China’s Advances in Space Warfare Are Terrifying

The indefatigable Bill Gertz of the Washington Times has a page-one story highlighting a Mitchell Institute report that warns that the United States is falling behind China in “counterspace capabilities” that will be crucial to success in any future war.

To quote the report: “The U.S. advantage in space is at risk … [T]he United States must maintain its access to space capabilities that are now threatened by China. And the United States must have the potential to deny China access to the space capabilities it needs to threaten U.S. space and terrestrial forces and national interests.”

The Mitchell Institute report is authored by Charles S. Galbreath, a senior resident fellow for space studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and a retired Space Force colonel. His 28-page paper is a siren call for the United States to wake up to the growing danger presented by China’s “alarming array of operational counterspace weaponry” that includes ground-based anti-satellite weapons, electronic warfare platforms, and killer satellites “capable of attacking U.S. assets in orbit. “China,” he writes, “has the most rapidly developing counterspace capabilities of any nation and is expanding its overall space program with the intent to surpass the United States.” (READ MORE: The Military Academies Have Turned Into Woke Wastelands)

Two recent novels about a future U.S.–China war — Ghost Fleet and 2034 — envision initial Chinese space and cyberattacks on U.S. communication and military satellites that prevent commanders in the field, at sea, and in the air from communicating with each other and with the Pentagon. The Mitchell Institute report notes that U.S. armed forces increasingly rely on space assets for many crucial missions, including satellite communications, position navigation and timing, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, warnings of missile attacks, and weather conditions. China, the report states, “now believes attacking U.S. space systems is essential to prevailing in a conflict with the United States and is actively fielding the most extensive collection of counterspace threats of any nation.” Meanwhile, due to what Galbreath calls a “decades-long view of the space domain an an operational sanctuary,” most of our space systems are “big, fat juicy targets for emerging Chinese … counterspace forces.”

Yet, as Gertz notes in his Washington Times piece, the Biden administration announced a unilateral halt to anti-satellite missile tests, even as China and Russia continue such tests. The Mitchell Institute report quotes from the 2023 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community: “China is steadily progressing toward becoming a world-class space leader, with the intent to match or surpass the United States by 2045.” Galbreath told Gertz that the threat posed by China is more urgent than that. We don’t have the luxury of time given China’s push for greater counterspace capabilities. “A U.S. failure to field counterspace capabilities,” Galbreath said, “will erode our deterrent posture and place our military at increased risk.” This would not be the first time that the U.S. intelligence community underestimated emerging threats from adversarial powers.

Galbreath urges U.S. policymakers to take a “robust, full-spectrum approach” to ensure that we have “continuous access to and unimpeded use of space.” Arms control is not the answer. What is needed is the improved resiliency of space assets, increased capabilities to defend space assets, and offensive capabilities to achieve space dominance in the event of war.

The arms race in space is part of the broader arms race in the Indo-Pacific that includes conventional and nuclear forces — and now space forces. The outcome of this arms race may determine the destiny of the Indo-Pacific and global balances of power for the rest of the 21st century.   

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