last piece of code. Under the first condition the text in the list items should normally be right aligned as it would be if we had the other two conditions in effect.

ul.dropdown.vertical.rtl li {
 text-align: right;
}

Conclusions

As you can see, CSS2 provides us with all necessary tools to create a dropdown without having to code too much. What is more, we managed to keep it modular, fully optimized and clean. Actually, much of these lines work in CSS Transitional – a mode which incorporates all browsers and pays attention to annoying browser bugs. However, under CSS Transitional you still have to use JavaScript helpers to make it work. That wasn’t my intention. When IE8 is out, hopefully this will work on the whole palette of browsers.

I don’t know if you have noticed, but CSS does not have any commands to identify list items that have other lists inside. We usually want to have arrows on those list items to show the user which of them will expand. Unfortunately, as far as I know, so far CSS3 hasn’t addressed this issue and I think that they should consider adding support for that.

Preview & Download

• Horizontal Drop Down Menu Demo
• Vertical Left-to-Right Direction Drop Down Menu
• Vertical Right-to-Left Direction Drop Down Menu
• Fully Packed Pure CSS Drop Down Menu Demo

Download the project files: CSS-Drop-Down-Menu-Suite_by-Tom-Lwis.zip

Today is also a great day because we get to talk about the international endeavour in space - a joint effort to build the ISS. Indeed, the ISS is a remarkable achievement of many nations, a new bright star in the night sky as they say it.

What they also say is that it is a long lasting endeavour and that the future of space exploration is international as well.

We learn how to live and operate in space, we learn how to work together as an international team and that’s what gets us all tingly and excited!

This is probably what you can almost every time hear from space business officials after every successful step in space. It’s truly a fascinating journey, I’d like to agree. But are we all gonna travel the same distances? I mean, You? Me? NASA, ESA, JAXA, space agencies in Russia and China?..

Whenever it is this special day, I remember a short bit of a dialog between Mr. Ken Calvert, member of the United States House of Representatives, and Dr. Scott J. Horowitz, NASA’s Associate Administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at the September 28th, 2006 hearing of The House Committee on Science “Implementing the Vision for Space Exploration: Development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle.” The dialog goes like this:

Mr. Calvert. There is competition out there today, isn’t there?
Dr. Horowitz. Yes, sir. Anybody who understands what this is all about is out there going to space. There are many other people.
Mr. Calvert. You know, I was looking at the - you know, I was commenting with my seatmate here about the Ares V and the lift capability of that, and of course, we go back and think of the old Saturn, but that has a lift capability of what, approximately 100 tons?
Dr. Horowitz. This one can lift a little more than Saturn V, about 125 metric tons.
Mr. Calvert. One hundred twenty-five metric tons. What is the heaviest lift capability we have now?
Dr. Horowitz. It is less than the small rocket you see to its left, which is on the order of 20 to 25 metric tons.
Mr. Calvert. Now, is there potentially other revenue streams that could be utilized for Ares V in other parts of the government?
Dr. Horowitz. Yes, sir, I am sure there are other people that might be interested.
Mr. Calvert. You mean, there is no country in the world at this point that can launch 125 metric tons?
Dr. Horowitz. Sir, there is nobody else who has this capability.

If it’s really an international endeavor, why do we have to talk about who has the heaviest lift capability in the world? What’s your money on - competition or collaboration?

Specifically in this article, titled “Sticky Footer”, I will give you a step by step guide on how to create css sticky footers at the bottom of the page. I know that there are other methods out there and this issue has attracted more attention recently, but this is what I use and in my view it’s cleaner and applicable to existing HTML structures.

It fulfills all main requirements of this type of solution: (a) it sticks at the bottom of the page only if all other content of the page does not occupy the full height of the page; (b) it works on IE5+, FF1+, Opera7+, Safari2+ and maybe even more; (c) and most importantly, it’s pure CSS.

So let’s get started…

Step 1: HTML markup

The first thing we do is get acquainted with the basic HTML markup for this project. As I mentioned before this is a common HTML structure. We have a page container and content inside. The only thing that might be odd is that the footer is below and not inside the page container. This is important. Other than that it’s pretty straightforward:

<div id="container">
 <div id="content"></div>
</div>
<div id="footer">My Sticky Footer</div>

Step 2: “body stretching”

Secondly, stretch html, body and page container elements to full window height. Notice that to make page container inherit body overflow I am using min-height property. Since IE6 or earlier does not support this, we have to make sure that IE, but only IE, applies height property to fix it. Here’s the right way to do it:

html, body, #container { height: 100%; }
body > #container { height: auto; min-height: 100%; }

Step 3: positioning the footer

Thirdly, we have to place the footer right after page container, creating a body overflow. However, we want it to be visible, so we forcibly move it up overlapping the bottom of page container — negative top margin for that reason. To make sure the whole footer is visible, negative margin must be equal to defined footer height. To fully secure footer’s position let’s clear both sides of floating elements, just in case.

#footer {
 clear: both;
 position: relative;
 z-index: 10;
 height: 3em;
 margin-top: -3em;
}

Step 4: finishing touches

Finally, we have to protect page content bottom from finding itself behind the footer by doing this:

#content { padding-bottom: 3em; }

Note that padding value is equal to footer height.

There you have it! You might want to check this sticky footer in action to get a sense of how it’s working.

I am really excited about the new Transformers live action movie which is set to open on the 2nd of July and is expected to be a summer blockbuster with robots shooting and transforming. Since this is not a new concept, most of the greatest Transformers fans come from the 90s when TVs aired the animated Transformers TV series. I barely remember those days, that’s why I don’t know much about the robot characters and the whole story behind the animated movie. For me it’s more about the technological challenge and this genius concept of transformation that is unprecedented in live action movies.

The Transformers is directed by Michael Bay who has previously worked on “The Island”. Now, I know that this movie wasn’t very successful and that it was Bay’s first flop, but gosh! — it is my favorite movie ever! And I don’t think that, if there’s no island in “The Island”, that could be a problem. The tragedy of humanity shown in this movie made a huge impact on me. I was moved by seeing that you are able to escape something that might seem as reality by being simply curious. The futurism, the action, music, the story and etc. — it was all simply amazing.

What I thought after seeing “The Island” was that something big was going to happen next. Though “The Island” sold not many tickets and the public thought that Bay would back off, I think I was right. Transformers is big! It has the same screenwriters — Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci — the same DreamWorks studio and the same compositor — Steve Jablonsky. The team was there, they just needed another chance.

Action redefined

I am sure that what we will see in this movie has never been done before. It creates a totally new excitement and opens space for new imagination. Well, for example, how about robots transforming at 80 mph!? We are used to see explosions, car crashes and etc. in the center of any action movie, but Transformers keeps all these things in the background of The Robot-Action. Here’s a quote from director Michael Bay which accompanies my thoughts:

When you see Optimus Transform in this movie for the first time and don’t get a chill up your spine — then fuck off — because nothing in cinema will excite you!!! And trust me you won’t care about the flames

And it’s so realistic. The robots transform as they were really doing that. It all looks really very believable. It is worth to note that they wouldn’t have done that a few years ago because of the great technology involved in making this movie. I think it’s really great what the capabilities are to bring such exciting concept into live action movie.

Impressions

My first impression - I was outraged by the action, it was alien! Over the first couple of hours after the session I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened… There were some folks saying that there has been too much chaos at the end of the movie or that Transformers lacked wide angle shots. It’s probably true, I’d like to agree, but what they actually ignore is the complexity of the action, concept itself. I realized how damn complicated it was to put this genius concept into live action, understandable movie and how the nature of this concept can simply be alien to many of us. There were things, to my mind, that contributed in making it clear and things that failed to represent the robots.

I must say that the story did not represent robots properly. I saw no drama, no tragedy, no good moral, except the “no sacrifice - no victory” thing. I mean, these are robots and we are humans. Robots-humans it can be an exciting story. Michael tried to adjust the robots to the human eye, to real live situations and I think he succeeded but the story, from my perspective, was far-fetched. And why are they so mad about the US military? Is it because Bay has Pentagon’s phone number or is it because Americans are so “proud” of it and they feel gaga over classified US government material that they never even get to know? Is there a coolness factor in this that I don’t understand?

My idea for the Transformers sequel: make one of the new robots return as the last Space Shuttle which is planned to be retired in 2009. Just imagine, it captures the Shuttle right before the atmosphere reentry, then flies all the way to the Kennedy Space Center in a usual, well-known manner and according to all normal ground procedures. And here it comes as everyone is watching, commenting and greeting the last successful Shuttle flight in the history. Then right at the main gear touch down, it transforms into a two-feet alien robot! Then you can do whatever you want - contact others through NASA channels, for example. Wouldn’t that be a cool and realistic landing?! I know, I know - it’s just a thought…

It is true that our presidents and political leaders look up at the stars as we all do. But there is one important difference. In their eyes all that vast and dark space becomes a nation’s agenda, an ultimate goal for more control and power. To justify this statement, we need to remember Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President of the United States. During the Space Race he said that:

There is something more important than the ultimate weapon and that’s the ultimate position. The position of total control over the Earth that lies somewhere in outer space.

In these words also lies the sense of how political and military space objectives are being built in the minds of our leaders. So it is no wonder that nations try to conquer the space above us and find that ultimate position that L. B. Johnson was talking about. However, at this point of time there are only three nations (USA, Russia and China) that can lift a man into space and bring him safely back to Earth. In this small group the U.S. has the leading position and the biggest experience of flying into space. This fact is enough to make its position exceptional among all other countries.

There are thousands of satellites, orbiting the Earth. Most of them are controlled by the U.S. and all of them are vulnerable to military attack from Earth. This has led the U.S. to a desire to protect its space capabilities, and to be able to deny the use of similar capabilities to potential adversaries in the event of conflict. Therefore, this subjects us to an assumption that U.S. domination in space will increase its military aggression in space. For this to find out we need to study U.S. evolution of space-power and understand the historical background that can lead us to some preconditions of its current doctrine which is our second main target. We will also touch on the theoretical concepts of space policy and space strategy that can be further used to analyze US space actions. But first things must come first.

Evolution of Space-Power Doctrine

Every strong space nation has its own space doctrine. To review the evolution of the US space doctrine, I am going to look at M. V. Smith’s Ten Propositions Regarding Spacepower which is a remarkable study of space power from the perspective of an Air Force officer. Smith argues that three distinct geopolitical events shaped American space-power doctrine: (1) Cold War, (2) Operation Desert Storm and (3) joins control doctrine. The first – the Cold War – enticed America into space as a means to spy on the Soviet Union, which also drove America’s early support for space treaties that ensured freedom of access to space. The second event, he argues, was Operation Desert Storm, which demonstrated the military capabilities of space in conventional warfare. This event occurred in the waning days of the Cold War, when nuclear tensions were greatly reduced. Since that time, the U.S. military has freely sought to exploit space systems as a means of enhancing terrestrial war fighting. Finally, the general joins control doctrine advocates who favor developing the capability to use force (when required) to secure American access to space and to deny the same to an adversary.

I would summarize U.S. evolution of spacepower in the following three stages. First stage was to enter the space and to catch up with its only rival in space – the Soviet Union. Afterwards, when the Americans took the leading position in this competition, they wanted to make it useable mostly for enhancing military operations on ground (e.g. Operation Desert Storm) and threatening rivals of its achievements in space (e.g. Reagan’s “Star Wars”). And the final stage is the military control of space which is currently under a controversy that can lead to two possible outcomes: peaceful partnership or more aggression and power and finally weaponization of space.

Smith himself presents the most pessimistic view on this issue, pointing out that wherever mankind goes, weapons follow. To his mind, weaponizing space is inevitable. Although reasons exist for not weaponizing space, but they fail to take into account the technological imperative that often drives human behavior in ways frequently beyond rational thought. When weapons will appear in space is anybody’s guess, but political and military pragmatists must assume that someone will put them there and plan accordingly.

To make things even more clear we need to understand not only the evolution, but also the concept of space strategy. Obviously, there is knowledge of how power can be gained in space. Therefore, we will take a look at E. C. Dolman’s book Astropolitics presenting a unique concept of control of space that can help create military space policy and strategy. Of course, there are other related studies, but this is one of the first major analysis of space geopolitics.

Astropolitics

Dolman defines astropolitics as “the study of the relationship between outer space terrain and technology and the development of political and military policy and strategy”. In this study he applies traditional mackinderian discipline of geopolitics. Following Halford Mackinder’s approach, Dolman divides our solar system into four regions: (1) terra (Earth and space to a point just below sustained, unpowered orbit); (2) terran space (lowest viable orbit to just beyond geostationary altitude); (3) lunar space (just beyond geostationary orbit to just beyond lunar orbit); and (4) solar space (everything else in the solar system) (pp. 69–70). All spaceflight must traverse Low-Earth Orbit (LEO). Dolman identifies this orbit as the first and most important astropolitical strategic narrow. And he says that:

Who controls Low-Earth Orbit controls Near-Earth space. Who controls Near-Earth space dominates Terra. Who dominates Terra determines the destiny of humankind.

That’s why the ultimate strategy for any country seeking for more space power would be to control the first astropolitical narrow or LEO. It seems that LEO for Dolman is the Johnson’s ultimate position. At least it is true from a geopolitical point of view.

Dolman advocates three immediate steps for the United States: (1) withdraw “from the current space regime and announce it is establishing a principle of free-market sovereignty in space”; (2) use “its current and near-term capabilities to seize military control” of LEO; and (3) establish “a national space coordination authority” to “define, separate, and coordinate the efforts of commercial, civilian, and military space projects”.

It is important to emphasize that the ultimate goal of astropolitics and Astropolitik according to Dolman is not the militarization of space. Rather, the militarization of space is a means to an end, part of a longer-term strategy. The goal is to reverse the current international malaise in regard to space exploration, and to do so in a way that is efficient and that harnesses the positive motivations of individuals and states striving to improve their conditions. It is a neoclassical, market-driven approach intended to maximize efficiency and wealth.

Dolman’s strategy is very delicate in terms of the space weaponization issue which is inevitable to Smith as result of pragmatic policy towards the space. Smith says that pragmatic politicians carry weapons whereever they go and Dolman adds to this that they carry the weapons, but don‘t show them outright. However, they both agree that space weaponization is going to happen. To find out more we need to analyze current U.S. space policy.

USA Astropolitics

U.S. reestablished its ambitions in weaponizing space in 2001 when a Space Commission led by Donald Rumsfeld released U.S. space security policy review. The main goal of that commission was to revise U.S. space security program and to address any issues and means to eliminate them. The commission reported that U.S. government was not ready to counter military threats in space and that these threats are a historical inevitability.

The whole idea of controlling the space was not new to Rumsfeld’s commission. In fact, the goal of U.S. superiority in space has been developed by every national space policy doctrine since Eisenhower. However, Rumsfeld’s committee made one step forward by making it clear that U.S. should expand its operations in space and even use force if necessary. Commission argued that U.S. has the largest number of any kind of devices in space that are vulnerable to enemy attacks (e.g. ASAT Anti-satellite weapons on the ground). The commission also stated that

The U.S. is more dependent on space than any other nation. Yet the threat to the US and its allies in and from space does not command the attention it merits.

The U.S., argues Rumsfeld, cannot allow its rivals to obtain asymmetric military superiority.

One of the most popular quotes from the Space Commission was that the U.S .could face a „space Pearl Harbor”. For this reason the Commission encouraged U.S. government to prepare a plan how to counter attacks in space. The Space Commission concluded that „it is possible to project power through and from space in response to events anywhere in the world. Having this capability would give the United States a much stronger deterrent and, in a conflict, an extraordinary military advantage.“

The second document I would like to point out here is The National space policy plan (Oct., 2006) that claims the right of the United States to “deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space” and at the same time to “dissuade or deter others” from developing similar capabilities to deny US access to space, and asserts the right to unimpeded use of space as a U.S. right, not an international right. It was mentioned that this plan might contravene the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that prohibits weapons of mass destruction either in orbit or celestial-based. US has been ignoring any international efforts to prohibit weaponization of space. In the same month U.S. at the UN General Assembly voting against arms race in space was the only country to cast its vote against such prohibition. Anybody might think that in this way the U.S. is trying to withdraw from the current space regime as stated by Dolman.

Tom Barry makes an interesting note that the “October release of the National Space Policy comes on the heels of a report by the “Independent Working Group on Missile Defense, the Space Relationship, and the 21st Century,” which is a misnamed task force assembled by various right-wing policy institutes.” They call themselves Independent Working Group as having no role in the U.S. space policy. The group’s members and sponsors include many key figures and institutions that advocate a more aggressive nuclear weapons and space weapons policy. No matter what they represent, it looks like space militarization issue has reached a point when not only the military, but also scientific community is pushing for space weapons. So it will be very interesting to find out whether space weaponization initiative will remain at stake with a new president at office.

So far these institutes claim that within three years, a space-based missile defense system should be tested. Also US should deploy 1,000 Brilliant Pebbles-like space-based interceptors. And because of the centrality of space to U.S. national security, efforts to counter U.S. primacy in space via restrictive legal regimes should be rejected.

The task force claims that the 21st century maintenance of the “U.S. lead in space may indeed be pivotal to the basic geopolitical, military, and economic status of the United States. Consolidation of the preeminent U.S. position in space is akin to Britain’s dominance of the oceans in the 19th century.” An improved report was also released in 2007. It states again that “space represents an arena of crucial importance to the United States for civil, commercial, and national security purposes.” As such, it is essential that the United States to be able to use space for missile defense.

Another interesting point is the commercialization of space assets. Commercial space assets make all actors space powers. The advent of commercial vendors selling military-related space products has created a new form of mercenary. The types of asymmetric advantages the superpowers once enjoyed because of their space prowess is quickly eroding because anyone who is able to pay the price can receive certain kinds of space support. Military and law-enforcement planners must take into account the potential for any opponent to exploit these commercial services. In the light of global fight against terrorism the U.S. might be afraid of commercial space initiative and control. Rumsfeld’s commission in its recommendations also stressed the dangers of commercial sector in space which would have no regulations in early years of space utilization.

Conclusions

It doesn’t seem to me that the everyday growing human presence in space will dispense with weapons and security projects for balancing power in space. As soon as we see more assets in space that are of a vital importance to the countries on the ground, there will be a need for the same security guarantees as we have now on the ground.

All these facts support the idea that the U.S. is seeking to finally step into the third stage – military control of space – of its evolution of space strategy. This is current tendency that of course later may change in one way or another. But other countries are already preparing their own military responses to the U.S. controversial plans and in the global scale we can see that a new defence system is growing. Later it might be too late for the US to go back. New programs include development of ASAT weapons on the ground and later in space. It can be predicted that during the upcoming decade we will see ASAT weapons in the international arena. They will be announced as legitimate means to counter hostile US satellites in space. International institutions may develop an ASAT non-proliferation agreement which can become another problem in the international relations arena.

Finally, several countries, such as Russia and China, have already developed counter-space weapons that directly threaten U.S. space operations. 48 Other states are likely to proliferate these or similar weapons in the coming decades. In sum, the U.S. military increasingly relies upon space assets. Therefore it is in their interest to protection them from enemy attack. At the same time, the U.S. has an interest in denying adversaries the ability to exploit their own space assets to gain advantage over them.