As we can see, although Russia continues to support its military space program, the scale of that effort is just enough to maintain the programs that are most important. In addition to the systems described above, Russia invests significant effort into its early-warning and military communication satellites. Neither of these systems, however, is related to space-based weapons or anti-satellite capability. Russia does seem to preserve the basic industrial infrastructure that theoretically would allow it to develop and eventually deploy these kind of weapons, but that infrastructure has been steadily deteriorating in the recent years and it is extremely unlikely that Russia will be able to undertake any serious development effort in the area of space weapons or ASAT. As for other space-based military capabilities-imagery, signal intelligence, navigation-that might potentially play important role in a military conflict, the existing systems do not seem to provide Russia with capabilities that would significantly improve performance of its military. Besides, Russia has yet to demonstrate its ability to integrate space-based systems into military operations. ( More ... )

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Podvig, Pavel. "Russian Military Space Capabilities." Ensuring America's Space Security. Ed. Phillip E. Coyle. Washington, D.C.: Federation of American Scientists, September 2004. [ 3 quotes ] [ page 131 ]

 

The ability of the Russian space industry to embark on a serious ASAT development effort seems highly questionable. First of all, Russia has lost both the military and industrial organizational infrastructure that was responsible for research and development in the area of anti-satellite or space-based weapons. On the military side, the anti-satellite research and development programs were managed by the Air Defense Forces, which used to be a separate service in the Soviet armed forces. This service, however, was disbanded during the military reform of 1997. ... The changes in the defense industry have been much more serious. While Russia has managed to keep most of its space industry intact, this does not apply to the companies that were involved in the development of anti-satellite systems. ... As a result of these transformations, Russia now does not have an agency that would be capable of supporting development program in the area of anti-satellite systems or spacebased weapons. ( More ... )

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Podvig, Pavel. "Russian Military Space Capabilities." Ensuring America's Space Security. Ed. Phillip E. Coyle. Washington, D.C.: Federation of American Scientists, September 2004. [ 3 quotes ] [ page 127-8 ]

 

First, Russia's ability to deploy a range of space-based military systems that would support the operations of the Russian armed forces—optical reconnaissance, navigation, and signal intelligence systems—is an essential component of competition in space. Russia does operate a number of systems of this kind, but, as discussed, none of them operates at full capacity. In addition, most of these systems were developed in the 1980s and have not been modernized for a substantial period of time, which hardly makes them suitable for support of modern military operations. In many cases, Russia has to deal with the low reliability of satellites developed in the Soviet Union. This was not a serious problem when the military had access to a virtually unlimited launch capacity. It is a problem for Russia now, however, as a large number of launches are required just to maintain constellations in a very limited configuration.

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Zhang, Hui and Pavel Podvig. Russian and Chinese Responses to U.S. Military Plans in Space. Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008. [ 16 quotes ] [ page 26-7 ]

 

There is another problem, potentially more serious, with the current Russian military space program. Realizing the full potential of space requires a significant investment in the creation of an infrastructure that would allow troops to use information and capabilities provided by the space-based components of the system. Although Russia has been improving its capability to launch satellites and to maintain and operate satellite constellations, the development of infrastructure on the ground remains the weakest link, limiting much of the effort to broaden the use of space systems. The Glonass satellite navigation system illustrates these points particularly well. It was developed in the 1970s and became operational in the mid-1980s. In recent years, Russia has invested considerable effort into having a full constellation of 24 Glonass satellites in orbit. In order to achieve this deployment, it had to upgrade the spacecraft to extend their lifetimes, as it could not otherwise provide enough launches to replace the satellites in orbit. However, even if the plan to populate all slots in the constellation succeeds, the ground infrastructure does not seem to be ready to take advantage of the system. For example, it was reported that the aircraft of Military Transport Aviation do not have Glonass receivers onboard and rely on the GPS system of the United States instead.

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Zhang, Hui and Pavel Podvig. Russian and Chinese Responses to U.S. Military Plans in Space. Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008. [ 16 quotes ] [ page 27 ]

 

Most of the same problems are common to photoreconnaissance and signal intelligence systems. Although Russia has the capability to collect imaging information and to monitor communications, these capabilities are not integrated into the command structure of the armed forces to the extent that would make these systems directly usable in military operations. The launch schedule of the satellites that provide these capabilities confirm this lack of integration—for example, there have been no serious efforts to constantly maintain the presence of imaging satellites in orbit. The same is true of signal intelligence satellites— Russia does not maintain fully operational constellations. Although this may be explained in part by a lack of sufficient funding, success with other systems, namely communication satellites, shows that funding was probably not the only, or even the main, factor. As the recent history of communication-satellite launches demonstrates, Russia has been investing considerable effort into its space-based communication network. This was due partly to the dual-use nature of the satellites, which are used for both military and civilian communications; however, military systems like the Strela system have been maintained at close to full capacity.

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Zhang, Hui and Pavel Podvig. Russian and Chinese Responses to U.S. Military Plans in Space. Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008. [ 16 quotes ] [ page 27 ]

 

[PAVEL PODVIG] It would be actually be fairly difficult to do that in practical terms. In terms of actual programs and developments, things are not very good for either space weapons or ASAT in Russia because most of the industrial and organizational infrastructure that supported those programs has been scattered around, and we don’t have either the military service dedicated to this kind of thing but also Russia does not have a unified ministry in the defense industry that would carry enough weight to lobby for this kind of a program.

Besides, looking from the other direction, Russia, the discussion about ASAT and space, military uses of space, is actually influenced by the fact that Russia doesn’t really have a lot of space assets to protect. The integration of military satellites into the actual military operations is actually not very good.

Again, on a positive note, access to space is basically controlled largely by the space forces, by Roscosmos, the civilian agency, to a certain extent the rocket forces, and none of those institutions actually has great interest or any real investment in any kind of an ASAT capability or any weapon-in-space developments.

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Krepon, Michael, Pavel Podvig et al. "The Space Nuclear Nexus." 2009 Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 07, 2009. [ 4 quotes ]