Hindustan Times ·
Science and technology
US says it has weapons in orbit: What 'space control' covers, from jamming to seizing satellites
The US Air Force secretary confirmed America has weapons in orbit but would not say what they are. Here is what such weapons can do and who else has them
Troy Meink, the US secretary of the Air Force, said on Monday that the US has weapons in orbit. As civilian head of the Department of the Air Force, Meink oversees both the Air Force and the Space Force, a military branch President Donald Trump created in 2019 during his first term.
Meink said the US has “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action”. Joint Force is the Pentagon's term for the US services operating together.
Reuters said it was the strongest admission yet by a Pentagon official of US weapons in space, and AP reported it as the first such confirmation. Meink did not say what the weapons were, how they work or whether they target objects in space or on Earth.
He told reporters afterwards that the wording was deliberate and that discussing specifics would weaken the deterrent. A Space Force spokesperson told ABC News the weapons can be used for offensive and defensive purposes at the direction of combatant commands, the joint headquarters that run US military operations in a region or domain.
A day later, Richard Palmer, director of the Capability and Resource Integration directorate at US Space Command, made the case for going public. He acknowledged that the weapons were fundamental to keeping deterrence from failing, and to being ready to use them if it did but also declined to discuss their nature or capability.
Space has “moved from a supporting role to a centrepiece in how nations compete and fight”, said Kari Bingen, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think-tank. She was speaking at a May 22 discussion that CSIS co-hosted with the Secure World Foundation (SWF), a US non-profit that publishes an annual open-source assessment of counterspace weapons.
Such programmes are typically centred around satellites, which carry the communications, navigation and intelligence that armed forces rely on, as the wars in Ukraine and West Asia have shown.
For decades, once in orbit, they held fixed paths. Militaries now increasingly treat them as weapons platforms that can jam another satellite, dazzle it with a laser or even capture it. General Stephen Whiting, who commands US Space Command, has warned that adversaries would likely go after US space assets early in a conflict, and has called for orbital interceptors and other weapons.