Pentagon warns China has started developing weapons to destroy satellites

China is making significant long-term investments in weapons designed to jam or destroy satellites, as the country seeks to quickly narrow the space technology gap with the United States, according to the intelligence chief of the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command.

China pushes to develop anti-satellite weapons with capabilities ranging from “glare to interference, through kinetic annihilation of ground, space … it’s all in progress”Rear Admiral Michael Studeman said this week during a webinar hosted by a trade security and intelligence group.

Studeman’s comments represent the most recent and unclassified assessment of a nation’s anti-space capabilities repeatedly mentioned by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin as the main challenge for US defense planning and spending.

China’s threats to US satellites, as well as Russian advancements in counter-space technology, were some of the main justifications cited by US officials for establish the United States Space Force, the sixth branch of military service in the United States and the Regional Space Command, under the Trump administration.

“They are looking at our space capabilities and they want to match and surpass them and be able to master to secure the maneuver that they need to be able to secure their targets if they are in combat,” Studeman said.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence of the United States (DNI) said in April that the Chinese military “will continue to integrate space services – such as satellite reconnaissance and positioning, navigation and synchronization and communications. satellite in their weapons and command and control systems to erode the US Army Information Advantage ”.

The development of so-called counter-space operations will be an integral part of a possible military campaign, the DNI said. Beijing continues to train its military space elements and to “develop new anti-satellite weapons (ASAT), destructive and non-destructive, based on land and in space”, the intelligence office said in its annual threat assessment report.

According to the report, “It has already deployed ground ASAT missiles intended to destroy satellites in low earth orbit and ground ASAT lasers capable of blinding or damaging sensitive space optical sensors” on satellites in low earth orbit.

The House Appropriations Committee, in a draft report on the defense bill for fiscal year 2022 obtained by Bloomberg government, expressed concern about “the increasing threats posed by ground lasers capable of damaging or destroying sensitive space sensors in low orbit, and the absence of a coordinated strategy to understand this threat and develop concepts to mitigate its risks ”.

Without mentioning China, the report ordered the Pentagon, in coordination with the DNI, “to provide a plan to collect, consolidate and characterize data on the activity of laser threats from potential adversaries, and develop strategies to mitigate these threats ”.

In addition to destructive technologies against space, China also runs parallel programs for military and commercial communications satellites and owns and operates around 30 of them for civilian, commercial and military satellite communications, the Defense said. Intelligence Agency in 2019. Beijing also operates a small number of dedicated military communications satellites.

“The United States has a substantial amount of activity going on on our side as we recognize the threat here,” Studeman said. “It will be a game of measures and countermeasures and countermeasures for a while.”

The Meadowlands System is one of America’s primary anti-space weapons, designed to temporarily interfere with, but not destroy, Chinese and Russian satellites. The US Space Force is building an arsenal of up to 48 of these ground weapons over the next seven years and declared the first operational in March 2020.

By Tony Capaccio (Bloomberg)

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