Top Pentagon leaders recently stressed the importance of navigating and succeeding in the growing security domain in space.
Russia and China, which the Department of Defense considers its most powerful adversary, are evolving their military strategies and capabilities to include space, and they are attempting to degrade the United States’s advantages in space.
“They’re both deploying capabilities that can target GPS and other vital space-based systems, and we’ve seen both countries conduct operations against us and our allies and partners to degrade our space advantages,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said last week. “More than ever before, space is integral to military operations. And our competitors know it. They realize how much the American way of life and the American ways of war depend on space power. And they want to undermine our advantage here.”
During her speech at the change-of-command ceremony at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado on Jan. 10, in which the leadership of U.S. Space Command changed from Gen. James Dickinson to Gen. Stephen Whiting, Hicks stated the U.S.’s intent to deter both countries, or any other possible adversary, from turning “space into a warfighting domain.”
China doubled its annual space launches and more than tripled how many payloads it put into orbit from 2019 to 2023, while the U.S. more than quadrupled its space launches per year and U.S. payloads launched increased by nearly 13 times, she added.
Hicks noted, as many defense officials have, that conflict with China is not inevitable despite their continued military expansion and modernization.
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“China has developed a wartime space architecture, and they have been developing it at a rapid pace. They continue to launch multiple satellites with the express purpose of countering the United States of America’s Joint Force,” Dr. John F. Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, said on Wednesday. “The scale and scope of the counterspace is a thing that we just are always tracking.”
The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Christopher Grady, said during the ceremony that he views space “as our most essential warfighting domain — integral to our national security, our coalition interoperability, and our global stability.”
