Evidence: Most Popular
The American fascination with the anti-satellite mission in general has hardly abated. In his January 2013 confirmation hearings, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel reiterated the standing U.S. policy “to develop capabilities, plans and options to deter, defend against, and, if necessary, defeat efforts to interfere with or attack U.S. or allied space systems.”189 On May 7, 2013, Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter revealed that the U.S. military had undertaken a “long overdue” program to develop mechanisms for countering the space capabilities of potential adversaries, including both resistance to another state’s ASAT activities, and pursuit of “our own capability to deny the use of space against our forces in a conflict.”190
The United States conducted thirty-one kinetic ASAT tests in space between 1959 and 1970, employing a variety of kill mechanisms.177 Three more tests in the 1980s used yet another different approach, built upon a direct-ascent, non- explosive, hit-to-kill Miniature Homing Vehicle (MHV), launched from an F-15 jet.178 On September 13, 1985, the MHV was directed against an obsolete U.S. Solwind solar observation satellite at 555 km altitude, colliding at 24,000 km/hr.179 The impact obliterated both spacecraft, generating 300 pieces of trackable debris, some of which required at least seventeen years to precipitate out of orbit, and part of which spun dangerously within one mile of the International Space Station.180 The MHV program was terminated in 1987, but work continued fitfully on a next-generation kinetic ASAT through 2005.181
In addition, it must be noted that there is (for Russia and China, as well as for the United States) considerable technical and bureaucratic overlap between ASAT programs and the corresponding national anti-ballistic missile (ABM) efforts aimed at developing systems for intercepting incoming ballistic warheads. Therefore, equipment, know-how, hardware, and flight tests nominally dedicated to either an ASAT function or an ABM function can have considerable application to the other program, too. Many missile defense systems are designed to operate at relatively low altitudes, so the space debris resulting from an intercept would not be persistent, but the similarity between the two types of enterprises obscures any effort to state with clarity whether a particular country is currently engaging in ASAT, ABM, or both types of activities.182
An important associated recent development has been an increased reliance upon multi-function and privately-owned satellites for monitoring purposes, expanding the concept of NTM satellites in two ways. First, many defense-related satellites perform multiple types of operations simultaneously. GPS satellites, for example, not only provide reliable, precise location information to the plethora of military and civilian receivers, they also contribute to arms control verification by hosting sensors that measure the visible light, radio waves, x-rays and radiation emitted from a nuclear explosion.114 Likewise, other earth monitoring orbiters can simultaneously or episodically contribute data that are relevant both to the detection, identification, and enumeration of other states' military resources (fulfilling an NTM function) and to the civilian tasks of forecasting weather, facilitating commercial communications, assessing crop yields, mapping highways, and responding to natural disasters.115
Second, commercially-owned and -operated satellites can be hired or commandeered for security purposes, including as NTM, as the occasion demands.116 For example, early in the fighting of the Afghanistan war in 2001, the U.S. military entered the international commercial marketplace to purchase all the available satellite imagery of the theater of battle from all public sources - artially to obtain products that would supplement the output of the U.S. government's own satellites, and partly to deny access to the enemy.117 As noted above, the emphatic policy of the U.S. government is to increase its exploitation of private satellites for the full array of public functions including security operations.118 Other states are also likely to realize the economic efficiency of turning to the private sector for the performance of intermittent or regular public missions-what some call "the Poor Man's NTM."119 This trend is evidenced by the fact that satellite remote sensing has grown to a $1 billion per year business.120
Therefore, there can be no definitive roster listing all NTM satellites; there is no requirement or state practice of officially designating a particular orbiter as performing a national security monitoring function.121 Many platforms, launched by a wide array of actors, ostensibly to fulfill a variety of purposes, can be adapted to support arms control treaty monitoring, as the occasion demands. Google Earth122 and other types of widely distributed satellite-based systems may in the future represent the face of NTM almost as much as highly-classified government-owned orbiters now do.
Direct Energy mechanisms, including devices to interrupt normal satellite services at least temporarily, may be even more widely disseminated. Commercial-off-the-shelf lasers may almost suffice to jeopardize many satellites, and one expert group concluded in 2006 that “[a]s many as 30 states may already have the capability to use low-power lasers to degrade unhardened satellite sensors.”207 Electronic jamming or other radio frequency interference is an even more present threat, with persistent complaints about annoying and costly disruptions.208 Even non-spacefaring states and non-state actors can get into this insidious game, with various genres of hackers demonstrating the power to degrade, jam, or even preempt satellite broadcasts.209
Distressingly, the capability for undertaking at least crude ASAT activities may already have proliferated broadly. The overlap between long-range missile technology and space-launch technology means that many countries already possess, or could soon develop, the competence for hostile space operations. Even a low-tech concept, such as inserting a quantity of gravel or nails into the oncoming path of a target satellite could constitute a crude KE capability (at least for a country that was not overly concerned about preserving its own ability to undertake peaceful space operations in the future, uninhibited by persistent junk).205
India, in particular, has been publicly energized to pursue autonomous ASAT capabilities. Spurred by China's 2007 ASAT test, India has hastened to enhance its military space activities, focusing on a kinetic energy mechanism adapted from its missile defense program.206
The prevalence of such theorizing suggests that China is moving towards a space campaign posture that emphasizes a variety of counterspace activities ranging from measured actions that produce transient and reversible effects (“soft-kills”) to the extreme violence of kinetic attacks, which are best reserved only for the apex of escalation or when dictated by dire operational necessity. Such a concept of operations is obviously “better” than simply a kinetic war of all against all in space and on the ground, but at the end of the day it cannot be consoling to U.S. defense planners in any significant way. For starters, it is not clear whether these visions purveyed by Chinese space warfare theorists, no matter how thoughtful or well situated, represent the actual operational preferences of the planners or the warfighters in the Chinese military. Notions of graduated escalation have long been alien to Chinese military culture and its style of combat operations. But even if this represents the new inclinations of the PLA, the emphasis on counterspace operations that emphasize securing transient and reversible effects only imply that space will no longer be a protected sanctuary in the context of any future U.S.-China confrontation. Rather, it will be a heavily contested environment, where the U.S. military will have to struggle to secure the information dominance that it simply presumed in the past would automatically obtain, when all it had to do then was to employ that freely found dominance to produce conventional victories on the ground, at sea, and in the air.
The idea that Chinese counterspace activities would diminish in intensity as Beijing slowly became a space power of significance has also proven to be illusory. Without a doubt, China is a major spacefaring nation today. The number of annual Chinese space launches currently exceeds that of the United States and it is believed that China presently operates some 105 satellites in space, just six short of the number required to surpass the Russian satellite inventory in orbit right now. Chinese satellites today span the gamut from weather and navigation platforms to communications andremote sensing, from electro-optical surveillance and synthetic aperture radar systems to electronic intelligence collection platforms. The Chinese space program more generally is attempting to push the boundaries of innovation with its manned spaceflight and lunar exploration components as well as through other development activities such as its spaceplane and hypersonic glide vehicle programs.
Even as China has expanded these investments in space, however, its commitment to developing a wide range of counterspace capabilities—targeted principally at the United States but also applicable to other spacefaring powers—has not diminished. This antinomous dynamic is driven by two realities. First, even as China seeks to use space for its own national goals, it is determined to develop and employ counterspace technologies whenever necessary to neutralize the combat advantages enjoyed by its opponents in the event of a conflict, while at the same time utilizing these burgeoning capabilities to deter any adversary attacks on its own space systems. Second, although the goals of Chinese counterspace employment vis-à-vis a superior adversary, such as the United States, may subsist in tension with China’s own professed desire for a peaceful space environment, Beijing appears to have concluded that the “delta” between its own and Washington’s dependence on space for the fulfillment of their respective national aims favors China rather than the United States. In other words, although competing counterspace actions by both nations would be hazardous to their common interests, the United States would stand to lose more than China does, given the relatively greater American dependence on space for both civilian and military purposes. Based on such an assessment, prosecuting counterspace operations in a crisis may be rational for China in any significant Sino-U.S. conflict along its periphery, even though Beijing itself stands to lose considerably as a result of the expected American riposte.
Whether assessed individually or in their totality, these endeavors remain initiatives of strategic significance that are authorized ultimately by the Central Military Commission (CMC). There is no evidence which suggests that these programs are the products of “freelancing” by the various research institutions and industrial conglomerates involved in the development and production of counterspace systems. To the contrary, China’s counterspace activities are principally directed by the PLA’s General Armaments Department and to a lesser degree by the General Staff Department, although the latter remains the nodal body that directs the subordinate services that have physical custody of the various counterspace components in wartime. This system of centralized control suggests that a high degree of deliberation drives the entire chain of Chinese counterspace activities to include the programmatic definition of requirements, research and development, acquisition of the various systems and their subsequent integration into the combat arms, all the way to operational deployment in the field in preparation for final employment when directed.
In my view, the current and evolving Chinese counterspace threat to U.S. military operations in the Asia-Pacific theater ranks on par with the dangers posed by Chinese offensive cyber operations to the United States. The dangers emanating from China’s counterspace investments are real and growing. And the diversity of Chinese counterspace activities ensures that almost every U.S. space component—the space systems in orbit, the links that control them and channel their data, and their associated ground facilities—will face grave perils as current Chinese counterspace programs mature and their technologies are integrated into the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) warfighting arsenal. The need for compensating U.S. investments to defeat these emerging threats is, therefore, vital if the extant U.S. military superiority that is essential to protecting the United States, its allies, and its interests is to be safeguarded.
Finally, the idea that China is deeply invested in its counterspace programs because the United States has proven resistant to space arms control is also fallacious. The Chinese interest in counterspace solutions has little to do with Washington’s attitude to space arms control, although numerous Chinese commentators continue to advance this argument. Beijing’s investments in counterspace capabilities, rather, are deeply rooted in the political predicaments it faces—none of which can be remedied by any arms control solutions. To begin with, China believes that it is engaged in a major geopolitical competition with the United States, a struggle wherein war, however remote, is still possible. Such a war could arise either because of extant disagreements, for example over Taiwan, which get out of hand; or because regional crises involving American protectees, such as Japan, explode to bring Chinese and American military power into confrontation; or because intensifying Sino- American competition in the Indo-Pacific spins out of control at some point during the next few decades when a power transition appears to be underway in Asia and possibly at the core of the international system.