The American military, specifically the country’s Air Force Secretary Troy Meink, has confirmed that it has space-based weapons in orbit around the planet. Exactly what form those weapons take, the country has yet to say. It’s not likely to, either.
Meink, speaking at the Air, Space & Cyber Conference at the beginning of this week, explained that the US continues “to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats, wherever they exist. This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”
Space for military action
The secretary added that “talking about the details of what we’re doing would actually not benefit deterrence, so we’re not going to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing, whether we’ve tested it, not tested it, or anything else.”
In other words, the US military intends to keep the country’s enemies and opponents guessing. That’s a sensible take, if you’re in charge of things that go ‘boom’. Orbital weapons are tricky to install and harder to move in time if they’re spotted.
Odds are, whatever the Space Force has cooked up, it’s more effective than Russia’s R-23M Kartech space-based cannon. The Soviet ballistic cannon was test-fired in the mid-1970s. It… didn’t go very well. China is suspected to have modern satellite-destruction capability, while Russia is said to be working on an orbital nuclear weapon delivery system. Even India is testing ground-based solutions for destroying hostile satellites.
Orbital warfare is a risk to all sorts of space-based operations. Destroying a single satellite leaves wide debris fields that pose risks to anything else orbiting in the area. There’s no effective cleanup program for these impacts, either. Still, the US military seems to think the risks are now worth it.
“With everything we’re talking about doing, from long-range fires to control of our forces, our maintaining and being able to count on those space capabilities is important. It is critically important that we maintain our dominance, not only in the air but in space. So we’ve had to take steps to make sure that when we’re threatened, we can take care of that,” said Meink.
