Report: China Making Rapid Progress on Anti-Satellite Systems
China has developed a number of weapons designed to jam and destroy enemy satellites in the event of a war while publicly opposing weapons in space, according to a new Pentagon report.
“In addition to the development of directed energy weapons and satellite jammers, China is also developing direct-ascent and co-orbital kinetic kill capabilities and has probably made progress on the anti-satellite missile system it tested in July 2014,” the report stated. “China is employing more sophisticated satellite operations and is probably testing dual-use technologies in space that could be applied to counterspace missions.
The claims come in a document from the Secretary of Defense titled, “Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2018.”
The report said that People’s Liberation Army (PLA) strategists regard space-based systems — and the ability to deny them to others — as central to modern warfare. They are continuing to develop counter space weapons despite a public stance against the militarization of space.
“Although China has not publicly acknowledged the existence of any new programs since it confirmed it used an anti-satellite missile to destroy a weather satellite in 2007, Chinese defense academics often publish on counterspace threat technologies,” the document added. “These scholars stress the necessity of ‘destroying, damaging, and interfering with the enemy’s reconnaissance . . . and communications satellites,’ suggesting that such systems, as well as navigation and early warning satellites, could be among the targets of attacks designed to ‘blind and deafen the enemy.’”
Below are excerpts from the report relating to China’s space capabilities.
Annual Report to Congress:
Military and Security Developments
Involving the People’s Republic of China 2018
Office of the Secretary of Defense
Space and Counterspace Capabilities. China’s space program continues to mature rapidly. The PLA, which has historically managed the effort, continues to invest in improving its capabilities in space-based ISR, satellite communication, satellite navigation,and meteorology, as well as human spaceflight and robotic space exploration. China has built an expansive ground support infrastructure to support its growing on-orbit fleet and related functions including spacecraft and SLV manufacture, launch, command and control, and data downlink. Additionally, China is developing multiple counterspace capabilities to degrade and deny adversary use of space-based assets during a crisis or conflict.
In 2017, China launched 18 SLVs, of which 16 were successful, orbiting some 31 spacecraft, including communications, navigation, ISR, and test/engineering satellites. Other activities included:
Space Launch Failures. In 2017, China suffered two SLV failures within two weeks, creating significant delays in China’s national space program, according to key government officials. A Long March (LM)-3B partially failed due to faulty guidance, navigation, and control. A LM-5 launch then catastrophically failed due to a manufacturing defect. The LM-5 is to become China’s new heavy-lift SLV, launching up to 25,000 kg into low Earth orbit and will play an important role in the assembly of the Chinese Space Station starting around 2018.
Commercial Launch. In January 2017, China’s Expace Technology Co, Ltd. successfully launched its first Kuaizhou-1 (KZ-1A) commercial SLV delivering three small satellites to sun synchronous orbit. Expace, a commercial launch company subsidized by the China Aerospace and Science Industry Corporation (CASIC), is the provider of the KZ-1A and is developing a larger version, the KZ-11. The KZ-1A is a light-lift quick response SLV owned and operated by Expace for commercial use, but it is often misidentified as the KZ-1, CASIC’s military version of SLV, as it shares many aspects of its design and concepts of operations.
Space Station. China launched its first resupply spacecraft, Tianzhou-1 (TZ-1), to dock with and transfer fuel to Tiangong-2, testing technologies necessary for long-term maintenance and operation of a future Chinese space station. China also used the TZ-1 to simulate rapid docking, similar to that of the Russian Soyuz docking with the International Space Station. China is expected to bring on orbit assembly of its own space station in 2019.
The PLA is acquiring a range of technologies to improve China’s counterspace capabilities. In addition to the development of directed energy weapons and satellite jammers, China is also developing direct-ascent and co-orbital kinetic kill capabilities and has probably made progress on the anti-satellite missile system it tested in July 2014. China is employing more sophisticated satellite operations and is probably testing dual-use technologies in space that could be applied to counterspace missions.
Although China has not publicly acknowledged the existence of any new programs since it confirmed it used an anti-satellite missile to destroy a weather satellite in 2007, Chinese defense academics often publish on counterspace threat technologies. These scholars stress the necessity of “destroying, damaging, and interfering with the enemy’s reconnaissance . . . and communications satellites,” suggesting that such systems, as well as navigation and early warning satellites, could be among the targets of attacks designed to “blind and deafen the enemy.”
Space and Counterspace. PLA strategists regard the ability to use space-based systems – and to deny them to adversaries – as central to modern warfare. The PLA continues to strengthen its military space capabilities despite its public stance against the militarization of space. Space operations are viewed as a key enabler of PLA campaigns aimed at countering third-party intervention, although PLA doctrine has not elevated them to the level of a separate “campaign.”
China seeks to enhance C2 in joint operations and establish a real-time surveillance, reconnaissance, and warning system and is increasing the number and capabilities of its space systems, including various communications and intelligence satellites and the Beidou navigation satellite system. China also continues to develop counterspace capabilities, including kinetic-kill missiles, ground-based lasers, and orbiting space robots, as well as to expand space surveillance capabilities that can monitor objects across the globe and in space and enable counterspace actions.
In 2016, China adopted the 13th Five Year Program (2016-2020) which, among other things, sets focus areas for research, development, and innovation. Several of these have defense implications, including aerospace engines (such as turbofan technology) and gas turbines; quantum communications and computing; innovative electronics and software; automation and robotics; special materials and applications; nanotechnology; neuroscience, neural research, and artificial intelligence; and deep space exploration and on-orbit servicing and maintenance systems. Other areas where China is concentrating significant R&D resources include nuclear fusion, hypersonic technology, and the deployment and “hardening” of an expanding constellation of multi-purpose satellites. China’s drive to expand military-civilian fusion and international economic activity supports these goals.
China’s space, armaments, and aviation industries are rapidly advancing; however, quality deficiencies persist in some export armament equipment, and the aircraft industry remains reliant on foreign-sourced aircraft engine components.
Missile and Space Industry. The majority of China’s missile programs, including its ballistic and cruise missile systems, are comparable to other international top-tier producers. China’s production of a wide range of ballistic, cruise, air-to-air, and SAMs for the PLA and for export has probably been enhanced by upgrades to primary assembly and solid rocket motor production facilities. Though China has become one of the world’s most advanced producers of SAM systems, China has purchased Russia’s S-400 air defense system and may receive it in 2018.
China’s space industry is rapidly expanding its ISR, navigation, and communication satellite constellations while making considerable progress in space lift, human spaceflight, and lunar exploration programs. China hopes to expand its space launch vehicle industry to support commercial launches and make rapid satellite launch services available to foreign customers. China will probably launch, assemble in-orbit, and operate a crewed Chinese space station before 2025.
Quantum Satellites. Priorities include unconditional security of network data across long distances, ultimately creating a global quantum network of classical (i.e., non-quantum) data secured by quantum cryptographic keys.
25 responses to “Report: China Making Rapid Progress on Anti-Satellite Systems”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
It seems, from the article and the report, that the gloves are coming off in our own reports, but not at all completely. China’s President-for-Life, Xi, intends to be around to see China become an equal with countries who tolerate more industrial freedoms of action than China does. Xi expects to not only be around for Trump’s retirement, but the retirement of his successor’s successor.
While the hierarchy Xi sits atop allows many market freedoms of action, their tolerance for intellectual, spiritual, political and physical freedoms of action is quite limited. Worse, Xi’s Belt & Road Initiative may yet undermine the current degree of market freedom of action, by diverting more resources from market allocation. China has no resource cushion of oil, as Venezuela had, to support a turn away from markets for very long, and eventually even the country with the largest oil resources in the world could not sustain high levels of political resource allocation.
The obvious question is that if China will not allow the freedoms of action needed for industrial levels of productivity to be sustained, then what will China turn toward to become a regional and world power? The old answer of military coercion, whether aimed at resources elsewhere or not, is one possible answer. In spaceflight’s contribution to military activity here on Earth, China has focused on US MilSpace “force multipliers” as a key target, according to this report.
Those MilSpace “force multipliers” are to be the target of the PLA’s new “Strategic Support Force”, alongside the Cyberwar assaults on the US internet that are now a continual occurrence. While I doubt anyone has decided on war, any frustration in China with not being as productive as the US will bend minds to coarser solutions to immediate problems, …and at the end of that path is war. Thus, preparing for it is what the existence of the US DoD is for. Thus, we come to structuring that, and asking if we should follow the Chinese model, of the “Strategic Support Force” or the Russian model of “the Space Troops of the Russian Aerospace Force”.
The stated fears of bureaucratic costs of a new hierarchy are mostly fears of current hierarchies losing control of budgets. I see no reason we cannot sustain the cost of a US Space Force. That would place us somewhere beyond the Chinese model, which still has their “Strategic Support Force” tied into the politics of the PLA, with their initialization being the PLASSF.
People do ask for purpose in talking about a “Space Force”, as if it were not obvious at the start as a simple reaction to attempts to neutralize US MilSpace “force multipliers”. I find it odd that anyone thinks it will not evolve as time goes on, while starting with preservation of the advantages we currently have in MilSpace. The evolution will take place in the usual dance of movement and counter move in military technology.
The first counter to any capability to degrade US assets in Space should be to multiply those assets so that we will not have a “crash” of our “force multiplier” abilities, but a “graceful decay”. The second is to be able to replenish those assets even if someone starts grinding away at the large numbers of assets we have established. Thirdly, as threats to replenishment from ‘earth’s surface are deployed in LEO, we should have established a second pipeline of assembled space assets from the top of the Earth/Moon gravity well. Eventually, that will also be pushed farther from Earth, and Space Force personnel will have to follow into Space, to keep light speed latency from disrupting command and control of both assets and assembly of new assets.
Each of these steps in evolution will strictly limit immediate degradation of our “force multiplier” assets, and should even allow enhancement far beyond current “force multipliers”. It means that instead of making our “force multipliers” disappear in hours, it will very possibly require months at minimum. In war on Earth’s surface, especially with the advantages of our MilSpace “force multipliers” on the US side, months will be a very long time in warfare.
Thus, we can convince opponents that it is better to pursue nonmilitary options. Maybe by letting those guys not in government have the freedom to experiment on a high productivity possibility, …yes?
War is unlikely, they only have one carrier (they bought from Russia) and they have the money to compensate for what they lack for a while.
Slight correction, they have 2 carriers now, with a larger 3rd one currently under build
actually, they have 2 under construction now. Type 002 which is almost finished, and have laid the backbone for type 003 which is a nuclear powered version that rivals America’s .
Supposedly, they have some other interesting ones, but I suspect that they will stay with these for a bit.
Personally, I think that America is making horrible mistakes in not building more nuclear powered destroyers, ice breakers, and ideally, cargo crafts for the great lakes.
I think with the destroyers the first 3 of the new ones i can’t spell have to go through shake down and prove their worth (at least in wargames) before they commit to more, as for cargo and icebreakers, we can feasibly do a modernized equivalent of the Liberty class if need be.
I believe that you are talking about the Zumwalts, but I believe that CONgress killed making more. Too expensive.
$4B IS a bit much. Hopefully, Bathworks can re-do those and make them much cheaper to build AND run.
Aren’t they supposed to be railgun equipped? Hopefully whatever replaces them is also railgun equipped,
My point was more to do with their naval assets are too strategically critical to risk unnecessarily, while it would hurt badly, the US can lose a Nimitz and in a matter of months replace it with a refitted CVN-65 Enterprise while redirecting one of its sister ships or a Ford to restore air supremacy in that area, and that isn’t even factoring in the assault carriers. And that is just one group of strategic assets.
Don’t forget that Japan also has a force of aircraft carriers (i.e. Helicopter Destroyers) that it is able to deploy in against China as well. Four of the ‘Helicopter Destroyers” are capable of handling the F-35B, as well as Harriers.
https://nationalinterest.or…
Refitting CVN-65 won’t happen, according to what I’ve been told by people who should know. There are many (non-nuclear) issues with it.
If we had to, i think you’d find those issues would not be significant enough to overcome the lure of a super carrier that can be pressed into service. We pressed the Iowas back into service after WWII TWICE, before their final decommissioning,
As always, you know more than the actual experts…
No, but it comes down to one simple question, which is better no replacement carrier or a sub par carrier in a few months? Obviously it depends on how far they would be along in breaking it but the fact is, it takes a while to build a CVN from scratch, if you have a mostly in tact one and you need a carrier, it will be faster to get CVN-65 operational than to build a new one, many ships used by the USN in the Pacific Theater were sunk at Pearl Harbor, this would be dealing with cleaner damage. You wouldn’t expect it to be a great preformer, but it will work.
Retired USN carriers are gutted and cannot be refitted while waiting for their trip to Brownsville TX for scrapping. Beside the fact where you are going to get aircraft, munitions, equipment and personnel to replaced losses.
The Iowas were rebuild for their last commissions. A waste of money that could have been better spend on more frigates and destroyers. The USN needs more units afloat not fewer bigger units. Also the Iowas were totally unimpressive in air defence, about the equivalent of a modern frigate with only point air defence capability. Every time they deployed requires escorts stripped from carrier groups.
Besides which the Chinese are going to find out how costly it is to operate a blue water carrier. Aircraft & aircrew will be lost steady in deployments and have to be replaced. Unless you don’t expect them to operate in bad weather and at night. Munitions, jet fuel, supplies and personnel have to be continuously replenished underway at sea.
Plus the amusing fact that big navel combatants like carriers have to be refitted (rebuilding actually) about every half decade or so. Also that you could only deploy about a third of your naval assets. Since some will be training for deployment, some in transit to & from their operating area and some will be doing maintenance & repairs at a dock.
more importantly, they are looking at how to recycle the enterprise.
I thought it would be as easy as taking it up the panama and then into the great lakes.
Was I ever wrong.
At this point,I am hoping that a steel company will consider building somewhere along the coast and simply recycle ships and planes. We have enough of each to make it worthy. In fact, ideally, we would add vehicles.
Yes they are but any ship in the breaker yard depending on progress of the demolition, is a prime candidate to be pressed into service in a major conflict and Big E hasn’t been there for long.
And a few companies make their business on military scrap
this is right wing propaganda
somewhat.
But this was also seen under O’s admin .
Also, the fact that a point of information, which this report is, has been brought up by someone who is not progressive, is *not* enough to turn it into propaganda that is obviously wrong. Indeed, much of it was calculated to be oncoming by the Rumsfeld Report in 2001.
Allow me some Dr. Strangelove musings:
Say that China develops the technology for Planetary Defense, i.e. they can alter the trajectory of asteroids. On the plus side, they can now save the Earth from catastrophic meteor impacts. On the minus side, they can now direct meteors to fall on their enemies and obliterate them. China would become impervious to a first strike nuclear attack since they can always retaliate in an utterly devastating manner.
The people of Earth would really have to trust China to allow them to be the only country capable of Planetary Defense. Since that is never going to happen, other countries would have to A) prevent China from performing Planetary Defense through military means or B) develop a similar capacity for Planetary Defense so that peace will be guaranteed through Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
Okay, re-read the previous paragraphs but substitute America for China. Basically stated, a move towards Planetary Defense on the part of any country will touch off a new Space Race. However, the modern Space Race would be different from that of the 1960’s in that the new one doesn’t have a finish line in the form of a 1st lunar landing. It would have to be a long term, open ended commitment requiring a consistent allocation of government resources and an organizational structure to use those resources in pursuit of its’ defining mission. Maybe this organization will be called the Space Force.
actually, one of the bigger issues is that USSR, and hopefully, Russia, KNEW that a nuke war was unwinnable.
BUT, China believes that it IS winnable.
That is why they have over 3000 miles of underground tunnels that not only hold launchers/nukes, but serves as bomb shelters and has food/water for millions.
anti-sat is a first strike item and has NOTHING to do with planetary defense.
Which is why you need to have a Space Force to monitor their activities in space and to intervene if they try to redirect an asteroid towards Earth.
Agreed. But it’s one thing to want a Space Force and another to come up with a reasonably coherent public justification for one.
The present needs and operations of Space Command are quite a coherent justification for a Space Force, when having Space Command under the Air Staff has resulted in shorting their budget for 15 years. In spite of the PLASSF testing of ASAT weapons since 2007, there is still no “responsive launch” system to replenish large numbers of US MilSpace assets if they are disabled, in *any* fashion. Much less is there a more proliferated capability of assets, instead of the old “Battlestar” asset buying inherited from NRO’s preferences during the Cold War.
Space Force order of business:
1) Take over space related organization, assets and personnel of other services.
2) Take over NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
3) Create a quad chart of the NEOs on the JPL Sentry System list. Organize by threat and feasibility of retrieval.
4) Buy, lease or rent a BFR from SpaceX.
5) Use BFR to retrieve the winning space rock or, at least, plant a flag and a science package on it.
6) Return all or part of the threatening NEO to the oval office for a photo op with the president.
If Trump takes this route he won’t be repeating the 1960s moon landing or waiting until NASA can get to Mars. Best of all, for him, there is a slim chance that it could all be done while he is still in office.