As the capabilities and importance of precision guided long range weapons have continued to grow, and are set to continue to increase quickly as hypersonic weapons are more widely adopted in the 2020s, the ability to neutralise satellites which are vital to locating adversaries and guiding such weapons has become all the more important. Beyond targeting, satellites are also critical for more conventional forms of surveillance as well as communications and a number of other key roles, meaning any country stripped of its own will face a serious and potentially decisive disadvantage. With the United States Military deploying more satellites than any of its rivals, after having overtaken the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Cold War, it has perceived growing Chinese and Russian anti satellite capabilities as a particularly serious threat to its ability to wage war. This was stressed in March 2018 in the paper ‘2018 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community,’ which stated: “China has sustained a broad effort to develop a broad range of counter-space capabilities… China has at least one, and possibly as many as three, programs underway” for destroying military satellites. Russia was also reported to have developed advanced anti satellite capabilities, including ground based lasers able to “dazzle the sensors of optical imagery satellites.” 

The report further stated: “foreign countries – particularly China and Russia – will continue to expand their space based reconnaissance, communications and navigation system in term of the numbers of satellites, the breadth of their capability and the applications for their use… Russia and China aim to have non-destructive and destructive counter space weapons available for use during a potential future conflict.” The growing importance of controlling space and threat to U.S. interests posed by adversaries’ missile and space forces notably led Washington to approve the creation of a Space Corps separate from the U.S. Air Force. Closely coinciding with the release of the 2018 threat assessment, President Donald Trump stated on March 13th: “You know, I was saying it the other day because we’re doing a tremendous amount of work in space. I said, ‘Maybe we need a new force, we’ll call it the Space Force. And I was not really serious, and then I said what a great idea, maybe we’ll have to do that. That could happen. That could be the big breaking story.”

Alongside improving the survivability of American and allied military satellites, the U.S. is expected to focus on improving its own anti satellite capabilities and on using space based weapons for missile defence. This is particularly critical considering the growing deployments of strategic hypersonic weapons such as the Russian Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle and of ballistic missiles which are increasingly difficult for ground based interceptors have any significant chance of hitting such as China’s Dongfeng 41. The possibility of deploying weapons in space for strikes on ground targets, exploiting possible loopholes in the Outer Space Treaty, has also been raised by multiple experts. 

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