“Russia remains a capable space power, even while its space industry suffers from systemic underfunding, quality control issues, international sanctions, and export controls,” US intelligence agencies wrote in their annual unclassified threat assessment released earlier this year.
Russia’s space industry has far less money than the US and Chinese space programs. Russian factories produce fewer satellites, and Russian rockets launch less often than the world’s other two leading space powers. But Russia seems to have a unique theory for the use of anti-satellite, or ASAT, weapons.
Whiting said Russia “has come to the conclusion that they’re a conventional arms deficit” compared to the United States and its NATO allies. Russian forces are seeking to get an asymmetric advantage anywhere they can.
“They’re looking for novel ways to try to balance that correlation of forces, to use a Soviet term,” Whiting said. “So they’re looking at nuclear, cyber, and space, and that’s why, when we read the reports over the last two years that Russia may be considering placing a nuclear ASAT on orbit, we find those just incredibly troubling.”
US forces rely on space-based assets for all major military operations. Satellite capabilities, such as overhead surveillance, navigation, missile warning, and electronic warfare, are now “fully nested in” all military planning. If you take away any of these capabilities, US forces “cannot fight the way they are designed or sized,” Whiting said.
“We’ve noted that the Chinese and the Russians have studied us since Desert Storm (in 1991),” Whiting said. “They deeply have tried to understand how is it that the United States is able to create such global effects with what appears to be such small number of forces, and they’ve assessed that space is one of those foundational issues. So now they have developed a suite of counter-space weapons.”
The United States, China, Russia, and India have each demonstrated the ability to destroy a low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite using a ground-launched missile. Russia’s development of co-orbital ASAT, or counter-space, weapons has long focused on LEO. That may be changing with the launch of a suspected Nivelir or similar mission last year toward geosynchronous orbit more than 20,000 miles above Earth.
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