 |
| GPS Satellite (Image: Wiki Commons) |
By Franz-Stefan Gady
Beijing is working on a host of different weapon systems designed to destroy or disable U.S. satellites in space.
A new report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission offers insights into China’s burgeoning space weapons program designed to attack U.S. satellites and undermine American C5ISR capabilities in the event of a conflict.
The Washington Times obtained a copy of the report, which will be published next month. “China is pursuing a broad and robust array of counterspace capabilities, which includes direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles, co-orbital anti-satellite systems, computer network operations, ground-based satellite jammers and directed energy weapons,” the report reads.
The People’s Republic’s counterspace capabilities play a pivotal role in the Chinese military’s overall anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) doctrine to counter U.S. conventional superiority based on network centric warfare. The 2014 iteration of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report quotes [PDF] a Chinese military analyst, who notes that the development long-range precision strike weapons “cannot be separated from space power.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat