China and Russia are preparing to attack and disrupt critical U.S.
military and intelligence satellites in a future conflict with crippling
space missile, maneuvering satellite, and laser attacks, senior
Pentagon and intelligence officials told Congress on Tuesday.
Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of the Air Force Space Command,
said the threat to U.S. space systems has reached a new tipping point,
and after years of post-Cold War stagnation foreign states are focused
on curbing U.S. space systems.
“Adversaries are developing kinetic, directed-energy, and cyber tools
to deny, degrade, and destroy our space capabilities,” Hyten said in a
prepared statement for a hearing of the House Armed Service strategic
forces subcommittee.
“They understand our reliance on space, and they understand the
competitive advantage we derive from space. The need for vigilance has
never been greater,” the four-star general said.
Hyten said U.S. Global Positioning System satellites remain
vulnerable to attack or jamming. The satellites’ extremely accurate
time-keeping feature is even more critical to U.S. guided weapons than
their ability to provide navigation guidance, he said.
Disrupting the satellites time capabilities would degrade the
military’s ability to conduct precision strike operations used in most
weapons systems today.
Hyten said a new joint military-intelligence command center is
helping to monitor space threats, such as anti-satellite missile
launches, covert killer robot satellites, and ground-fired lasers that
can blind or disrupt satellites. The unit is called the Joint
Interagency Combined Space Operations Center, located at Schriever Air
Force Base, Colorado.
The Space Command also is creating 39 cyber mission teams that will
be used for defensive and offensive cyber operations involving space
systems.
Lt. Gen. David Buck, commander of Joint Functional Component for
Space, a U.S. Strategic Command unit, testified along with Hyten that
China and Russia pose the most serious threats to space systems.
“Simply stated, there isn’t a single aspect of our space
architecture, to include the ground architecture, that isn’t at risk,”
Buck said.
“Russia views U.S. dependency on space as an exploitable
vulnerability and they are taking deliberate actions to strengthen their
counter-space capabilities,” he said.
China in December created its first dedicated space warfare and cyber
warfare unit, called the Strategic Support Forces, for
concentrating their “space, electronic, and network warfare
capabilities,” Buck said.
“China is developing, and has demonstrated, a wide range of
counter-space technologies to include direct-ascent, kinetic-kill
vehicles, co-orbital technologies that can disable or destroy a
satellite, terrestrially-based communications jammers, and lasers that
can blind or disable satellites,” Buck said.
“Moreover, they continue to modernize their space programs to support
near-real-time tracking of objects, command and control of deployed
forces, and long-range precision strikes capabilities,” the three-star
general said.
Douglas Loverro, deputy assistant defense secretary for space policy,
also warned about growing threats to satellites and outlined U.S. plans
to deter future attacks.
Loverro said the United States does not want a war in space. “But let me be clear about our intent—we will be ready,” he said.
None of the five Pentagon and intelligence officials who took part in
the budget hearing for military space efforts mentioned any U.S. plans
or programs to develop anti-satellite missiles and other space weapons
for use against Chinese or Russian space systems. The subcommittee,
however, held a closed-door session after the public hearing.
A modified U.S. missile defense interceptor, the SM-3, was used in
2008 to shoot down a falling U.S. satellites in a demonstration of the
country’s undeclared anti-satellite warfare capability.
Loverro suggested U.S. defense and deterrence of space attacks could
involve counter attacks, possibly on the ground or in cyber space. But
he provided no specifics.
“Today our adversaries perceive that space is a weak-link in our
deterrence calculus,” Loverro said. “Our strategy is to strengthen that
link, to assure it never breaks, and to disabuse our adversaries of the
idea that our space capabilities make tempting targets.”
Many of the most important navigation, communications, and
intelligence satellites were designed during the Cold War for use in
nuclear war and thus incorporate hardening against electronic attacks,
Loverro said.
For conventional military conflict, however, adversaries today view
attacks on U.S. satellites as a way to blunt a conventional military
response what Loverro called the “chink in the conventional armor of the
United States.”
“In this topsy-turvy state, attacks on space forces may even become
the opening gambit of an anti-access/area-denial strategy in a regional
conflict wherein an adversary seeks to forestall or preclude a U.S.
military response,” he said. “Chinese military strategists began writing
about the targeting of space assets as a ‘tempting and most
irresistible choice’ in the late 1990s, and the People’s Liberation Army
has been pursuing the necessary capabilities ever since,” he said.
Rather than threatening foreign states’ satellites, Loverro said
deterrence against foreign nations’ space attacks is based on defending
against missile strikes or other attacks and making sure satellite
operations will not be disrupted in war.
That would be carried out through partnering with the growing
commercial space sector that is expected to deploy hundreds of new
satellites in the coming years that could be used as back up systems for
the Pentagon in a conflict.
Deterrence also will be based on increasing foreign partnerships with
allied nations in gathering intelligence on space threats and other
cooperation.
A space defense “offset” strategy will seek to reduce the advantage
of using relatively low cost of missiles, small satellites, or cyber
forces to attack U.S. satellites, Loverro said.
“An advanced U.S. satellite might cost upwards of $1 billion;
missiles that could destroy such a satellite cost a few percent of that
sum; co-orbital microsatellites cost even less; and lasers that might
blind or damage satellites have an unlimited magazine with almost zero
cost per shot,” Loverro said.
Deploying large numbers of low-cost satellites will not offset those advantages, he said.
Instead, Loverro offered vague plans for countering the threat. “A
space offset strategy must employ a diverse set of resilience measures
that complicate the technical, political, and force structure calculus
of our adversaries, by arraying a complex set of responses, with few
overlapping vulnerabilities and a combination of known and ambiguous
elements,” he said.
Frank Calvelli, deputy director of the National Reconnaissance
Office, the spy agency that builds and operates strategic intelligence
and reconnaissance satellites, said a resurgent Russia and aggressive
China are among several current national security threats.
Calvelli revealed that the agency in October launched a new satellite that carried 13 smaller “CubeSats.”
“The NRO sponsored nine of the CubeSats while the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration sponsored the remaining four,”
Calvelli said.
Among the missions of the CubeSats are software-defined radios “to
provide beyond-line-of-sight communication for disadvantaged users in
remote locations, and technology pathfinders to demonstrate tracking
technologies, optical communications, and laser communication,” he said.
Four advanced intelligence-gathering satellites will be launched this
year to support military operations and intelligence analysis and
decision-making.
Calvelli also said space threats are prompting the Reconnaissance
Office to develop “better and faster” systems in space and on the
ground, along with better overall “resiliency”—a term used by the
military to signify an ability to operate during high-intensity warfare.
The agency is investing substantial sums in bolstering defenses for
space and ground systems to make them more survivable during space war.
“We are more focused on survivability and resiliency from an
enterprise perspective than we have ever been and we have made
significant investments to that end,” he said.
The agency also is “improving the persistence of our space-based
systems, providing greater ‘time on target’ to observe and characterize
activities, and the potential relationship between activities, and to
hold even small, mobile targets at risk,” Calvelli said.
It also is upgrading its ground stations, which are used to control
and communicate with orbiting satellites, including an artificial
intelligence system called “Sentient.”
“Sentient—a ‘thinking’ system that allows automated,
multi-intelligence tipping and cueing at machine speeds—is just one of
those capabilities,” Calvelli said.
New ground stations also are being deployed that will empower “users
of all types with the capabilities to receive, process, and generate
tailored, timely, highly-assured, and actionable intelligence,” he said.
The comments were a rare public discussion of the activities of one of the most secret U.S. intelligence agencies.
Dyke D. Weatherington, director of unmanned warfare and intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance at the Pentagon, said eight national
security satellites were launched in 2015, including tactical and
strategic communications, and navigation, position, and timing
satellites.
Weatherington said the United States maintains a strategy advantage
in space system but warned that is changing. “The rapid evolution and
expansion of threats to our space capabilities in every orbit regime has
highlighted the converse: an asymmetric disadvantage due to the
inherent susceptibilities and increasing vulnerabilities of these
systems,” he said.
While space threats are increasing, “our abilities have lagged to
protect our own use of space and operate through the effects of
adversary threats,” Weatherington said.
The Pentagon currently has 19 military-capable GPS satellites on
orbit and a new generation of GPS satellites is being developed that
will be produce signals three times stronger than current system to be
able to overcome electronic jamming, he said.
The officials at the hearing also discussed plans to transition from
the sole reliance on the use of Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines to
launch national security satellites.
A new U.S. made engine, however, will not be fully developed until 2022 or 2023.