COLIN CLARK and THERESA HITCHENS
WASHINGTON: When Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall used his Sept. 20 keynote speech at the annual Air Force Association conference to claim that China is developing the ability to launch “global strikes from space” against US targets, it raised more than a few eyebrows and sent military analysts scrambling.
After all, the decision to bring up the potential for a space-based strike against terrestrial targets couldn’t have been casual. In a speech focused on Chinese threats, this line stood out: new PRC capabilities, Kendall said, include “precision weapons with steadily increasingly range … including the potential for global strikes, strikes from space.”
That’s a major claim, and one Kendall had to know would make waves at the conference. Some analysts believed Kendall, an unapologetic China hawk, was hyping the Chinese threat. Others felt that he was just trying to send a broad message about the speed with which the People’s Liberation Army is developing and fielding weapons.
But it appears Kendall was basing his statement on highly classified information. After the speech, one source with knowledge of the issue said “I’m surprised he got clearance to mention it, frankly.” The mention was designed to be a signal to the Chinese, the source believes.
Unsurprisingly, reporters used a roundtable after his speech to hit Kendall with questions about his statement. The secretary started with a broad direction to look at history.
“There is a potential for weapons to be launched into space, then go through this old concept from the Cold War called the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System,” or FOBS, Kendall told reporters, “which is a system that basically goes into orbit and then de-orbits to a target.”
FOBS, deployed by the Soviet Union from 1969 to 1983 and attempted by the Chinese in the early 1970s, combined a low-flying missile and nuclear warhead that reached Low Earth Orbit, but did not remain in orbit for a full turn about the Earth.
“If you use that kind of approach, you don’t have to use a traditional ICBM trajectory,” Kendall said. “It’s a way to avoid defense systems and missile warning systems.” Kendall also made a vague reference to other offensive capabilities, saying there is “a potential to actually put weapons in space.”
Kendall said “there’s no question about the technical feasibility or technology to do these types of things,” noting that China already has a satellite with a robotic arm in orbit that DoD says is aimed at rendering US satellites non-functional. (Canada has long operated such an arm on ISS; and such grappling technology also has potential commercial uses for satellite servicing.)
Finally, Kendall said he had no specific knowledge that the Chinese are pursuing a space to Earth weapon, but said “it could be possible” and suggested this idea would be attractive to the Chinese because FOBS systems are hard to detect by early-warning satellites.
That would seem to walk back what he said on stage, but based on what the source with knowledge of the issue said, Kendall may well have been trying to obfuscate the exact nature of the intelligence.
Skepticism And Possibility
Outside analysts contacted by Breaking Defense were largely skeptical — and in some cases, simply incredulous — about Kendall’s statements.
“I’ve seen no evidence to indicate this,” said Brian Weeden, head of program planning at Secure World Foundation (SWF), said in an email.
“Maybe they got their hands on some internal Chinese discussion where the PLA is mulling some idea, a concept, right? Maybe there’s some R&D experiment that sort of leads in this direction,” said Weeden. “Those I think are possibilities, more so than, you know, they actually have money dedicated to an operational capability.”
Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), was even more skeptical.
“It sounds like he may have misspoken or may have confused this with something else China is doing, like hypersonic glide missiles,” he said. “I have not seen any public reporting about China developing a kinetic space to Earth weapon. By all indications, China appears to be continuing its focus on developing the full suite of Earth to space weapons, both kinetic and non-kinetic.” (CSIS puts out an annual report detailing publicly available information on counterspace threats, Space Threat Assessment, that includes China’s tech efforts.)
Weeden’s colleague, Victoria Samson, who directs SWF’s DC office, noted that the foundation’s annual review of counterspace technology development, Global Counterspace Capabilities, found no indications that Beijing was exploring space to Earth weapons, whether nuclear, conventional or directed energy. Of course, given the information is apparently highly classified, an open source publication wouldn’t necessarily have any details.
“If he’s speculating that China is going to violate the main arms control provision of the OST (Outer Space Treaty),” Weeden added, “he needs to show some actual evidence.”
The 1967 Outer Space treaty, of which China is a member, clearly bans the placement of weapons of mass destruction on orbit or on any celestial body. That said, there is a decades-long debate about whether FOBS-like systems can be considered as “orbiting.”
The US has long argued that FOBS can be compared with intercontinental ballistic missiles, which traverse space but do not go into orbit. The DoD Law of Warfare Manuel, last updated in 2016, states:
The prohibition on placing weapons of mass destruction “in orbit around the earth” refers only to their placement in full orbit around the Earth; thus, the Outer Space Treaty does not ban the use of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction that go into a fractional orbit or engage in suborbital flight.158 For example, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) will travel a portion of their trajectory in outer space; but because ICBMs would enter outer space only temporarily, their entry into outer space with nuclear warheads would not violate this prohibition.
Weeden, however, says that this interpretation is just plain wrong and is contradictory to how the US treats satellites.
“The manual is correct that Article IV does not prohibit ICBMs, but wrong on the reason why. It’s because ICBMs never achieve orbital velocity to begin with (meaning they never achieve orbit), not that they only travel a portion of an orbit,” he explained.
“If an object had to travel a full orbit in order to be considered ‘in orbit’ then you’d have to wait many hours for every GEO launch to be ‘in orbit’ and some deep space launches would have to wait for weeks (if not longer). Yet the DoD and NASA consider it in orbit much sooner because it’s based off velocity,” he added. (GEO stands for Geosynchronous Orbit, some 36,000 kilometers above the Earth.)
On the other hand, Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Project at Monterrey Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), was ready to entertain the idea that China is pursuing such systems.
“I don’t think we should dismiss the possibility of countries developing orbital bombardment systems, including China and North Korea,” he said in a Sept. 21 Twitter thread. “The Soviets had an operational FOBS capability for 12 years. At it’s peak, the Soviets deployed 18 R-36O missiles.”
China, too, was interested in the mid-1960s in developing a similar capability, Lewis explains, using the DF-6 missile.
Both programs were aimed at overcoming the 1960s-era US Safeguard anti-ballistic missile ABM system. Indeed, both Moscow and Beijing have been expressing alarm over the past several decades that US missile defense systems are strategically destabilizing because such weapons decrease the value of their own arsenals to deter a first strike by Washington.
“Moscow and Beijing were very interested in FOBS and other exotic weapons systems when the US was heavily investing in ABMs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Guess why they are interested in those systems again? It’s a total mystery,” Lewis tweeted sarcastically.
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