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Chapter 5

Maj Gen Albert M. Kuhfeld and Air Force
Leadership of Space Law Development

Before the Project West Ford controversy, the Air Force had assumed a reactive posture regarding the development of the law. However, even as Project West Ford was stirring controversy, the judge advocate general and many in the Air Force judge advocate general (JAG) corps were becoming restive with this ap. proach. Several years before Project West Ford, Col Richard C. Hagan[fn 1], a member of the Headquarters Air Force JAG staff, advised Maj Gert Reginald C. Harmon[fn 2], the first judge advocate general of the Air Force, that the Air Force could not wait until events had passed it by before it formulated a legal position regarding space. Colonel Hagan further advised General Harmon that the Air Force should take a leadership role on the issue.[1]

While Hagan and others in Headquarters Air Force JAG were interested in space matters, General Harmon was not particularly thus inclined.[2] He did, however, participate as a panelist in an October 1959 space law symposium sponsored by a Reserve JAG flight held in New York City. The panel included "notable jurists, attorneys at law and members of the United Nations." General Harmon restated the Air Force position, which was contrary to the positions taken by several of the other panelists. Harmon asserted that it would be "foolhardy to rush to establish a code of general space law at this time." He further noted to the effect that "law is evolutionary and that the people of the earth do not yet have sufficient scientific knowledge of the physical nature of space to draft rules for its regulation." The general argued that "rather than establish premature rules which could prove dangerous because their possible effects cannot be foreseen, it would be more logical to consider each problem individually." General Harmon "explained the practical and political difficulties inherent in having the legislatures or other state machinery of individual nations ratify any kind of international code of general space law."[3]

  1. ↑ General Harmon served as The Judge Advocate General (TJAG) of the Air Force from 8 September 1948 through 30 March 1960.
  2. ↑ Col Hagan, a JAG reservist, was eventually promoted to brigadier general.
  1. ↑ Maj Gen Richard C. Hagan, USAFR, transcript of interview by Colonels David M. Lewis and Ronald J. Rakowsky, US Air Force Oral History Program, November 1987-May 1989, USAF Historical Research Agency, 66. (Hereafter Hagan, "Oral History.")
  2. ↑ Ibid., 66-67.
  3. ↑ "Space Law Symposium," US Air Force JAG Bulletin 1, no. 5 (November 1959): 38.

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