A critic of the U.S. Secretary of Defense-issued report is space policy and arms control analyst, Jeffrey Lewis. He thinks poorly of the assessment and judges it far from a work of scholarship.The practical upshot of this in the immediate future would be that the report would be in the hands of a known Panda-Hugger...John Negroponte, and removed from Rumsfeld's staff, those with noticeably fewer illusions.Lewis is Executive Director of the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“This report, as in previous years, suffers from the usual defects associated with a report drafted by committee and rushed into print with poor or compromise editing,” Lewis told SPACE.com.
He added that the report’s space section is little more than a laundry list of Chinese space activities.
“A member of Congress or defense analyst looking to argue that China is developing anti-satellite weapons might find such a list useful,” Lewis said. “But an analyst attempting to make a serious, evidence-based assessment should regard the report as a useless compendium of previously established facts lacking the necessary qualifications about what the intelligence community does not know.”
For example, Lewis said that the Pentagon view of China’s laser weaponry proficiency falls short. Previous reports, he added, described limits to what the intelligence community knew about Chinese laser research, noting that “whether this claim extends to actual facilities” or “whether Beijing has tested such a capability is unclear.”
Lewis said that the U.S. Congress ought to create a requirement that the Director of National Intelligence—not the Secretary of Defense—report on Chinese military power.