A top U.S. Space Force general sees a clear need to be able to attack threats in space, not just to protect friendly satellites, but to challenge China’s dramatically expanded surveillance capabilities in orbit. Hundreds of satellites give the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) immense capacity to track and target American forces. The main Space Force unit charged with the “orbital warfare” mission is now exploring new ways to maneuver using an experimental satellite, which could lead to future offensive and defensive capabilities.
Lt. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, head of what is now called U.S. Space Force Combat Forces Command (CFC), talked about what will be required to provide “space superiority” in the future at a roundtable, at which TWZwas in attendance, on the sidelines of the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) annual Warfare Symposium yesterday. The Space Force redesignated its Space Operations Command (SpOC) as CFC last November, specifically to put more emphasis on its warfighting functions. U.S. military officials have been stressing that space is now a warfighting domain where active conflict could occur for years now. This, in turn, has also led to increasingly open discussions about new anti-satellite capabilities.
“Protective measures on satellites is just like thinking about protective measures on aircraft, okay? And we’re working through that,” Gagnon said in response to a question from TWZ‘s Howard Altman about how his command is responding to threats to U.S. assets in orbit. “I won’t provide specifics, because I want those protective measures to work, right? I don’t want to tell Beijing and Moscow what I’ve done.”
Maneuvering satellites away from threats is known to be a central aspectof the Space Force’s current “protect and defend” concepts of operations. Significant investments are also being made now to develop ways to expand those capabilities, which we will come back to later on.
Deploying new distributed and proliferated constellations with large numbers of smaller satellites to create targeting challenges for opponents, as well as to help reduce the impacts if some satellites are lost, has been another major focus area. The U.S. military is heavily reliant on space-based capabilities for strategic early warning, intelligence gathering, communications and data-sharing, navigation and weapons guidance, and more.
“But protecting and defending satellites can’t simply be done by protect and defend. You can’t run away from a bully forever. Sometimes you got to turn around and punch,” Gagnon continued. “So protect and defend, although necessary is insufficient to deliver space control. We also need, as part of our joint force, the ability to attack.”
He cited two core reasons as driving this demand for offensive capabilities. One was to improve the ability of friendly assets in space to defend themselves. The other is China.
What “[China’s] President Xi [Jinping] has decided to do is build the second-best remote sensing architecture in the world from outer space, and that’s now what they have,” Gagnon said. “So when 2013 started, and he came to power, he had less than 100 satellites that were the total of what China had in outer space. They have about 1,900 today.
Over 500 of those satellites are remote sensing satellites, which are purposely designed and networked to track mobile forces such as U.S. carriers, destroyers, and cruisers in the Pacific, as well as aircraft that deploy around the Pacific. Those have been built with a purpose. The purpose is to cue their long-range fire weapons.”
Concerns about the extent to which China can now track U.S. force movements from space, and then use that information to target them, are not new, as TWZ has explored in the past. In 2022, the Pentagon had assessed that “the PLA [Chinese People’s Liberation Army] owns and operates about half of the world’s [space-based] ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] systems.”
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