The United States has confirmed that it has deployed weapons in orbit, an unusually explicit public acknowledgement that experts warn could accelerate a high-risk arms race in space involving Washington, Russia and China.
US Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said on Monday that the United States had active “on-orbit” weapons, meaning systems that had been deployed and were operating in space.
“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist,” Meink said at the annual Air, Space, Cyber conference. “This is why the United States now has, on-orbit, space-control weapons.”
Meink declined to provide the “specifics” of the systems. A US Space Force spokesperson said, however, that space control could involve “employing kinetic [combat] and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities”.
The spokesperson added that “these capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes”.
China’s Foreign Ministry responded by accusing Washington of “preparing for war in outer space” and warning against turning space “into a battlefield, as well as an arms race there”.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia believed “that space must be free of any weapon” and called for “the complete demilitarisation of space”.
The United States, Russia and China have long been known to be developing technologies that could be used in space warfare. Such systems could include signal jammers designed to disable satellites, as well as more “kinetic” weapons capable of physically damaging or destroying orbital systems.
However, experts said the significance of Meink’s statement lay in its public confirmation that such capabilities are already deployed in orbit.
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who has spent decades cataloguing rocket launches, told the Guardian that it was reasonable to assume the United States had such weapons in space, probably jammers, given that Washington had already launched several satellites carrying secret payloads.
He said Russia and China were likely to respond to the announcement by developing or deploying comparable systems.
“In the long run, I find it questionable whether this is in the US national interest, and for sure we will see comparable systems from China, if they don’t already have them,” McDowell said.
He added that even the use of radio jamming would represent a significant escalation in military activity in space. McDowell worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics until retiring this year.
Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at the Secure World Foundation, told Defence One that Washington would now have to accept that China and Russia could take similar steps.
“Well, that’s huge, because I don’t think any US government official has ever said that before,” she said.
The militarisation of space dates to the 1950s, when the United States and Soviet Union explored ways to destroy satellites. Over subsequent decades, countries also sought to preserve space around Earth for peaceful purposes.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, signed by the superpowers and other countries, prohibits placing weapons of mass destruction in orbit. It does not, however, impose a blanket ban on conventional weapons being deployed in Earth orbit.
The end of the Cold War in 1989 ushered in a period of greater cooperation, including the construction and operation of the International Space Station by multiple countries. But during the 21st century, space has increasingly been viewed as a potential theatre of military conflict.
Russia drew international condemnation in 2021 after destroying one of its defunct satellites in orbit during a test of a ground-based anti-satellite missile. The strike generated thousands of pieces of orbital debris.
Because satellites travel around Earth at thousands of miles per hour, experts fear that an armed confrontation in orbit could trigger a domino effect, generating vast amounts of high-speed debris and making parts of near-Earth space increasingly hazardous for other spacecraft.
McDowell said the United States was also undergoing a broader shift in its approach to the military use of space.
“The US sees conflict in space as something that is conceptually normalised, whereas 20 years ago it was ‘no, we will never want to do that’,” he said.
“I think this is wrong,” he added. “I also think it is still not too late to change course on this. To work mainly with China, because they are the real competitors in space now. I hope the US establishment takes a step back and rethinks some of this.”
By Tamilla Hasanova
