The United States holds the strategic "high ground" in space and no nation looks close to matching its capabilities, but "the high ground is always visible to the opponent," Everett Dolman, professor of comparative military studies at the U.S. Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, told the two-day conference organized by the Nuclear Policy Research Institute.

Every war that the United States has been involved in over the past decade and a half has been won with minimum U.S. casualties in only a few weeks, and its success has increasingly depended on the United States' use of thousands of precision guided weapons aided by space-based or relayed communications and tracking technology, Peter Hays, editor of "Spacepower for a New Millennium," told the conference.

In the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, 92 percent -- 245,000 -- of the bombs and air or missile-delivered munitions used were unguided and 8 percent were precision guided, said Hays, the former director of the U.S. Air Force Institute for National Security Studies.

In the 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia to force it to leave the province of Kosovo, the percentage of laser and GPS-guided munitions had risen to 34 percent, or 7,700 of the weapons delivered, while the number of unguided munitions had fallen to 16,000, he said.

And in the 2003 Iraq war to topple President Saddam Hussein, a full 68 percent of the munitions used, or 19,948 of them, were laser- or GPS-guided and 32 percent were unguided, he said.

Also, experts at the conference said, the United States remains far ahead of any other country in the world in its broadband communications and surveillance capabilities from space, and its superiority is expected to further grow in the coming years.

However, even U.S. space-based military assets in Low Earth Orbit are potentially highly vulnerable to attack from the ground, experts warned.

"All space-based assets are inherently vulnerable," Theresa Hitchens, director of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, told the conference.

Because satellites are in fixed orbit it is easy to calculate their course and send missiles or other weapons to intercept them, experts said. And because LEO is around 180 miles up in space, it remains well within the range of any nation that can field intermediate-range missiles.

Currently 80 percent of the estimated 800 military satellites in space are American, with a majority of the rest being Russian, David Wright, co-director of Global Security Studies at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group opposed to the militarization of space, told the conference. And 43 percent of these military satellites were at the more vulnerable LEO level, Wright said. Another 43 percent of all military satellites orbited at 21,600 miles in geosynchronous Earth orbit, he said.

Satellites can carry the fuel and engines to maneuver in orbit to avoid attack, but "maneuvering a satellite is difficult and expensive," said Wright, who is also a research scientist in the Security Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Anyone who can put a satellite up has an anti-satellite capability," said Richard Garwin, IBM emeritus fellow at the Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. "Satellites, unless they can fight back, are sitting ducks," he said.

John Polanyi, a professor of chemistry at the University of Toronto and winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for chemistry, told the conference the success of the 1960s U.S. manned space program and the achievements in putting up communication and other satellites since then in times of peace had misled both the U.S. public and policymakers on how vulnerable many space-based assets would be to attack or disruption in a time of war.

When the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon from 1969 through 1972, "There were no (other people) on the moon with hat-pins (to pierce their vulnerable space suits) trying to prevent that landing," he said.

But Dolman told the conference that the United States faced major strategic imperatives impelling it to maintain its dominant position in space. "Can the United States afford to be the second (major power) to weaponize space?" he asked.

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