The United States is locked in a battle for supremacy with China and Russia that has taken many forms. The constant competition has resulted in the sides looking to gain an advantage in nontraditional battlefields. In space, a previous gentlemen’s agreement on warfare no longer holds sway, while there is a constant fight for one-upmanship in the Arctic and in the race to dominate rare Earth minerals. This Washington Examiner series, The Next Frontier, will investigate this existential struggle. Part 1 looks at space.
The U.S. is still the preeminent space power, but its adversaries are quickly closing the gap, according to military officials and national security experts alike.
Gen. Michael Guetlein, vice chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force, issued a warning earlier this month when he told the Reagan National Defense Forum, “Today that capability gap is in our favor, but if it goes negative on us, it’s going to be a really bad day.”
“The adversary is quickly shrinking that gap, and we have got to change the way we approach space pretty rapidly,” Guetlein explained, adding that the U.S. is now seeing “a new steady state set of behaviors that we haven’t seen in the past, the adversaries has become very emboldened to mess with our space capabilities.”
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He said there was a “gentleman’s agreement” of sorts between space powers in the past that no longer exists.
China and Russia are two of the U.S.’s primary space competitors, and their pursuit of anti-satellite capabilities has been well-documented in recent years. Some anti-satellite weapons are space-based, but not all of them are.
“China and Russia already possess the full suite of counter-space capabilities, everything from missiles that can shoot down our satellites and create tons of space debris to non-kinetic forms of attack like GPS jamming, satellite communications jamming, and even things like lasers that can blind the sensors on satellites,” Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner.
GPS jamming is when an adversary tries to electronically block the system from gathering data or information, whereas GPS spoofing is when an adversary tries to essentially fool the system to redirect the coordinates to another location.
“Imagine a GPS-guided bomb or missile, if all of a sudden, midway through its flight, it enters an area where GPS signal is being jammed. Now it’s lost its guidance navigation capability,” Harrison warned. “Or even worse, if it enters an area where the GPS signals are being spoofed, it will think it knows where it is and how to guide itself to its target, but it actually will not be going to the right location.”
The jamming and spoofing of U.S. satellites has become a part of “the norm” now, according to Guetlein.
“It is a normal behavior to jam GPS, to spoof GPS, to jam [satellite communications] to cyberattacks, to fly UAVs over [the continental U.S.],” he said.
Clayton Swope, the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project, told the Washington Examiner that non-state actors or countries that don’t have the capabilities to launch their own satellites into space or can’t do it consistently could still affect the U.S. through jamming and spoofing.
Should an adversary target U.S. satellites, it could affect millions of people.
“Without space,” Guetlein added, “You cannot get crops out of the field. You cannot get gas at the gas pumps. You can’t get groceries. You can’t get ambulances to the emergency or fire trucks to the fire. It will be a very bad day without space.”
China’s ‘Sputnik’ moment
A major moment in the race for space weapons was in 2021 when China carried out a hypersonic missile test, which marked the first time any country sent a hypersonic weapon fully around Earth. Hypersonic missiles travel five times faster than the speed of sound, can carry nuclear payloads, and are maneuverable, giving them the ability to evade defense systems.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said at the time that it was “very close” to a “Sputnik moment,” referring to Russia’s launch of the world’s first artificial satellite in the 1950s, which initiated the space race.
“It has all of our attention,” he said.
“The pace with which [China] put counterspace capabilities into play is mind-boggling,” U.S. Space Force Chief Gen. B. Chance Saltzman told Politico earlier this year. “The volume of threats, the diversity of threats that [China] is presenting is a particular challenge … But Russia is a very capable space-faring nation, and they’ve invested heavily in counterspace as well.”
The same year China carried out its surprising hypersonic test, Russia conducted an anti-satellite missile test targeting one of its own satellites, breaking it up into more than 1,500 pieces of debris, which posed a threat to other objects in orbit.
Earlier this year, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee vaguely warned about a grave threat that U.S. officials later confirmed to be Russia’s development of a space-based nuclear weapons system.
“Russia is also developing a concerning anti-satellite capability related to a new satellite carrying a nuclear device that Russia is developing,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Dr. John Plumb told lawmakers earlier this year. “This capability could pose a threat to all satellites operated by countries and companies around the globe, as well as to the vital communications, scientific, meteorological, agricultural, commercial, and national security services we all depend upon.”
Gen. Stephen Whiting, the commander of U.S. Space Command, described the weapon as “completely indiscriminate” in July, while Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said U.S. intelligence officials have been tracking the project “for almost a decade,” and that Russia is “getting close” to finishing its preparations.
“One way to deal with threats to space capabilities is to just make it more resilient,” the Hudson Institute’s Bryan Clark told the Washington Examiner. “So add new systems, create redundancy, and have systems in different orbital regimes, so low Earth orbit, medium Earth orbit, geo-orbit that can support or duplicate each other.”
Many of these challenges will remain the same for the incoming administration. President-elect Donald Trump oversaw the creation of the Space Force in 2019. During his reelection campaign this time around, one of his biggest donors was billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose businesses already have several space-related government contracts.
SpaceX, Musk’s company, already works closely with the Pentagon.
The Pentagon released its 2024 Commercial Space Integration Strategy in April, which outlined four top priorities that the department intends to pursue: the department having confidence that it will have access to commercial solutions, achieving integrated commercial space solutions before a crisis emerges, creating the security conditions to integrate commercial space solutions, and supporting the development of new commercial space solutions for use by the military.
“The most important development in national security space is how the Department of Defense is transitioning from many impressions, from a small number of exquisite, expensive, big satellites in high orbit to many systems, proliferate systems across the diversity of orbits,” Sam Wilson, a senior policy analyst for the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at the Aerospace Center, told the Washington Examiner.
Trump has repeatedly used the phrase “peace through strength” to characterize his foreign policy, and according to Swope, that will mean proving to adversaries that the U.S. would win a war fought in space.
The U.S. needs to demonstrate that “there are real ramifications to these kinds of attacks” if they were to happen, Swope explained.
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“Now, those ramifications don’t have to necessarily be in space. They could be in other domains. So it’s making sure that the adversary knows that we can strike them and reach them and reach them in space, that they are also vulnerable, but then also making sure that the adversary knows that it’s clear how we will respond to different types of attacks on this spectrum,” he said.
“Instead of an adversary just seeing us as vulnerable in space, they learn to fear us in space,” Swope added.