U.S. government satellites are under attack, “every single day.” Once and Future President Donald Trump established America’s Space Force just in the nick of time, it seems. For a mere $15.4 billion, carved out from the Air Force 2021 budget, Uncle Sam consolidated some strategic status in “the world’s newest war-fighting domain.” According to General David Thompson, we’re “at a point now where there’s a whole host of ways that our space systems can be threatened.” He’s on top of them.
Under daily attack
General David Thompson, Space Force Vice Chief of Space Operations confirmed last month at the Halifax International Security Forum that the Space Force is dealing with one attack after another, targeting orbital American government hardware “every single day.”
On the bright side, so far, they have been “reversible attacks.” That means, he explains, “they aren’t permanently damaging the satellites — at least for now.”
Both China and Russia regularly attack “U.S. satellites with non-kinetic means, including lasers, radio frequency jammers and cyber attacks.” Of course, that’s nothing new. the space arms race has been running since sputnik.
The next big marathon is a base on the moon. While there are all sorts of peaceful humanitarian and scientific reasons for a foothold on our nearest neighbor, the biggest one is the Moon’s convenient location at the top of Earth’s gravity well. As Funk-master George Clinton likes to say, “up is just a place to throw down from.”
The ever-present space war has been ramping up in the shadows, recently. For the past several months the experts have been engaging in a “space arms race” which “has China, the U.S. and Russia competing with each other.”
The attack pattern prompted General Thompson to observe the “threats are really growing and expanding every single day. And it’s really an evolution of activity that’s been happening for a long time.”
A whole host of ways
As the general explained to the international space security community, “We’re really at a point now where there’s a whole host of ways that our space systems can be threatened.” The headlines have been full of Russian and Chinese exploits. For instance, Russia started posturing for potential attack in November when the Kremlin “destroyed an old Soviet satellite with an anti-satellite missile.”
Meant simply to prove they could do it, the shrapnel made a lot of orbital engineers rather upset. BBC notes, this “became especially problematic when the debris from the destroyed satellite ended up in the orbit of the International Space Station.”
Both America and Britain screamed loudly about the “dangerous and irresponsible” action that “shows a complete disregard for the security, safety and sustainability of space.” China has been going on the offensive as well, showing off their space attack weapons. Over the summer Xi Jinping “tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle in space.”
That experiment made the Pentagon as nervous as when Kim Jong Un starts playing with his rockets. “They put it on a rocket, flew it through low-orbit space to circle the globe, and then struck within about two dozen miles of its target, as the Arms Control Association reported.”
Last year, Russia’s apparent leader for life Vladimir Putin got tricky. He practically admitted planning for an attack by accusing America of planning one. Putin “proposed that the leading space powers (Russia, U.S. and China) should agree to prohibit the ‘stationing’ of weapons in space and the ‘threat or use of force’ against any space objects,” the RAND Corporation reported. Of course, we couldn’t agree to that.
“Both nations [Russia and China] share a common desire to curb the U.S. technological prowess in developing advanced space capabilities, especially those that might be applied to missile defense or anti-satellite operations.”
