General Bradley Chance Saltzman warned that space has “fundamentally transformed” in recent years into an “exponential arms race,” citing China as the “biggest threat” to fight, ahead of Russia.
“We see a whole range of weapons being produced by our strategic opponents,” the general, quoted by AFP news agency, said on the sidelines of a conference on security in Munich, Germany, where the heads of US and Chinese diplomacy met.
According to the chief of space operations of the US Air Force, the biggest threat is China, but also Russia.
“Space, as a contested domain, has fundamentally changed. The way we operate in space has to evolve, mainly because of the range of weapons that China and Russia have tried to use and sometimes used,” the general noted, referring to the weapons directed energy, anti-satellite missiles and other orbital intercepts.
According to him, this fact is not surprising given the space military activities of the great powers.
However, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken informed China’s head of diplomacy Wang Yi that the Chinese balloon, which flew over US soil for several days before being shot down, was an “irresponsible act that must never happen again”.
At the same conference, Wang denounced and criticized Washington’s “excessive use of force”.
The arms race in space is not new. As far back as 1985, the Pentagon used a missile to destroy a satellite during a test. Since then, his rivals have shown they have the same capabilities. China did it in 2007, India in 2019.
In late 2021, Russia sprayed one of its own satellites with a rocket launched from Earth. A display of force that was described at the time by NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg as an “irresponsible act”.
In reality, potentially bomb-armed satellites and laser spacecraft are no longer just science fiction.
“Our adversaries are using space to hit us and increase the range of their weapons,” General Saltzman warned.
Countries are increasingly secretive about their military activities in space, but the race is such that in 2019, the year the Pentagon launched its Space Force, a senior US official estimated that Russia and China had the potential to overtake the US.
General Saltzman refutes the idea that Washington is now backward. However, the space battle evolved from the system of destroying satellites with missiles to other ways of damaging them with powerful laser weapons.
Source: DN
