The United States has publicly acknowledged deploying offensive-capable weapons in Earth’s orbit, citing growing threats from Russia and China, for the first time.
The United States has weapons deployed in space, the US Space Force said, confirming the presence of such capabilities in orbit for the first time. US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said the ‘on-orbit’ weapon was necessary to protect American forces from hostile adversaries, in a pointed warning to China and Russia.
Meink made the remarks at the annual Air, Space, and Cyber Conference at National Harbor in Maryland but did not provide specifics on the weapons and, when asked to expand, refused to provide additional details, according to CNN.
“The US has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action,” a US Space Force spokesperson said in a statement that did not provide specifics on the weapons.
“Space control encapsulates the mission areas required to contest and control the space domain — employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities,” the statement said, adding that “these capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes.”
Both Russia and China, the two main geopolitical rivals of the United States, are seen by Washington as posing potential threats to its interests in space.
According to the US Space Force, China “develops and operates space and counterspace capabilities as part of a military modernization strategy,” while Russia “views space as a warfighting domain and believes space supremacy will be a decisive factor in future conflicts.”
Such a weapon could have broad, devastating impacts, for example, upending satellites the world relies on to predict the weather and respond to disasters, or even potentially affecting global navigation systems used for everything from banking and cargo shipping to hailing a ride share and ambulance dispatch.
The militarisation of space is as old as the space race itself , as soon as Sputnik was launched into orbit in 1957, Washington and Moscow began exploring ways to both arm and destroy satellites.
The biggest worry was once about nuclear weapons in space, but the superpowers and other countries signed the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, banning weapons of mass destruction in orbit.
Since then, the US, Russia, China and other countries, including India, have explored military capabilities in space that fall outside the treaty’s restrictions. These include systems designed to target or disable satellites, which play a crucial role in military communications, surveillance and navigation.