Mike Brest writes for the Washington Examiner about the extension of Earth-based geopolitical conflict to outer space.
The U.S. is still the preeminent space power, but its adversaries are quickly closing the gap, according to military officials and national security experts alike.
Gen. Michael Guetlein, vice chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force, issued a warning earlier this month when he told the Reagan National Defense Forum, “Today that capability gap is in our favor, but if it goes negative on us, it’s going to be a really bad day.”
“The adversary is quickly shrinking that gap, and we have got to change the way we approach space pretty rapidly,” Guetlein explained, adding that the U.S. is now seeing “a new steady state set of behaviors that we haven’t seen in the past, the adversaries has become very emboldened to mess with our space capabilities.”
He said there was a “gentleman’s agreement” of sorts between space powers in the past that no longer exists.
China and Russia are two of the U.S.’s primary space competitors, and their pursuit of anti-satellite capabilities has been well-documented in recent years. Some anti-satellite weapons are space-based, but not all of them are.
“China and Russia already possess the full suite of counter-space capabilities, everything from missiles that can shoot down our satellites and create tons of space debris to non-kinetic forms of attack like GPS jamming, satellite communications jamming, and even things like lasers that can blind the sensors on satellites,” Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner.
GPS jamming is when an adversary tries to electronically block the system from gathering data or information, whereas GPS spoofing is when an adversary tries to essentially fool the system to redirect the coordinates to another location.
