With China’s boosted military intelligence gathering ability in space, the U.S. military no longer holds a monopoly.
China has
achieved a strategic breakout in space, now deploying a vast network of
satellites capable of targeting U.S. forces, should a conflict break out
between the two nations in the western Pacific, according to the U.S. Space
Force’s intelligence chief.
“The PLA
[People’s Liberation Army] has rapidly advanced in space in a way that few
people can really appreciate,” Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon, deputy chief of
space operations for intelligence, told the Mitchell Institute for
Aerospace Studies on May 2.
“I tried to
think about historical analogies, about rapid buildups. I haven’t seen a rapid
build-up like this. ... I was thinking about World War II ... but even as I was
looking more broadly, an adversary arming this fast is profoundly concerning.”
Maj. Gen.
Gagnon said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has increased its on-orbit
capability by 550 percent since the end of 2015.
China’s
military development in space has grown to become a great U.S. national
security concern in recent years.
In April,
Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, warned about the CCP’s
developing its military capabilities in space at a “breathtaking” pace. In January, a U.S. military
report warned that China and Russia are populating space with dual-use
satellites,
concealing their military applications.
“For the
last two years, they’ve placed over 200 satellites in space—both years,” Maj.
Gen. Gagnon said. “Of that, over half of them are remote sensing
satellites—remote sensing satellites that are purpose-built to surveil, do
reconnaissance in the western Pacific and globally.”
By putting
up so many remote sensing satellites, China was recognizing the importance of
“proliferated architecture,” one that Maj. Gen. Gagnon said makes China’s space
infrastructure more “resilient against attack” because of the sheer number of
satellites.
“[It’s] an
architecture that isn’t designed for efficiency and cost-effectiveness—an
architecture that’s designed to go to war and sustain a war,” he added.
With
China’s boosted military intelligence-gathering ability in space, the U.S.
military no longer holds a monopoly on hitting “mobile targets at extremely
long distances,” which to date has been ensured by its leading space
capabilities.
Now, China
has a similar ability given its fleet of satellites. “That monopoly is over,”
the major general said.
“[T]he
purpose of reconnaissance and surveillance from the ultimate high ground is, of
course, to inform decisions about fire control for militaries,” he said. “It’s
to provide indications and warnings of [U.S.] sailors, Marines, airmen, trying
to move west, if directed, to defend freedom.”
“They will
now—in a way that we’re not comfortable talking about in America—they will be
inside a rapidly expanding weapons engagement zone,” he said of U.S. troops,
thanks to China’s rapidly equalizing ability in space, much of which is based
on stolen U.S.
intellectual property
and funded by decades of western investment.
The deputy
chief also disputed the CCP’s claims about the purpose of its radar
satellite in
​​geosynchronous orbit (GEO), which is located about 22,000 miles above the
surface of the Earth.
“They
recently put a radar imager in GEO in August [2023]. It’s designed to look at
the Western Pacific, even though they say it’s about agriculture. The Western
Pacific that it’s looking at is over the ocean. We kind of know what the
purpose is,” he said.
Compared
with 2019, the year the Space Force was established, the service is now
monitoring far more satellites in orbit, according to Maj. Gen. Gagnon.
“Today, we
are now orchestrating the collection of about 1,000 priority targets in space
... 1,000 out of 9,500 satellites in space, those are the priorities,” he said.
Consequently,
the Space Force is now putting out about 11,000 “maneuver alerts” each month,
compared with about six to seven alerts during the early days after the service
was established, according to Maj. Gen. Gagnon. The alerts have been generated
by U.S. Space Force Guardians and individuals from 11 other countries, he
added.
“That’s the
scale; that’s profound. That’s a great advancement because of our partnership
with the commercial sector, our ability to manage the data in a reasonable way
into a United Data
Library,” he said.
“We’ve
created the opportunity here for other people in other countries to help. And
we’re training about six people a month to learn how to do this first-level
analysis. We have 100 people trained now, we’ll have 175 in 12 months. They
exist on three continents, and because they exist on three continents, we’re
gaining 24/7 coverage.”