Agence France-Presse, China may be just three years away from being able to disrupt U.S. military satellites in a regional conflict, a senior U.S. military leader said Aug. 14, citing a recent antisatellite test and other advances.
The warning came amid calls at a conference in Alabama for intensified efforts to ensure U.S. “space superiority” in the wake of China’s shootdown Jan. 11 of one of its own satellites with a ballistic missile.
“It is not inconceivable that within about three years we can be challenged at a near peer level in a region,” said Lt. Gen. Kevin Campbell, head of the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command.
“That means taking out a number of communications capabilities over a theater of war,” he added in a speech to an audience of defense contractors in Huntsville, Ala.
Campbell later told reporters that while a number of countries have some capabilities to interfere with satellite communications, China is the country he is most worried about.
Its antisatellite test in January was a clear demonstration of its ability to destroy an orbiting satellite, he said.
But its development of jamming capabilities and advances in computer network attack point to a comprehensive approach to denying the U.S. military access to space in a conflict, he said.
“It starts to add up that they’ll have multidimensional capabilities to attack various systems that are in orbit today,” he said.
“A lot of countries have pieces of what I’ve described, but I would say I’m more concerned about China than any of them,” he said.
Satellites are vital to U.S. military operations, enabling the flow of torrents of communications, imagery and navigational data for the kind of high-tech precision warfare the U.S. excels at.
But U.S. reliance on satellites also has created vulnerabilities that, though long understood, had not taken concrete form until the Chinese test.
Campbell said it has spurred the military to think about how to counter the threat, including ways to track and surveil objects in space to know what they are up to.
He said his command has devised a “space alert” system patterned on “air alerts” that would key the military’s responses to a threat to a friendly satellite.
The military also is thinking about offensive countermeasures, he said.
“I’m not free to talk about specifics, but the bottom line is we’re thinking about and taking steps to ensure we have a capability… that shows we have freedom of action in space,” he said.
