A United States military official recently said that the Communist regime in China has tripled its number of on-orbit satellites that could be used for intelligence or military purposes in recent years.
Space Force Gen. Stephen Whiting, while addressing a July 17 talk at the Aspen Institute think tank, said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) oversaw the launching of several hundred satellites for intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance (ISTAR) purposes.
“In the last six years, they have tripled the number of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance satellites they have on orbit,” Gen. Whiting said.
“Hundreds and hundreds of satellites purpose-built and designed to find, fix, track, target, and yes, potentially engage the United States and allied forces across the Indo-Pacific [area of responsibility],” he added.
Gen. Whiting’s comments closely follow a spate of China-linked cyber campaigns that have targeted Western governments and defense entities with malware and appear in line with a wider CCP ambition to dominate critical technology fields, including space technology, according to a report by The Epoch Times.
The CCP, in a 2022 white paper published by the regime’s State Council Information Office, stated its ambition to become the world’s “space power” leader.
Following that publication, the CCP regime became the world’s foremost nation in annual satellite launches and has overseen the development of new modular rocket systems and the ongoing construction of a joint moon base with Russia, as reported by The Epoch Times.
More importantly, the Communist regime white paper said that China would be “proactive” in developing the nation’s domestic space industry to copy foreign technologies, a process colloquially referred to as technology transfer, as per reports.
“[The regime will] seize the opportunities presented by the expanding digital industry and the digital transformation of traditional industries, to promote the application and transfer of space technology,” the paper said.
“A number of major space and science projects are in place to promote the leapfrog development of space science and technology, which spearheads overall technical advances,” it added.
According to the Epoch Times, Gen. Whiting said that the Space Force had taken actions to make US satellite constellations “more resilient” in the face of such threats by including new defense capabilities on satellites and using larger satellite constellations to ensure that an attack on one would not necessarily disrupt the activities of the whole system.
“We’re seeing a whole host of our constellations now heading in a direction of being more disaggregated, more distributed, having built-in defense capabilities against these threats,” he was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, the Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, Gen. Jeff Kruse, who also spoke at July 17’s event, said that the Chinese Communist regime had sought to use its new space assets to erode US dominance in the international order.
“China aims to displace the United States as the global leader in space and to exploit space in a way that is to our detriment,” Gen. Kruse said, adding that CCP strategic leadership was targeting a perceived “over-reliance on space” by the United States, which depends on space-based infrastructure for everything from financial transactions to mobile map applications.
Therefore, the CCP regime is investing in the development of weapons designed to destroy or degrade US on-orbit systems, Gen. Kruse was quoted as saying by the Epoch Times.
According to the official, China’s Communist leadership believes the threat of these weapons will allow the regime to compel US behaviour to align with the Asian major’s strategic goals.
“Both Russia and China view the use of space early on, even ahead of conflict, as important capabilities to deter or compel behavior,” Gen. Kruse added. “Where we see that is just a tremendous increase in directed energy weapons, in electronic warfare, in anti-satellite capabilities.”
Reversible attacks, in which US satellite architecture or cyber systems are compromised temporarily, are largely understood to be a testing of the waters, and that strategy also aligns with the CCP regime’s wider technology-centric operations, including cyber campaigns, as reported by The Epoch Times.
The US-based media outlet reported, quoting American intelligence leaders, that those efforts were part of a strategy to preposition assets in critical infrastructure so that the regime can launch attacks on the US homeland in the event of a military conflict.
According to a report by ‘The Sun’, the Commander of the US Space Delta-2 Force said that China is increasing its military power through a new space race, while chief of the Space Force Intelligence Squadron claimed that the Communist country has prepared itself to the capability of detecting US and allied military or naval vessels in the Indo-Pacific.
Months ago, some media reports claimed that China was building a massive “Star Wars army” in space by tripling the number of its spy satellites in space in the last six years.
According to the US Space Force, China has an estimated 350 surveillance satellites, a 300 percent rise since 2018, as the nation’s President Xi Jinping wants to keep the Indo-Pacific region free from Western influence.
According to a report by the South China Morning Post, the People Liberation Army (PLA) of China has boosted military aerospace funding to reach a modernisation target set for 2027 – the year of its centenary – paving the way for China to become a “world-class” military power by 2049.
In its largest structural reform in almost a decade, China earlier this year disbanded the PLA’s Strategic Support Force (SSF) which had been established in 2015 to take charge of the PLA’s cyber, space, electronic and psychological warfare capabilities, reports South China Morning Post.
The Air and Space Forces Magazine reported that the PLA now consists of four services—the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Rocket Force—and four arms—the Aerospace, Cyberspace, Information Support, and the Joint Logistic Support Forces.
The Air and Space Forces Magazine — the monthly journal of the Air and Space Forces Association — reported, citing the Chinese state-run media, that PLA’s Aerospace Force in particular is “of great significance to strengthening the capacity to safely enter, exit and openly use space, enhancing crisis management and the efficacy of comprehensive governance in space and promoting peaceful utilization of space.”
The Newsweek reported, quoting US Space Force’s top official, that the Communist regime in China is fast challenging the United States’ monopoly in space as new remote-sensing satellites have allowed Beijing to monitor American military assets globally.
Leave a Reply