Space becomes new U.S.-China battlefield
Beijing’s rush for antisatellite arms began 15 years ago.
Now it can threaten the orbital fleets that give the United States military its technological edge. Advanced weapons at China’s military bases can fire warheads that smash satellites and can shoot laser beams that have a potential to blind arrays of delicate sensors.
And China’s cyberattacks can, at least in theory, cut off the Pentagon from contact with fleets of satellites that track enemy movements, relay communications among troops and provide information for the precise targeting of smart weapons.
Among the most important national security issues now facing President Joe Biden is how to contend with the threat that China poses to the U.S. military in space and, by extension, terrestrial forces that rely on the overhead platforms.
The Biden administration has yet to indicate what it plans to do with President Donald Trump’s legacy in this area: the Space Force, a new branch of the military that has been criticized as an expensive and ill-advised escalation that could lead to a dangerous new arms race.
Trump presented the initiative as his own, and it now suffers from an association with him. It remains the brunt of jokes on television. But its creation was also the culmination of strategic choices by his predecessors, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, to counter an emboldened China that raised bipartisan alarm.
“There’s been a dawning realization that our space systems are quite vulnerable,” said Greg Grant, a Pentagon official in the Obama administration who helped devise its response to China. “The Biden administration will see more funding — not less — going into space defense and dealing with these threats.”
The protective goal is to create an American presence in orbit so resilient that, no matter how deadly the attacks, it will function well enough for the military
to project power halfway around the globe in terrestrial reprisals and counterattacks. That could deter Beijing’s strikes in the first place. The hard question is how to achieve that kind of strong deterrence.
Beijing’s surge
For years, the Chinese studied — with growing anxiety — the U.S. military, especially its invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The battlefield successes were seen as rooted in space dominance. Planners noted that thousands of satellite-guided bombs and cruise missiles had rained down with devastating precision on Taliban forces and Iraqi defenses.
While the Pentagon’s edge in orbital assets was clearly a threat to China, planners argued that it also might represent a liability. “They saw how the U.S. projected power,” said Todd Harrison, a space analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “And they saw that it was largely undefended.”
China began its anti-satellite tests in 2005. It fired two missiles in two years and made headlines in 2007 by shattering a derelict weather satellite. The successful test reverberated globally because it was the first such act of destruction since the Cold War.
China also sought to diversify its anti-satellite force. In tests China began firing weak laser beams at satellites and studying other ways to strike at the speed of light.
Then came the new idea. Every aspect of U.S. space power was controlled from the ground by powerful computers. If penetrated, the brains of Washington’s space fleets might be degraded or destroyed. Such attacks, compared with every other anti-satellite move, were remarkably inexpensive. In 2005, China began to incorporate cyberattacks into its military exercises.
In 2008, hackers seized control of a civilian imaging satellite named Terra that orbited low, like the military’s reconnaissance craft. They did so twice roaming control circuits with seeming impunity. Remarkably, in both cases, the hackers achieved all the necessary steps to command the spacecraft but refrained from doing so, apparently to reduce their fingerprints.
Washington’s response
In its second term, the Obama administration made public what it called an “offset strategy” to respond to China and other threats by capitalizing on America’s technological edge.
Just as the United States had developed, first, a vast nuclear arsenal and, second, smart weapons, this so-called third offset would seek an advantage by speeding the rise of robotics, high-speed arms and other breakthroughs that could empower the armed forces for decades.
Unlike earlier offsets, officials said, the objective was to rely less on federal teams than the tech entrepreneurs who were fast transforming the civilian world.
The advances in space were to be defensive: swarms of small, relatively cheap satellites and fleets of recycled launchers that would overwhelm Beijing with countless targets. For Obama, innovative leaps were to do for U.S. space forces what Steve Jobs did for terrestrial gadgets, running circles around the calcified ministries of authoritarian states.
In March, Space Force said it had taken possession of its first offensive weapon, calling the event historic.
Based on land, the system fires energy beams to disrupt spacecraft. Lt. Col. Steve Brogan, a space combat specialist, said the acquisition “puts the ‘force’ in Space Force and is critical for space as a war-fighting domain.”