Mastering the Ultimate High Ground; Next Steps in the Military Uses of Space

xviii, 193, [1] pages. Footnotes. Acronyms. Appendix. Bibliography. Dr. Benjamin S. Lambeth assumed a position at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in July 2011 after a 37-year career as at the RAND Corporation. Before joining RAND, he served in the Office of National Estimates at the CIA. Prior to that, he worked for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Institute for Defense Analyses. Dr. Lambeth has flown or flown in more than 40 different types of military aircraft with the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and with eight foreign air forces. He became the first U.S. citizen to fly the Soviet MiG-29 fighter and the first Westerner invited to fly a combat aircraft inside Soviet airspace since the end of WWII. He is the author of The Transformation of American Air Power, which won the Air Force Association’s Gill Robb Wilson Award in 2001. He also wrote Mastering the Ultimate High Ground: Next Steps in the Military Uses of Space and many other works. Assesses the military space challenges facing the Air Force and the nation in light of the findings and recommendations of the Space Commission. The author reviews the Air Force's involvement in space since its creation as an independent service in 1947; examines the circumstances that occasioned the commission's creation and the conceptual and organizational roadblocks that have impeded a more rapid growth of U.S. military space capability; and enumerates the challenges facing the Air Force with respect to space.…