The intelligence community reports that the Chinese Communist Party is aiming to weaponize space in an attempt to displace the United States in space, Defense News Weekly reports.
In its new global risk assessment, the U.S. intelligence community warns that the Chinese Communist Party is working to weaponize space with a range of capabilities designed to target U.S. and allied satellites as part of an ambitious plan to displace the United States in space.
According to a report by the Director of National Intelligence, the Chinese Communist military plans to “meet or exceed U.S. capabilities in space in order to reap the military, economic and prestige benefits Washington has accrued from its space leadership. These space countermeasures would be “an integral part of the PLA’s potential military operations.
The broad-based report also highlighted Russia’s space capabilities and generally called the Chinese Communist Party the “number one threat” to U.S. technological competitiveness.
Asked about China’s nascent 138 commercial Earth observation satellites at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines confirmed that the satellites are part of the Chinese Communist Party’s challenge to U.S. dominance. She declined to publicly discuss U.S. capabilities.
“I think there’s no question that, in fact, the Chinese Communist Party is focused on achieving leadership in space compared to the United States and has been working on a variety of different efforts in that area to try to compete for our leadership,” Haines said.
The intelligence community expects the Communist Party to establish an operational space station in near-Earth orbit between 2022 and 2024, and to continue its lunar exploration missions with the aim of establishing a robotic research station there, followed by an “intermittent manned” base.
The report highlights the increased development and proliferation of space countermeasures. In 2019, the Communist Party’s space-centric Strategic Support Force reportedly began training helicopter-based anti-satellite missiles capable of targeting satellites in near-Earth orbit.
Beijing has deployed ground-based anti-satellite missiles designed to destroy satellites in near-Earth orbit, as well as ground-based anti-satellite lasers, “possibly to blind or damage sensitive space-based optical sensors on satellites in near-Earth orbit,” according to the report.
According to the report, Communist China and Russia are continuing to train their military space content, and both are deploying new destructive and non-destructive anti-satellite weapons. Russian weapons include “jamming and cyberspace capabilities, directed energy weapons, in-orbit capabilities and ground-based ASAT capabilities – against U.S. and allied satellites.
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