The US is preparing offensive weapons to blind China’s military satellites in any future conflict, even as the two sides lack reliable channels to manage risks in an increasingly crowded orbit, defence analysts said on Tuesday.
Kari Bingen, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and a former US deputy under secretary of defence for intelligence, said that Washington was openly debating how to “hold at risk” the satellites that underpin Chinese targeting of American forces in any Indo-Pacific conflict.
“We’re now having to think ... how do we, the United States, hold those assets at risk, so that they can’t use space to target us on the ground,” Bingen told the CSIS event. “That is really starting to spur this much more public conversation on offence, or our ability to deny the other side the use of space.”
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) now operates more than 500 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites, Bingen said, and has been “practising out in the Gobi Desert, targeting our ports, our ships, our airfields” by pairing space sensors with battle networks to close “kill chains” against US forces.
Bingen also warned that Washington and Beijing lacked the basic safety dialogue that still exists between Washington and Moscow.
If a US satellite was on a collision course with a Chinese one, “we send an email. We don’t know if it gets answered. The onus is on our side to take that evasive manoeuvre”, she said.
“We still do that with the Russians, as tough as it is, we have those lines. We need to figure out what that looks like with China,” she added. “That’s what professional operators do.”
Heather Williams, who directs the CSIS Project on Nuclear Issues, said the broader freeze in US-China military dialogue had bled into the orbital domain.
“China [is] blocking any sort of dialogue or engagement,” she said.
The comments by US analysts have underscored Washington’s concerns that space is becoming a new frontier for strategic competition and potential conflict.
That is reflected in Washington’s hardening posture as it increasingly targets China’s commercial space sector.
Earlier this month, the US Treasury sanctioned MizarVision, a Hangzhou open-source intelligence start-up that had analysed US troop deployments during the recent Operation Epic Fury strikes on Iran.
The increasingly confrontational stance by both sides on space warfare also comes as US President Donald Trump pushes the “Golden Dome” missile shield, including space-based interceptors that he wants operational before his term ends in January 2029.
Beijing has warned that the project risks “turning outer space into a battlefield”.
China itself is making rapid progress in military space technology, with advancements in areas including satellite communications, space resupply and anti-satellite weapons.
While Beijing says its ambitious plans remain peaceful and that it rejects the weaponisation of space, some of the technologies it has developed in recent years also have military uses.
The PLA folded its military space units into a Strategic Support Force in a 2016 overhaul, three years before the US Space Force was created.
And in 2024, Beijing elevated them into a separate Aerospace Force reporting directly to the Central Military Commission, the top military body. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
