Fortress America

US Needs Offensive Space Capabilities to Deter China

National security correspondent for The Epoch Times Andrew Thornebrooke continues. “The United States military must invest in both offensive and defensive capabilities in outer space if it’s to effectively deter potential adversaries such as China and Russia, according to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.

“Space is a domain which you’re not trying to conquer per se, but use to provide services to your 

terrestrial forces,” Kendall said at a recent webinar hosted by the Center for a New American Security, a defense focused think tank.

Kendall, who serves as the senior civilian leader for both the Air Force and the Space Force, said vital space-based systems that are responsible for communications, GPS, target acquisition systems, and the strategic early warning arrays that tell U.S. commanders when there’s a missile launch, are actively being threatened by the increasing contest for space dominance. “They’re under attack,” Kendall said of the systems.

To adequately maintain the defense of space-based systems and to ensure that the United States can deter conflict or, if necessary, win wars, Kendall said it would be necessary to develop and deploy offensive space-based systems.

“We need to get to the right mix,” he said. “It is a combination of proliferation and [platform] desegregation.”

Kendall said he has developed a set of operational imperatives to address the greatest challenges facing the U.S. military, including deterring an increasingly aggressive Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He said such deterrence would fail without adequate changes to U.S. basing and the deployment of offensive space capabilities.

“We recognized several years ago that space was a contested domain,” Kendall said.

He noted that competing in space would require a much more agile strategy than is currently being employed by the U.S. military, one that would allow it to create ambiguity, appear to be in multiple locations at once when it isn’t, and utilize deception more effectively.

In space, specifically, it would require decentralizing the aging satellite architecture to ensure resiliency against attack by distributing vulnerable systems across larger constellations of smaller satellites, according to Kendall. Such an effort would also require the deployment of space-based systems capable of denying such services to the nation’s adversaries, he said.

Kendall didn’t specify what form these offensive systems might take, be they directed energy weapons such as lasers or microwave technologies or something more subtle, such as cyber packages or analog mechanical systems such as grabber arms. However, he did say that China was wasting no time in its own pursuit of offensive space capabilities.

“They’ve been moving very aggressively to operationalize space from a military perspective,” he said.

The comments were similar to those made by Gen. David Thompson of the U.S. Space Force in November 2021. Thompson said the CCP was attacking U.S. space infrastructure “every single day.”

Such attacks require an active response— a counter capability—because the type of attack the United States is trying to prevent is one of potentially catastrophic proportions, according to Kendall.

“The kinds of conflicts we’re trying to deter ... are more like D-Day than they are like the Air Force’s

strategic air campaign in Europe,” he said, referencing the allied bombing campaign in World War II. “They’re very compressed in time. They’re very high density.”

To that end, Kendall also said much more needed to be done to adequately defend both U. S. space infrastructure and its basing architecture throughout the Indo-Pacific, which he said was vulnerable to Chinese military technologies.

“[China has] noticed, it’s quite obvious, that we depend upon a small number of assets, including forward air bases, to conduct operations,” he said. “And because they’re fixed, they’re easily targetable. “[China] built the assets to come after them. So we have got to respond to that.”

Kendall said the hour is late, the need is urgent, and that a failure to act now would be disastrous later.

“We cannot go forward with a presumption of superiority,” he said. “These problems are already upon us. They’re not a future thing that we have to worry about sometime in 5 or 10 or 15 years down the road. They’re here now.”

Kendall said urgency doesn’t mean that the United States must react blindly, however. He noted the recent discussions about hypersonic weapon development as one area he thought was too reactionary and missed the greater strategic situation of the United States. “China has a set of targets, and I can easily understand why they would want to field hypersonic weapons in reasonable quantities,” he said.

He noted that China has fielded many conventional weapons over a number of decades that could attack specific U.S. targets and that it was now adding hypersonics to that list. Each of these weapons provides some specific advantage for how China would want to strike at certain targets, he said.

To that end, Kendall said hypersonic weaponry is important in some limited applications for the U.S. military, but that the United States doesn’t share the same strategic priorities or targets as the CCP and therefore requires different military technologies. “We don’t have the same target set that they’re worried about,” he said.

As such, he said the service would be better served by chipping away at impediments to the development of cost-effective weapons systems and an out-of-control bureaucracy that made any project require multiple years to get off the ground.

The remarks echoed sentiments by former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten, who said a “brutal” bureaucracy and risk-averse culture were preventing the United States from developing new weapons systems.

With that in mind, Kendall underscored the seriousness of the competition between the United States and China, saying that the clash of powers is something unseen since the Cold War. To win, the United States would have to compete agilely and aggressively.

“I have 20 years of Cold War experience, worrying about an enemy who was thinking very hard about

how to defeat us and trying to apply technology to that problem,” he said. “We’ve got that again. That’s where we are today.”

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China Versus the US in Space: Do Americans Have What It Takes?

Anders Corr has a bachelor’s/master’s in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and an author who has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. He writes:

“War in space between the United States and China is becoming more probable as Beijing ramps up its military capabilities in what was previously thought of as a no-go zone for military offensives.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is now America’s most powerful adversary in space, with almost 500 intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites. Many are reportedly dual purpose commercial satellites. Half of China’s ISR satellites were added in 2023.

These capabilities allow the PLA Aerospace Force to detect, track, and use satellite targeting data to attack U.S. forces with missiles. By comparison, the United States has about 300 dedicated military or intelligence satellites out of a total of almost 7,000 satellites, most of which are commercial.

American soldiers, sailors, and airmen on our largest military platforms, including aircraft carriers, military bases, and large air force formations, are the most vulnerable. The U.S. economy, which depends upon satellite communications, could also be targeted to make everything from GPS to emergency internet services go dark.

The PLA demonstrated its anti-satellite capabilities as early as 2007. It can now destroy, capture, or move off-orbit satellites upon which the U.S. military, intelligence, and general public rely. The PLA is developing ground-based and considering submarine-based weapons—likely lasers—to disable U.S. satellites up to 22,000 miles above Earth.

In a war over Taiwan, the most likely U.S.–China flashpoint, the PLA could be building toward a surprise attack on U.S. satellites that would degrade the U.S. military’s global communications, surveillance, and targeting capabilities. Protecting those satellites from the PLA, not to mention Russian aggression, is becoming increasingly critical. In 2022, Russia tested components for a nuclear weapon in space that could destroy many satellites with a single explosion.

A combined Russian–Chinese first strike in space could blind and potentially sideline most of the U.S. military in any upcoming fight.

America’s tip of the spear in space is the U.S. Space Command ( USSPACECOM) founded by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1985, and the U.S. Space Force (USSF) founded by then-President Donald Trump in 2019.

USSPACECOM is a leadership structure focused on coordinating joint military forces in space warfighting, including not only the USSF but also warfighting units focused on space from the Air Force, Navy, Army, Marines, and joint missile defense forces. The USSF is for training, equipping, and

operating additional space forces as necessary for space warfighting under the ultimate wartime command of USSPACECOM.

The USSF is small compared to other services, with just 15,000 personnel, called “Guardians,” and a $29 billion budget request for 2025. That’s likely too small compared to the total $850 billion defense budget request as a whole.

The Mitchell Institute has advocated an increase to the USSF budget of $250 million per year and an end goal of 200 additional personnel necessary for the defense of the moon and the cislunar region, which is the space between the Earth and the moon. Space capabilities at other services are also likely underfunded, given the importance of the space mission at the earliest stages of any major military conflict.

If the PLA plans on attacking Taiwan by 2027, which it has been tasked to be ready for, and it fears U.S. military intervention, which President Joe Biden repeatedly said he would do, then the PLA will likely want to blind U.S. military satellites beforehand so they cannot target Chinese bombers, missiles, and an amphibious fleet as they speed across the Taiwan Strait.

The U.S. defense of vulnerable U.S. satellites, likely including disabling offensive Chinese space assets, shows just how destabilizing are Beijing’s plans for a Taiwan invasion. Before it even takes place, the United States and China could be fighting in space because whoever strikes first in space has the advantage in not just space, but also any ground, air, or naval war that follows. To avoid that awful outcome, Beijing and Moscow should immediately back away from their aggression against Taiwan and Ukraine. But unfortunately, that does not seem to be in the cards at this time.

Both the United States and China have launched military space planes, with the first X-37 flight in 2010. The PLA launched its first Shenlong reusable space plane on Dec. 14, 2023. Both planes are conducting highly secret operations.

The USSF has argued for offensive space capabilities known as “space fires” that will avoid creating debris fields that could damage our own satellites. Space fires could include laser, microwave, particle beam, cyber, or nonexplosive kinetic options such as satellites or space planes that capture, move, or electronically disable adversary satellites. The USSF has also promoted redundancy in U.S. military and intelligence satellites, meaning that we have so many that if some are taken out, others can fill in.

To protect ourselves and our allies, the USSF and other USSPACECOM warfighting units need to be able to rapidly achieve space superiority in any pending war with China or Russia, including through preemptive space fires. This provides deterrence against these adversaries, which keeps the peace.

Peace in space through strength in space is not cheap, however. It requires more funding—not necessarily from the U.S. taxpayer—sufficient to protect our space assets and deter the enemy from launching strikes in the first place.”

Next time: Chinese Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile Threat Requires Navy, Space Force Cooperation