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Published by The Lawfare Institute
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Editor’s Note: In any major war, the United States would depend heavily on its space systems. Many analysts have argued that these systems are highly vulnerable, but RAND’s Zachary Burdette contends that the U.S. space architecture is more resilient than commonly believed, and this resilience may even be growing.
Daniel Byman
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In the early 2000s, U.S. defense analysts sounded the alarm about a potential “Space Pearl Harbor.” They warned that the U.S. military was becoming increasingly dependent on a small number of vulnerable satellites that would become tempting targets during a crisis or conflict. Those fears grew exponentially after China’s landmark demonstration in 2007 of a direct-ascent anti-satellite (DA-ASAT) missile that destroyed a Chinese weather satellite. Some analysts have argued in the years since that satellites are becoming a liability rather than an asset, potentially even “the American military’s Achilles heel.” Policymakers have warned that a Space Pearl Harbor risks leaving U.S. forces “deaf, dumb, blind, and impotent.”
These fears have significant implications. If the United States depends heavily on satellites that it cannot defend effectively, that raises fundamental questions about its grand strategy and ability to defend allies and partners in the Pacific. If China believes that counterspace attacks could paralyze the U.S. military, that could fuel crisis instability by incentivizing China to strike first.
Fortunately, the magnitude of the challenge remains more manageable than pessimists fear. While China’s counterspace capabilities pose a serious challenge, worst-case scenarios of quick and easy counterspace campaigns that leave the U.S. military incapacitated are unrealistic. Encouraging trends in the resilience of U.S. space architectures and terrestrial backups to space capabilities are mitigating the extent of the threat, though not eliminating it. Additionally, the Space Pearl Harbor framing overlooks that, rather than just playing defense, the United States also needs sustained investments to counter the dramatic growth of China’s own space capabilities that could enable long-range strikes and put U.S. forces at increasing risk.
Historical Pessimism About Resilience Against Counterspace Attacks
There are three main reasons that policymakers and analysts have expressed alarm about the U.S. ability to defend against Chinese counterspace attacks. First, the conventional wisdom is that the attacker has significant structural advantages over the defender in space. Analysts point to factors such as the predictability of orbits and the difficulty of hiding satellites as reasons that space is “an inherently vulnerable and offense-dominant domain.” Additionally, because DA-ASATs have historically been much cheaper than satellites, some observers believe that “defense is impractical in the long term” unless the defender makes unsustainably high investments.
Second, the U.S. military has historically relied on exquisite constellations with small numbers of very capable but very expensive satellites. U.S. officials have referred to these exquisite satellites as “big, fat, juicy targets” and cautioned that they are as survivable as a “glass house.” The concern is therefore that the United States has a weak defensive starting point in a domain that already favors the offense.
Third, China has invested in a wide range of counterspace capabilities to target U.S. satellites. These include a DA-ASAT missile that can destroy satellites in low Earth orbit, lasers that can dazzle or blind imaging satellites, jammers that can disrupt communications and GPS signals, co-orbital satellites that could move or otherwise interfere with U.S. satellites, and offensive cyber capabilities. If China has a strong offensive starting point in a domain that already rewards the attacker, that further compounds the problem.
The Case for Qualified Optimism About Increasing Resilience
While the three concerns outlined above have real merit, pessimists sometimes exaggerate the scale of the challenge. Additionally, trends in technological innovation and greater investments in defensive countermeasures are eroding some of the attacker’s historical advantages. Defending small constellations of exquisite satellites will likely remain difficult, but the shift toward “proliferated” constellations with hundreds or even thousands of smaller and cheaper satellites will make it more practical and affordable to build resilient space architectures than in the past.
First, the conventional wisdom overstates the extent of the attacker’s structural advantages. Claims about offense dominance focus on the tactical-level survivability of individual satellites rather than the operational-level resilience of satellite constellations. This distinction is important because individual satellites are often just nodes in larger networks, and the importance of any one node depends on the network’s characteristics and performance requirements. Moving from a tactical to operational perspective reveals a new set of challenges for the attacker, including variation in the attacker’s capability to target satellites in different orbits, its capacity to attack large numbers of satellites with finite inventories of counterspace weapons, and the tempo required for it to generate large effects within an operationally relevant timeframe.
Knocking out a single satellite is much easier than orchestrating an effective operational-level campaign. For example, it would be relatively easy for China to destroy any one Starlink communications satellite, but significantly degrading the constellation of more than 7,600 satellites would likely require a protracted counterspace campaign with at least hundreds of strikes over several months. To be effective, such a campaign would also need to target multiple other U.S. commercial and military constellations that operate across different orbits because there are multiple constellations that provide space-based communications to U.S. forces, and degrading one constellation does not necessarily block the use of others.
Even at the tactical level, the attacker’s advantages are declining. During the Cold War, satellites could weigh as much as 13,600 kilograms while DA-ASAT interceptors might weigh as little as a dozen kilograms (with greater weight corresponding to higher costs). Technological advances in satellite miniaturization and lower launch costs have dramatically reduced this cost asymmetry. For example, the commercial “Dove” imaging satellite is only 5 kilograms but still provides 3- to 5-meter resolution imagery, which is likely sufficient to detect and identify warships. Instead of costing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars like their Cold War predecessors, this new generation of small satellites can cost in the range of several million dollars—sometimes even less. Cost estimates of the ballistic missiles China reportedly modified for its DA-ASAT system are at least $5-11 million per missile, which puts DA-ASATs on increasingly unfavorable cost terms against some, though not all, satellites. As the cost effectiveness of DA-ASATs declines, attackers will need to rely more on alternatives such as jammers and lasers. Defenders have better countermeasures against these kinds of counterspace capabilities than against DA-ASATs, moving the competition onto more favorable terrain for the defense.
Second, the United States is investing in more resilient satellite architectures. Through proliferation, it is pursuing safety in numbers. In contrast to exquisite constellations that range in size from handfuls to dozens of large satellites, proliferated constellations can have hundreds or thousands of small satellites. For example, the U.S. government reports that it has fielded more than 200 new reconnaissance satellites in just the past two years. This unprecedented growth can help constellations degrade gracefully as they lose nodes and create capacity challenges for an attacker’s finite inventory of weapons. While defending any one satellite in a proliferated constellation may be difficult, these constellations provide resilience through redundancy, allowing them to withstand greater attrition and continue supporting U.S. forces with the satellites that remain operational.
Through diversification, the United States can create dilemmas for attackers by putting its eggs in multiple baskets. Diversification measures include leveraging alternative satellite providers, especially the U.S. private sector and U.S. allies, and operating satellites in multiple orbits. Integrating commercial space providers can strengthen resiliency by adding capacity and access to commercial proliferated constellations like Starlink. The explosive growth of the U.S. commercial space sector over the past decade, in both the quantity of satellites and their quality, has been a key trend that is bolstering U.S. resilience. The Russia-Ukraine war has demonstrated the value of commercial space systems for supporting military operations. Integrating U.S. allies’ space systems can further bolster capacity and confront the attacker with uncomfortable decisions about escalating the conflict by attacking third-party satellites. Another important diversification method is to spread space capabilities across multiple orbits. This can make it more difficult for attackers to match the right weapons with the right targets and slow down the tempo of a counterspace campaign.
Third, China’s counterspace capabilities are impressive, but they still have practical limitations. Some of these limitations are surmountable. For example, experts assess that China’s DA-ASAT capability cannot yet reach satellites above low Earth orbit, which would force China to rely on different capabilities against key targets such as GPS and military communications satellites. But China is likely developing a new DA-ASAT system that will eventually hold satellites at risk all the way up to geosynchronous orbit. Other limitations, though, will be more enduring. For example, China could try to build more missiles to keep pace with the exponential increase of satellites in orbit, but this would likely be cost-ineffective. Attacking hundreds or thousands of satellites would also be a relatively slow process, and it would create huge amounts of debris that would threaten China’s own satellites. China could still build jammers and dazzlers at scale to degrade proliferated constellations, but these reversible capabilities are much less concerning than classic visions of a destructive Space Pearl Harbor.
The Limits of Optimism
While trends for U.S. resilience in space are encouraging, the United States still has work to do. Supply chain problems have caused delays in the U.S. military’s efforts to field its own proliferated constellations. This increases short-term reliance on commercial providers and involves risks of ensuring access in a conflict and having the right equipment to integrate commercial capabilities effectively. Additionally, because the government provides GPS for free, commercial backups to GPS are lacking. Since GPS is particularly important to support U.S. operations, and the commercial backups are weaker than for other mission areas like communications, the United States should place a greater priority on more resilient positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT, which GPS provides) than its current plans suggest.
To be clear, proliferated constellations of small satellites are also not a panacea for the defender. Making satellites smaller and cheaper will, all else equal, reduce their capabilities, and attackers can still degrade proliferated constellations through jamming, dazzling, and cyberattacks. The United States will need to find the right balance of exquisite and small satellites in its force structure, similar to experimentation with “affordable mass” in the air and naval domains.
Finally, China is making dramatic leaps in fielding its own satellite capabilities and will also benefit from the same trends toward greater resilience. The number of Chinese satellites has increased by more than 550 percent since 2015. China reportedly has access to more than 500 reconnaissance satellites that could support long-range kill chains, and it is developing multiple proliferated constellations. This will force the United States to revisit questions it has not faced since the Cold War, when both sides developed capabilities and concepts to counter each other’s satellites.
Going forward, these trends suggest that achieving a Space Pearl Harbor will be out of reach for both China and the United States. The implausibility of a decisive knockout blow is good news for crisis stability. But it also suggests that the United States will need to invest much more heavily not only in making its own space architectures more resilient but also in capabilities and concepts to offset China’s increasingly potent and resilient space systems.
