Rich Welsh| China and Russia have been hitting US satellites with electronic attacks “every single day,” according to US Space Force General David Thompson as reported by the Washington Post.
WaPo columnist Josh Rogin interviewed Thompson at the Halifax International Security Forum where the general said, “The threats are really growing and expanding every single day. And it’s really an evolution of activity that’s been happening for a long time.”
Now you know why former President Donald Trump wanted to create the Space Force, a new branch of the Air Force. He wanted to protect the US in space while no one else was thinking about it.
Thompson said China and Russia are regularly targeting US satellites with “reversible attacks,” which means the attacks won’t permanently damage the satellites. The general said the Chines and Russians typically apply non-kinetic processes like lasers, radiofrequency jammers and cyber attacks to try to disrupt the US satellites. Isn’t that an act of war?
China is building its own of GPS, and a couple hundred intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance satellites. The number of launches is twice that of the United States.
When asked, Thompson declined to answer questions if US satellites were ever targeted with kinetic means that could have done permanent damage.
He added that China is the bigger threat to our satellites because they are rapidly deploying ground-based systems that target space satellites.
“The Chinese are actually well ahead,” Thompson said. “They’re fielding operational systems at an incredible rate.”
Thompson told the WaPo that both countries are working on space-based weapons, like satellites that can target and attack other satellites.
I read recently that China has a satellite that has a robot arm that can grab hold of another satellite and pull it out of orbit. That could be dangerous to our national security. You pull enough satellites out of their orbits and we could go blind as to what our enemies are up to.
Just days before the interview, Russia launched what’s called a direct-ascent anti-satellite missile that destroyed one of their own satellites and scattered the debris throughout the Earth’s orbit. The debris cloud it created in orbit was so large, with over 15,000 pieces of debris, that US astronauts and Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station had to take emergency sheltering measures. Jackass russkies.
January last year, the US Space Command watched a pair of Russian satellites marked as COSMOS 2542 and COSMOS 2543 drift into the orbit of a US spy satellite and “exhibited characteristics of a space weapon.” They came so close that they posed a risk of collision. Space Command said the Russian actions would be considered “irresponsible and potentially threatening in any other domain.”
Also, in 2017, a Russian satellite launched something that resembled a projectile.
The Russians may want to take out our satellites because we are using them to watch large build-ups of Russian military troops along the border next to Ukraine.
China wants to take out our satellites because they are doing things like finding missile silos and weapons test facilities and we even discovered detention camps for China’s minority Uyghur population.
We have such a milquetoast administration, I’m not sure they will even attempt to do anything to stop the Russians and the Chinese from attacking our satellites. They’ll claim it’s not worth it to get into a war when there is no permanent damage to our satellites because they are too stupid to realize that with each reversible attack, they are practicing for how to pull off hard attacks. You wouldn’t let burglars do a dry run on your house, right?
I honestly worry about the lack of experience and brains the Biden administration has when it comes to foreign policy with two enemies. I bet if Iran had satellites, they’d let them mess with us, too.
