China may be just three years away from being able to disrupt US military satellites in a regional conflict, a senior US military leader said on Tuesday, citing a recent anti-satellite test and other advances.
The warning came amid calls at a conference in Huntsville, Alabama for intensified efforts to ensure US "space superiority" in the wake of China's shoot-down January 11 of one of its own satellites with a ballistic missile.
"It is not inconceivable that within about three years we can be challenged at a near peer level in a region," said Lieutenant General Kevin Campbell, head of the US Army's Space and Missile Defense Command.
"That means taking out a number of communications capabilities over a theater of war," he added in a speech to defense contractors.
Campbell later told reporters that while a number of countries have some capabilities to interfere with satellite communications, China is the one he is most worried about.
He said its anti-satellite test in January was a clear demonstration of its ability to destroy an orbiting satellite.
But China also is developing satellite jamming capabilities and has made advances in computer network attack skills that point to a comprehensive approach to denying the US military access to space in a conflict, he said.
"It starts to add up that they'll have multi-dimensional capabilities to attack various systems that are in orbit today," he said.
"A lot of countries have pieces of what I've described, but I would say I'm more concerned about China than any of them," he said.
Taiwan is widely considered the likeliest US-China flashpoint, and some analysts believe Beijing is developing anti-satellite capabilities to "blind" the US military in the first days of a conflict.
Satellites are vital to US military operations, enabling the flow of torrents of communications, imagery, and navigational data for the kind of high-tech precision warfare that has been a US trademark since the 1991 Gulf War.
But US reliance on satellites for myriad civilian as well as military uses also has created vulnerabilities that though long understood had not taken concrete form until the Chinese test.
Campbell said it has spurred the military to think about how to counter the threat, including ways to track and surveil objects in space to know what they are up to.
He said his command has devised a "space alert" system patterned on "air alerts" that would key the military's responses to a threat to a friendly satellite.
The military also is thinking about offensive counter-measures, he said. "I'm not free to talk about specifics, but the bottom line is we're thinking about and taking steps to ensure we have a capability... that shows we have freedom of action in space," he said.
US-Chinese military competition raises the prospect of an arms race in space, something the Soviet Union and the United States generally refrained from in the Cold War.
But US military leaders suggest that, like it or not, they are engaged in a struggle for space superiority.
"If they take over our asymmetric advantage in space, we go from an information age war machine to an industrial war machine," said Lieutenant General Michael Hamel, head of the air force's space command.
"We know that shifting that balance, the edge will go to the adversary," he said at the conference here.
Hamel called the January test "another wake-up call" and drew a comparison to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in the 1950s, which set off a US-Soviet space race.
"Space superiority is not just an interesting phrase, not just an interesting collection of programs, but it becomes an overarching concept for success on the battlefield," he said.
He said the notion of establishing "guaranteed space superiority in all future conflicts as well as in peacetime" needed to permeate everything the US military does.
"One does not have to get caught up in arguments over whether or not to weaponize space, or whether this becomes an arms race," he said. "It is simply irresponsible for us not to plan for, and to think about and to assure that we can have freedom of action."
US Military Sees Looming China Threat To Satellites
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