[The Biden administration faces not only waves of Chinese antisatellite weapons but a history of jumbled responses to the intensifying threat.]
And China’s cyberattacks can, at
least in theory, cut off the Pentagon from contact with fleets of satellites
that track enemy movements, relay communications among troops and provide information
for the precise targeting of smart weapons.
Among the most important national
security issues now facing President Biden is how to contend with the threat
that China poses to the American military in space and, by extension,
terrestrial forces that rely on the overhead platforms.
The Biden administration has yet to
indicate what it plans to do with President Donald J. Trump’s legacy in this
area: the Space Force, a new branch of the military that has been criticized as
an expensive and ill-advised escalation that could lead to a dangerous new arms
race.
Mr. Trump presented the initiative
as his own, and it now suffers from an association with him and remains the
brunt of jokes on television. But its creation was also the culmination of
strategic choices by his predecessors, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack
Obama, to counter an emboldened China that raised bipartisan alarm.
“There’s been a dawning realization
that our space systems are quite vulnerable,” said Greg Grant, a
Pentagon official in the Obama administration who helped devise its response to
China. “The Biden administration will see more funding — not less — going into
space defense and dealing with these threats.”
The protective goal is to create an
American presence in orbit so resilient that, no matter how deadly the attacks,
it will function well enough for the military to project power halfway around
the globe in terrestrial reprisals and counterattacks. That could deter
Beijing’s strikes in the first place. The hard question is how to achieve that
kind of strong deterrence.
Lloyd J. Austin III, a retired
four-star Army general who was confirmed last
week as Mr. Biden’s secretary of defense, told the Senate that he would keep a “laserlike focus”
on sharpening the country’s “competitive edge” against China’s increasingly
powerful military. Among other things, he called for new American strides in
building “space-based platforms” and repeatedly referred to space as a war-fighting domain.
“Space is already an arena of great
power competition,” Mr. Austin said, with China “the most significant threat
going forward.”
The new administration has shown
interest in tapping the innovations of space entrepreneurs as a means of
strengthening the military’s hand — what Mr. Austin in his Senate
testimony called “partnerships with commercial space entities.”
The Obama and Trump administrations both adopted that strategy as a uniquely
American way of sharpening the military’s edge.
Experts clash on whether the United
States is doing too little or too much. Defense hawks had lobbied for
decades for the creation of a military Space Corps and called for more spending
on weapons.
But arms controllers see the Space
Force as raising global tensions and giving Beijing an excuse to accelerate its own
threatening measures. Some go further and call it a precipitous move that will
increase the likelihood of war.
In decades past, especially during
the “Star
Wars” program of the Reagan administration, conflict in space was
often portrayed as shootouts in orbit. That has changed. With few exceptions, the weapons are no
longer seen as circling the planet but as being deployed from secure bases. So,
too, the targets are no longer swarms of nuclear warheads but fleets of
satellites, whose recurring, predictable paths while orbiting the Earth make
them far easier to destroy.
A main question is whether the
antisatellite moves and countermoves will lower or raise the risks of
miscalculation and war. That debate is just beginning.
Beijing’s Surge
For years, the Chinese studied —
with growing anxiety — the American military, especially its invasions of
Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The battlefield successes were seen as
rooted in space dominance. Planners noted that thousands of satellite-guided
bombs and cruise
missiles had rained down with devastating precision on Taliban forces
and Iraqi defenses.
While the Pentagon’s edge in
orbital assets was clearly a threat to China, planners argued that it might also represent a
liability.
“They saw how the U.S. projected
power,” said Todd Harrison, a space analyst at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “And they saw that it was
largely undefended.”
China began its antisatellite tests
in 2005. It fired two
missiles in two years and then made headlines in 2007 by shattering a
derelict weather satellite. There was no explosion. The inert warhead simply
smashed into the satellite at blinding speed. The successful test reverberated
globally because it was the first such act
of destruction since the Cold War.
The whirling shards, more than 150,000 in all, threatened satellites as well as
the International Space Station. Ground controllers raced to move dozens of spacecraft and astronauts out
of harm’s way.
The Bush administration initially
did little. Then, in a show of force meant to send Beijing a message, in 2008,
it fired a sophisticated missile to shoot down one
of its own satellites.
Beijing conducted about a dozen more tests, including ones in which warheads shot
much higher, in theory putting most classes of American spacecraft at risk.
China also sought to diversify its
antisatellite force. A warhead could take hours to reach a high orbit,
potentially giving American forces time for evasive or retaliatory action.
Moreover, the speeding debris from a successful attack might endanger Beijing’s
own spacecraft.
In tests, China began firing weak laser beams at satellites and studying
other ways to strike at the speed of light. However, all the techniques were
judged as requiring years and perhaps decades of development.
Then came the new idea. Every
aspect of American space power was controlled from the ground by powerful
computers. If penetrated, the brains of Washington’s space fleets might be
degraded or destroyed. Such attacks, compared with every other antisatellite
move, were also remarkably inexpensive.
In 2005, China began to incorporate cyberattacks into its military exercises,
primarily in first strikes against enemy networks. Increasingly, its military doctrine called for paralyzing early attacks.
In 2008, hackers seized control of a civilian imaging satellite
named Terra that orbited low, like the military’s reconnaissance craft. They
did so twice — first in June and again in October — roaming control circuits
with seeming impunity. Remarkably, in both cases, the hackers achieved all the
necessary steps to command the spacecraft but refrained from doing so,
apparently to reduce their fingerprints.
Space officials were troubled by
more than China’s moves and weapons. The modern history of the American
military centered on building global alliances. Beijing was rushing ahead as an
aggressive loner, and many officers feared that Washington was too hidebound
and burdened with the responsibilities of coalition-building and arms-control
treaties to react quickly.
“The Chinese are starting from
scratch,” Paul S. Szymanski, a veteran analyst of space warfare, argued in an Air Force journal. They’re not, he added,
“hindered by long space traditions.”
Washington’s Response
In its second term, the Obama
administration made public what it called an “offset strategy” to respond to
China and other threats by capitalizing on America’s technological edge.
Just as the United States had
developed, first, a vast nuclear arsenal and, second, smart weapons, this
so-called third offset would seek an advantage by speeding the rise of robotics,
high-speed arms and other breakthroughs that could empower the armed forces for
decades.
Unlike earlier offsets, officials
said, the objective was to rely less on federal teams than the tech
entrepreneurs who were fast transforming the civilian world.
“We must really capture the
commercial sector,” Robert O. Work, a deputy secretary of defense, said in a 2015 speech explaining the new initiative.
The advances in space were to be
defensive: swarms of small, relatively cheap satellites and fleets of recycled
launchers that would overwhelm Beijing with countless targets. For Mr. Obama,
innovative leaps were to do for American space forces what Steve Jobs did for
terrestrial gadgets, running circles around the calcified ministries of
authoritarian states.
After decades in which adversaries
— from stateless terrorists to those with traditional militaries — sought to
exploit narrow advantages over the more powerful United States, the Pentagon
was now finding an unconventional edge all its own.
The Obama administration was
already applying the commercial philosophy to NASA, turning
the space agency into a major funder of entrepreneurial strides. It was pumping
billions of dollars into the development of private rockets and capsules
meant to carry astronauts into orbit.
The military joined in. The
beneficiaries included Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, and Jeff Bezos, the
founder of Amazon. Their space companies — Mr. Musk’s SpaceX and Mr. Bezos’s
Blue Origin — sought to turn
rocket launchers from throwaways into recyclables, slashing their cost.
Military officials believed that
the new system would make it possible to quickly replace satellites in times of
war.
The third offset also sought to
shrink the size of satellites. Over decades, the big ones had grown into
behemoths. Some cost $1 billion or more to design, construct, outfit, launch
and keep in service. One type unfurled an antenna nearly as large as a football
field. But civilians, inspired
by the iPhone revolution, were building spacecraft as small as loaves of
bread.
Military planners saw smaller,
cheaper, more numerous craft as making antisatellite targeting vastly more
difficult — in some cases impossible — for an adversary.
The initiative aided companies such
as Planet Labs, which sought to build hundreds of tiny Earth-observing
satellites, and Capella
Space, which designed small radar-imaging satellites meant to see through
clouds. It also bolstered SpaceX, where Mr. Musk envisioned a fleet of thousands of communication satellites.
The administration, increasingly
worried about Beijing’s strides, also raised its spending on offensive space control — without saying exactly what
that meant.
Federal investment in the tech
entrepreneurs totaled $7.2 billion, most of it during the Obama years, according to a NASA report. It said the funds went to 67
companies. The approach differed from the usual Pentagon method,
which dictated terms to contractors. Instead, the private sector led the way.
As predicted, the small investments made a big difference.
By the end of the Obama
administration, SpaceX was firing payloads into space and successfully returning
booster rockets to Earth in soft landings.
Mr. Obama tweeted his congratulations in April 2016 when, for
the first time, a SpaceX booster landed successfully on a platform at sea.
Two years later, Mr. Trump unveiled
the Space Force, prompting jokes on Twitter and late-night television and
even a Netflix
sitcom. But in March, the unit said it had taken possession of its first
offensive weapon, calling
the event historic. Based on land, the system fires energy beams to disrupt
spacecraft. Lt. Col. Steve Brogan, a space combat specialist, said the acquisition “puts the ‘force’ in Space Force
and is critical for space as a war-fighting domain.”
The Trump administration last
year asked Congress for a start on what it called
counter-space weapons, putting their expected cost at many hundreds of millions
of dollars. The military’s classified budget for the offensive abilities is
said to run much higher. In word and deed, the administration also backed new reliance on the swarms of commercial strides.
Trump officials described their
steps as a response not only to Beijing’s progress but its plans. In 2019, the
Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency warned that China appeared to be deploying a new
generation of extremely powerful lasers that could flash to life by the middle
of this decade, putting new classes of American satellites at risk.
Analysts say the Biden
administration might keep the Space Force, which has bipartisan support in
Congress. Military experts see its high profile as sending Beijing a clear message.
“You have to have an organizational
constituency,” said James E.
Cartwright, a retired Marine Corps general and vice chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011. “That’s starting to happen. You’ve got a new
emphasis on space — on people who get up every day thinking about how to manage
these threats.”
Gravity’s Pull
The stars of the current space age
include not only famous entrepreneurs but a new generation of unknown dreamers
and doers.
Developing states, small companies
and even high
schools are now lofting spacecraft into orbit. New
Zealand hosts a spaceport. Turkey and Peru have their
own spy satellites. Tiny Luxembourg runs more satellites than Spain, Italy or
Germany. India in 2019 fired an
antisatellite weapon into orbit. Last year, Iran
launched its first military satellite.
The United States leads in
satellite tallies, mainly because of its space-age legacies and its many
entrepreneurs, including those now aiding the military. The Union of Concerned
Scientists, based in Cambridge, Mass., currently lists
1,425 for the United States, 382 for China and 172 for Russia.
But China is pushing hard.
For three years in a row, it has fired more rockets into space
than any other country. It is now a dominating force, analysts say. The rush
includes not only antisatellite weapons but many other military and scientific
projects, as suggested by its recent retrieval
of moon rocks.
In June, Chinese scientists reported
new progress in using quantum physics to build what appeared to be the
world’s first unbreakable information link between an orbiting craft and its
controllers. Laser beams carried the messages. The test raised the prospect
that Beijing might one day possess a super-secure network for global communications.
That same month, China
finished deploying the last of 35 navigation satellites, the
completion of a third-generation network intended to give its military new precision in conducting
terrestrial strikes.
A rugged area of mountains and
deserts in northwestern China hosts a tidy complex of buildings with large roofs that can
open to the sky. Recently, analysts identified the site in the Xinjiang region as one of
five military bases whose lasers can fire beams of concentrated light at
American reconnaissance satellites, blinding or disabling their fragile optic
sensors.
Mr. Biden is inheriting a range of
responses to Beijing’s antisatellite moves, including arms both offensive and
defensive, initiatives both federal and commercial, and orbital acts both
conspicuous and subtle. Analysts call the situation increasingly delicate.
Mr. Work, the third-offset official
from the Obama era, and Mr. Grant, his former Pentagon colleague, warned in a report that Beijing might eventually beat
Washington at its own game.
“The Soviets were never able to
match, much less overcome, America’s technological superiority,” they wrote.
“The same may not be true for China.”
