US military satellites could be disabled or destroyed in the event of a war in space, an American general has said, citing China’s tests of anti-satellite weapons. To protect US space capability, the satellite park should be reformed, he believes.
American satellites are defenseless against a possible attack in space, and their destruction “would create a huge hole” in the country’s capability for high-tech warfare, Gen. William Shelton, the commander of the US Air Force Space Command said Tuesday.
According to Shelton, most critical are the satellites providing the US Army with survivable communications and missile warning.
But each of those $1 billion satellites could be easily blocked or destroyed by anti-satellite systems developed in countries like China.
While electronic jammers could be “a cheap and effective way of blocking our signals from space” and laser attacks could “blind” the satellite imaging or even render it dysfunctional, “direct attack weapons, like the Chinese anti-satellite system, can destroy our space systems,” Shelton stressed.
A dependence on cutting-edge space technologies has become a “double-edged sword” for the US, the Space Command chief said.
The US general was apparently referring to the official reports of China recently conducting a test of a high-earth orbit anti-satellite missile.