ABSTRACT
Opponents of the Bush administration who expected an exponential increase in rhetoric on the use of space for global military supremacy have found it difficult to follow the tortuous path of space doctrine under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. On the one hand, rapid deployment of multitiered missile defense has been promoted from the White House to a level not seen since Ronald Reagan's seminal 1983 Star Wars speech. The Rumsfeld Commission report on military space, released in early 2001 just as Bush took office, seemed to go beyond the United States Space Command's aggressive Long-Range Plan of 1998 in advocating global space dominance in order to prevent a new “space Pearl Harbor.” 1
