Its leader status makes the country a target for adversaries, intelligence report says
APOGEE STAFF
The way the United States has leveraged outer space to achieve its military goals helps explain the chief threats the country faces from the domain, now, and in the future. Adversaries, chiefly the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia, have redoubled their efforts in recent years to match and exceed U.S. capabilities in space.
That’s one conclusion from a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analysis titled “Challenges to Security in Space,” released in April 2022 as an update to the first space-security report issued by the DIA two years earlier. “Adversaries have observed more than 30 years of U.S. military operations supported by space systems and are now seeking ways to expand their own capabilities and deny the U.S. a space-enabled advantage,” according to the report.
The DIA identifies the adversaries as the PRC, Russia and emerging space players Iran and North Korea. These authoritarian regimes took note in the 1980s, the report said, when the U.S. created the space-focused Strategic Defense Initiative to defend against the former Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, and again in the 1990s, when satellite-based command and control helped tilt the field of battle during the Gulf War and in action in Kosovo, Afghanistan and the second Iraq War.
The PRC and Russia have reacted, in part, by creating their own versions of the ubiquitous Global Positioning System (GPS), first developed by the U.S. military. Today, the PRC’s BeiDou system and Russia’s GLONASS also offer global satellite positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services and are competing with GPS for customers while touting their systems in seeking new military alliances.
The PRC and Russia value superiority in space, seeking ways to strengthen their space and counterspace programs and to better integrate them into their militaries. The two countries aim to keep their adversaries from using capabilities like these in war. At the same time, they are broadening their space exploration initiatives beyond Earth’s orbit — together and individually — with plans to explore the moon and Mars during the next 30 years. “Through the use of space and counterspace capabilities, they aspire to undercut U.S. global leadership,” the DIA report said.
Space experts with the DIA have emphasized that their report provides information only and that policymakers and warfighting planners can decide what to do with the strategies they devise. Other recent private sector analyses echo the report’s findings, while urging U.S. leaders to respond to the growing threats from space. In a forward to “Space Threat Assessment 2022,” from the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Susan M. Gordon said, “So broad and deep is our collective reliance on space and space assets that these threats — from kinetic strikes, to other actions that create physical damage, to electronic, to cyber — should impel responsive actions within the United States, with our partners, and in a way that includes the private sector.”
Asked at a news briefing in April 2022 to identify whether the PRC or Russia poses the greater threat, the DIA authorities characterized the capabilities of the two countries.
“I’ll put it this way,” said senior defense analyst Kevin Ryder, “China, due to more economic advantages, has increased their capabilities and put more financial and military effort towards developing their capabilities. Russia, on the other hand, is more streamlined due to other modern military modernization efforts for the country.” Added defense intelligence officer John F. Huth, “I wouldn’t take my eye off either one.”
The two countries are charting courses in space that are in some ways similar and in others different, but the threats they pose continue to trend upward. Between 2019 and 2021 the combined operational space fleets of the PRC and Russia increased about 70%, the DIA report said. This builds upon a period of growth from 2015 to 2018, during which the PRC and Russia increased their combined satellite fleets by more than 200%. The numbers reflect nearly all major space categories — satellite communications or SATCOM, remote sensing, navigation, and science and technology.
The DIA report highlights the contradiction between moves by the PRC and Russia to develop anti-satellite weapons and their pursuit of binding international agreements through the United Nations to discourage the weaponization of space. Deliberate destruction by the PRC and Russia of satellites in low Earth orbit accounts for a significant share of the space debris that poses a danger to the civilian, commercial and government satellites of all nations. Before 2007, most space debris came from explosions of upper stages of satellite launch vehicles, the DIA report said. Today, nearly half of all cataloged debris consists of fragments from three major events: The PRC’s destruction of its own defunct weather satellite in 2007, the accidental collision of a U.S. communications satellite with a dead Russian satellite in 2009, and the 2021 Russian Nudol anti-satellite test. Debris attributed, in part, to increased overall activity in space has emerged as a major concern and rated a separate chapter in the DIA threat assessment.
The PRC, with its rise as a world economic power, has devoted considerable resources to increasing all aspects of its space program — improving military space applications, developing human spaceflight and conducting lunar and Martian exploration missions, the DIA report said. During the past 10 years, the PRC has doubled its launches per year and the number of satellites in orbit. The country also has launched anti-satellite missiles and developed mobile jamming devices to interfere with GPS and satellite communications. The Shijian-17 is a Chinese satellite with a robotic arm, technology that could be used in a future system for grappling other satellites, the DIA report said.
The PRC space program, second only to the U.S. in the number of operational satellites, is a source of national pride and part of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” to establish a powerful and prosperous China. The space program, managed by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), supports both civilian and military interests, including strengthening its science and technology sector, growing international relationships and modernizing the military, the DIA report said. For the time being, space technology under development for scientific gain appears distinct from work done for military purposes. But that could change, the DIA’s Huth told reporters. He spoke of a potential “military-civil fusion,” saying, “They don’t conduct business the way, certainly the way the U.S. or other Western countries do.”
The DIA report quotes from a paper titled “Science of Military Strategy,” published in 2020 by the PRC’s National Defense University: “Space has already become a new domain of modern military struggle; it is a critical factor for deciding military transformation; and it has an extremely important influence on the evolution of future form-states, modes, and rules of war. Therefore, following with interest the military struggle circumstance of space and strengthening the study of the space military struggle problem is a very important topic we are currently facing.”
The PRC has four fixed sites for space launches. The newest, Wenchang on Hainan Island, has a launch latitude closer to the equator, a more efficient path for placing satellites into the higher geostationary orbit vital for communication and missile warning. In 2020, the PRC launched a Long March 11 rocket from a barge based in Haiyang Port on the Yellow Sea. The country’s main satellite control center is in the central Chinese city of Xian and its primary control center for human space flight and lunar missions is in the capital of Beijing. The PLA operates four radar devices that most likely are used for missile warning and space situational awareness. In addition, there are at least six ground stations receiving command and control signals from PRC satellites, one of them in Neuquén, Argentina, and five ground stations receiving remote sensing data from PRC satellites, one in Kiruna, Sweden.
Russia’s space program is robust, but Moscow’s budget is more limited than Beijing’s as Russia embarks on broader military modernization efforts, the DIA report said. In the years following the Cold War, Russia’s space capabilities fell into decay because of economic constraints and technological setbacks. What’s more, Russia’s access to space technology, information and expertise has been restricted by sanctions imposed by the U.S., western Europe, Australia and Japan in response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of the Crimean Peninsula. Russia relies on components from the West, in part, because of the decline of its domestic microelectronics industry.
Still, Russia designs and deploys some of the world’s most capable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites, and during the past two decades, has continued to pursue space services, in part to develop counterspace weapons that can deny, degrade and disrupt adversaries’ communications. Russia is developing a mobile missile that can destroy satellites and crewed space vehicles, the DIA report said. The report quotes Dmitry Rogozin, former chief of the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos, as saying, “Slowly but surely, we are heading toward” militarization of space. “Roscosmos has no illusions about this. Everyone is working on it.”
Mindful of U.S. leadership in space, Russia still views itself as the pioneer in the domain as a matter of national pride and even considers the reliance on space by the U.S. military as its Achilles heel, the DIA report said. Russia is pursuing systems to counter U.S. space-based services, both military and commercial, to offset a perceived U.S. military advantage. For its part, Russia has developed terrestrial redundancies to complement or replace space services that may be neutralized during war.
Russia owns two of its launch sites and leases one from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. The European Space Agency (ESA) has contracted with Russia to conduct launches from the ESA’s site in French Guiana on the northeast coast of South America. Russian spaceports at Kapustin Yar and Svobodny are inactive. Space control sites are spread across Russia to enable effective satellite command and control. Moscow also has spread nine radars over eight locations to enable a dual missile-warning and space situational awareness function.
Iran and North Korea are identified as emerging U.S. space threats, in part for their efforts to counter space-based services such as communications and navigation, the DIA report said. Both countries have space-tracking stations. Both can conduct electronic warfare against adversaries and theoretically could use their advances in missile and launch vehicle capabilities to target orbiting satellites. Tehran has publicly acknowledged it can jam space-based communications and GPS signals and is marketing to others the devices used to accomplish this. In January 2021, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced that Pyongyang — to secure its own space-based reconnaissance capability — would launch a spy satellite in the near future. Two attempts, in May 2023 and August 2023, met with failure, but the regime announced a successful launch on a third try in November 2023.
It’s clear that adversaries and allies alike see the U.S. as the leader in outer space, but in its final “Outlook” section, the DIA report spells out how this status will be tested: “As the number of spacefaring nations grows and space and counterspace capabilities become more integrated into military operations, the U.S. space posture will be increasingly challenged and on-orbit assets will face new risks.”