Jonas Vidhammer Berge & Henrik Stålhane Hiim
Introduction
In November 2021, General David Thompson of the US Space Force revealed that the United States is dealing with ‘reversible attacks’ against its satellites from China and Russia ‘every single day’.Footnote1 Such reversible or soft-kill attacks are part of what Thompson referred to ‘a whole host of ways’ states can now employ to threaten space systems. In addition to kinetic, hard-kill weapons such as ground-launched missiles, states can target satellites with a range of soft-kill capabilities such as lasers, electronic warfare (EW), or cyber weapons. Unlike kinetic weapons, soft-kill capabilities often leave no trace: They do not create space debris and provide states with plausible deniability.
Beyond the United States, the country making the largest advances in its pursuit of advanced counterspace capabilities is China.Footnote2 Recently, several key US documents have described China as a threat to the US command of space. For example, the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment from 2022 asserted that China ‘has counterspace weapons capabilities intended to target US and allied satellites’,Footnote3 whereas the US Department of Defense (DOD) claimed China had ‘weaponized space and turned it into a warfighting domain’.Footnote4 Moreover, analysts have long feared that China’s threshold for employing such weapons first in a crisis may be low, portraying it as a potential culprit in a ‘Space Pearl Harbor’ attack.Footnote5 In other words, these analysts fear that first-strike stability in the space domain – that is, a situation where none of the actors perceives the other as motivated to launch first in a crisis – is low.Footnote6
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