China and Russia continue to develop and deploy weapons that can attack US satellites even as they increase their own fleets of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) space vehicles, the US Defense Intelligence Agency said in an updated report on Tuesday.
Although the report is mostly based on news accounts, and declarations from Chinese and Russian officials, it is a useful summary of the threats that the US says are driving major investments in the Pentagon’s proposed fiscal 2023 defense budget, specifically for the US Space Force and Space Command.
“China has multiple ground-based laser weapons of varying power levels to disrupt, degrade or damage satellites that include a current limited capability to employ laser systems against satellite sensors,” the intelligence agency said. “By the mid to late-2020s, China may field higher power systems that extend the threat to the structures of non-optical satellites.”
Photo: AP
China’s own fleet of ISR satellites keeps expanding.
As of January, it included more than 250 systems — “a quantity second only to the United States, and nearly doubling China’s in-orbit systems since 2018,” the report said.
The agency said that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “owns and operates about half of the world’s ISR systems, most of which could support monitoring, tracking and targeting of US and allied forces worldwide, especially throughout the Indo-Pacific region. These satellites also allow the PLA to monitor potential regional flashpoints, including the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, Indian Ocean and South China Sea.”
At the same time, Russia perceives the US dependence on space as Washington’s “Achilles’ heel” so it is “pursuing counterspace systems to neutralize or deny US space-based services,” and “probably will field lasers that are more capable of damaging satellites in the mid-to-late 2020s,” the agency said.
Russia “has several ground-based lasers, for example, that can blind satellite sensors,” including a system delivered in 2018 to its aerospace forces, it said.
By 2030, Russia might also field “higher-power systems that extend the threat to the structures of all satellites, not just electro-optical” sensors, the agency said.
In addition to the anti-satellite weapons threat, “the probability of collisions of massive derelict objects in low Earth orbit is growing and almost certainly will continue through at least 2030,” it said.
The agency cited the rising number of space launches, especially those with multiple payloads, and continuing fragmentation from collisions, battery explosions” and anti-satellite testing.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema