In space warfare one man’s refueling or repair capability can look an awful lot like another man’s ability to destroy or cripple your satellite. Now one Chinese satellite has approached another and, apparently, bumped its target and changed the orbit. U.S. analysts of Chinese space efforts seem to agree, so far, that this was not an anti-satellite test.

In an exclusive interview with DoD Buzz, Lockheed Martin CEO Bob Stevens says he hopes Congress looks favorably on the Obama administration’s proposed arms export control reforms because it will make U.S. companies more competitive, help generate U.S. jobs and better protect crucial U.S. technology.

The United States has spent $2 trillion since 1998 on wars and regular defense spending and has been left “with a smaller Navy and Air Force and a tiny increase in the size of the Army,” argues Winslow Wheeler, defense analyst at the Center for Defense Information. If Defense Secretary Robert Gates is serious about restructuring the military and what it buys, then he better get going or he’ll be a “wasted asset,” Wheeler says.

With the stroke of a pen Air Force Secretary Mike Donley engaged one of the most complex bureaucratic challenges faced by the service: how to buy, build and manage satellites and the rockets that move them into space. In perhaps the biggest change, Donley vested the service’s undersecretary, Erin Conaton, with the responsiblity for guiding all space policy activities overseen by the Air Force. The assistant secretary for acqusiution will now lead all space acquisition, combining traditional fighter, bomber and other service acquisition with space.

It was the top story in the Wall Street Journal — China looks set to become the world’s second largest economy. But the New York Times put it on the front page of the business section, seeming to indicate this story was less a milestone and more a technical correction. The need for analysis was obvious so we asked a Chinese expert at the Heritage Foundation to give us a better idea of just how important this fact is and why. Dean Cheng’s conclusion: the PLA must still fight for its share of the pot, but a growing pot will probably drive a demand for greater deference from China to those who share its neighborhood.

The Pentagon’s head of acquisition signed an Acquisition Decision Memorandum last week telling the Air Force to plow ahead and develop plans for a new weather satellite, one replacing the ill-fated NPOESS program. Ironically, the requirements for the new satellite — to be known as the Defense Weather Satellite — are the same as they were for NPOESS, according to a congressional aide

The rumor mill is racing with reports that Gen. Hoss Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will soon leave his post and be replaced by Gen. Norton Schwartz, Air Force chief of staff. Schwartz’s ascension has Air Force sources beaming. It has been some time since an Air Force officer has been blessed with promotion to the innermost command circle. “I’m happy [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates is expressing some confidence in my poor, beleaguered Air Force.

This week the Senate Armed Services Committee held a highly classified hearing on what is probably the core issue of the treaty: verification. Next week the committee holds an open hearing on treaty implementation. That should bring a few howls of anguish from Republicans committed to squashing the treaty, afraid it will leave the United States less safe in a dangerous world. Earlier this week, we ran a START commentary by a group created by the folks at Heritage. Today, the left — in the form of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation – swings back, arguing that START will make us safer.

The NRO charter has taken a crucial step, having been finalized for approval by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the next Director of National Intelligence. The NSC got a copy last week. For members of the intel community, the most important part of all this may not be that the document is moving to approval but that language in the draft was changed to “clarify” the extent of the NRO’s reach.

Notwithstanding those three staunch, tough words underling the stakes in space, most of the experts seem to agree that the Obama administration’s new national space policy should create a much more amenable international environment for the United States to hammer out guidelines, agreements and treaties governing issues such as how to handle space debris and more general military and civilian uses of space. One huge difference between the Bush and Obama administrations: the Bush White House took almost six years to turn out its first space policy. Obama’s people did it in roughly 18 months, which would seem to indicate a keener interest and commitment to the issues involved.

The intelligence community and the Pentagon have pressed ahead, fought, stumbled and generally made a mess for more than half a decade of crafting a new guiding document for the NRO, the agency that builds and operates the nation’s spy satellites. “It’s been my concern all along that this whole issue of redoing the NRO charter has been hung up in what I think of as typical Pentagon bureaucracy,” Rep. John Kline said today. He wants the charter finished, period.

Ash Carter, head of Pentagon acquisition, has told the Air Force to come up with alternatives to the deeply troubled NPOESS weather satellite program run by Northrop Grumman. He told me he today that issued a directive to the service about 10 days ago giving them 30 days to come up with alternatives and to provide some costs. I hear it was a formal Acq1uisition Decision Memorandum, although no “decision” is at hand yet. But Carter and the Air Force will be hard-pressed to avoid what is beginning to look like the final legislative steamroller for a program that encountered serious and persistent technical problems.

When the New York Times covers a weapons program and they put it on the front page, above the fold, we take even more note. The Times did just that this morning, trumpeting a tale about how a veteran missile defense sceptic at MIT, Ted Postol, and a colleague, George Lewis, performed an analysis of SM-3 tests and came away convinced that the system does not work very well. The Hill reaction to the study was muted. “I think in the end that SM-3 will work. The test process is going slowly, some of which is by design. MDA has probably oversold it at this point, but it is a much more successful test program than the GBIs,” said one aide.

“You are not going to have 300 to 500 ships. You are not going to have thousands of fighters.” At the same time, America must try and reverse its course of the last decade, which was bringing us to the point where we would have one ship on each coast and one plane on each coast, and focus on quantity to help reverse that stark reality: “We need quantity more than we need that exquisiite capability.” There you have it straight from the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Hoss Cartwright, who pulled the curtain back a bit on what he and his boss have been ruminating about for most of May.

The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hoss Cartwright, ranks as one of the smartest players in the national security world and he rarely speaks in public. Even more rarely does he speak in public about one of the most essential elements of his job — strategy. The Center for Strategic and International Studies are broadcasting a talk by Cartwright tomorrow as well as a host of a host of provocative panels. We’ll be covering his remarks, as well as those of some of the others speaking during the conference. Click for the link to Cartwright’s and the other broadcasts.

The enormous need for overhead reconnaissance to combat IEDs and to track terrorists and insurgents over large areas for long periods is driving at least one part of the Pentagon to develop so-called stratospheric UAVs that can hover above the Jet Stream for several months or more. That may be the harbinger of a long-term shift in the UAV market, according to one advocate of the concept, Ed Herlik. Persistent stratospheric UAVs will significantly change the marketplace for both platforms and payloads in less than five years, he predicts in a market forecast. “Persistent surveillance (months or a year on-station above the Jet Stream) is the one capability that will significantly enhance the ability to combat an insurgency while minimizing troop risk and ground commitment,” the report says.

Cruise missiles are highly accurate but they have to be fired from a distance and they take a fair amount of time to get where they are going. So they are great for fixed targets, but their limitations have left the Pentagon scratching its head for half a decade trying to find something that can be launched and hit its target anywhere in the world within an hour or so. The concept, pushed hard by vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Hoss Cartwright, is called Prompt Global Strike and the budget contains $240 million for development programs. But one of the more promising efforts, DARPA’s Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2), made it part way through a test and then vanished. A review board has been formed to find out just what went wrong.

Defense budgets are not declining and will remain stable through 2015. Defense spending will remain at about 21 percent of total federal outlays, or around 4.7 percent of GDP, according to an analysis of the 2011 defense budget by business consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. But, in a big change to business as usual, the defense budget will no longer be evenly divided between the three services as it has for around the past forty years; the ground forces will be the big winners in future years and the Army’s slice of the budget pie will grow.

The Pentagon’s top weapons buyer said industry and taxpayers should expect more independent cost scrubs like the one recently done on the Joint Strike Fighter. Ash Carter made it clear there is more blood to be squeezed from the acquisition stone at a lunch put on by the National Aeronautics Association. “There are too many programs that resemble the Joint Strike Fighter in the sense that they are not performing the way we expect them to,” he said. Carter declined to name any programs, but he said he’s got lots to choose from.

Arms control elicits strong emotions and sparks great debates. In that tradition, Kingston Reif and Travis Sharp offer a rebuttal to the recent commentary we ran from the folks at the Heritage Foundation. Here’s the take of two dedicated arms control advocates. In their recent commentary on DoD Buzz (“Will START Talks Go MAD,”), the Heritage Foundation’s Baker Spring and Helle Dale recycle a snake oil sales pitch that first emerged at the dawn of the Atomic Age. The illusion is that the awesome destructiveness of nuclear weapons can somehow be neutralized by a panacea—in this case impenetrable missile defenses.