US general warns China, Russia big threats in space

MUNICH: Space has “fundamentally changed” in a just a few years due to a growing arms race, a US general said, singling out China as the “most challenging threat”, followed by Russia.

“We are seeing a whole mix of weapons being produced by our strategic competitors,” General Bradley Chance Saltzman, the US Chief of Space Operations, told a select group of media, including AFP.

“The most challenging threat is China but also Russia,” he said, speaking late Saturday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, listing technologies including anti-satellite missiles, ground-based directed energy and orbit interception capacities.

“We have to account for the fact that space as a contested domain has fundamentally changed. The character of how we operate in space has to shift, and that’s mostly because of the weapons (China) and Russia have tested and in some cases operationalised,” he said.

His words carry even more weight given surging US-China tensions -- highlighted by tense exchanges in Munich Saturday between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Beijing’s top diplomat Wang Yi over a suspected Chinese spy balloon.

Blinken warned Wang that China must not repeat such an “irresponsible act” of sending a balloon over US airspace, while Wang said the Washington’s reaction — it shot the craft down — had damaged their countries’ relations. The space arms race is nothing new. As early as 1985, the Pentagon used a missile to destroy a satellite in a test.

Since then, the United States’s rivals have been seeking to show they can compete -- China did the same in 2007, and India in 2019. In February 2020, an American general noted that there were two Russian satellites placed into orbit that were tracking a US spy satellite. And in late 2021, Russia destroyed one of its own satellites with a missile fired from Earth, in a show of force condemned as an irresponsible act by NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg. “Adversaries are leveraging space... targeting and extending the range of their weapons,” said General Saltzman.