3.2.3 Military Support Virtually any large-scale addition to the civilian economic infrastructure can be used in some way to enable or to assist military forces in performing their principal missions of force delivery and C3I. The Interstate Highway system in the United States, for example, is one of the largest civilian projects ever undertaken by the federal government,* but one of the arguments used in the 1950s to justify it was its potential use in deployment of mobile ICBM launchers. Similarly, we anticipate that SPS elements could be used, or modified, to perform a wide variety of military support roles. 3.2.3.1 Military Support Adapters for SPS. Table 3-1 indicates possible adapters which could be added to SPS elements to provide enhanced capabilities for military support. Beacons or transponders could be installed aboard space segments of the SPS to provide navigational services for land and sea forces, for aircraft, for spacecraft, and for ballistic missiles during boost phase or terminal maneuvering. In view of the anticipated capabilities of independent navigational satellite systems such as the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS), which will provide geographic coordinates anywhere on Earth accurate to 10 meters in all three coordi- nates by about 1990, and velocity measurement accurate to 0.03 meters per second in all three directions, it is difficult to foresee any real advantage to attaching such navigational devices to SPS elements. It would also be possible to install phase control circuits on the power satellites which could divert the microwave power beam (or a portion of the beam energy) to different locations on the Earth in order to provide substantial amounts of electrical power to remote military installations. Similarly, the diverted power beam(s) could supply power to other spacecraft, although large receiver antennae would be required. Such spacecraft, especially if located in low orbits, could field directed energy weapons to good advantage. Depending on technological advances, it might also be possible to transmit power by laser beam to armed spacecraft or to military aircraft at high altitudes, permitting almost unlimited , loiter. *The federal govenrment has thus far spent about $175 billion (1978 dollars) for construction of the Interstate Highway system.
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