Military Experts Highlight Space Opportunities, Threats at Aspen Conference

Attendees of the Aspen Security Forum yesterday discussed a subject that influences all other topics the experts at the Colorado conference will talk about: space.

Space Force Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, and Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, spoke of the all-encompassing need for the United States to maintain space capabilities and the threats to U.S. space assets during their discussions with Bloomberg's Loren Grush.

Kruse said space is an arena of enormous change, especially when combined with the development of artificial intelligence. "I would say the technology that we see in space, the change in how space is being used, and the impact that space can have on [the] ground is really in a new place," he said. "We all need to address it."

The DIA director sees two big trends: the growth of partnerships and the increasing counter-space capabilities.

He cited the growing number of partnerships in the space community, both formal and informal. This can be government with government, government with industry, and even informal relationships between nations. "There's tremendous goodness in that. The only way we're going to be able to be as effective as we need to be in space is through those partnerships."

These are important because space is ubiquitous, he said. Space impacts economies, diplomatic capabilities, military capabilities and more. "This domain becomes more and more important every day," Kruse said.

Challengers see this, too, he said. "From a military perspective, what we see … is the increasing amount in intent to use counter-space capabilities to threaten space as we see it today."

The intelligence director gave the Aspen attendees a CliffsNotes version of threats emanating from China and Russia. China "absolutely intends to be a broad-based, fully capable space power, both economically and militarily," he said. "And we see that in the amount of research and development that they are doing, we see that in the increase of launch capabilities, we see that in what they are doing."

China aims to displace the United States as the global leader in space and to exploit space in a way that is to the detriment of the United States, he said. "[China] counts on what they perceive as a U.S. over reliance on space, and it intends to hold that capability at risk," Kruse said.

He cited Chinese efforts to develop directed-energy weapons, electronic warfare, and anti-satellite capabilities. China is testing some of these technologies. "We need to really think about how do we defend space," he said.

Russia - once the original space superpower - is concentrating on reinvigorating its space capabilities, Kruse said. Russia's lack of conventional superiority is on display in Ukraine, the general said, and that causes the Kremlin to look at space capabilities as an asymmetric capability.

Russia "very much considers space a warfighting domain," Kruse said. "What I would offer is both Russia and China view the use of space early on - even ahead of conflict - as important capabilities to deter or to compel behaviors, and we just need to be ready for those," he said.

Whiting, as the combatant commander responsible for space defense, is also concerned about anti-satellite capabilities. "We have seen [China's] development of counter-space weapons just rapidly, breathtakingly increase," he said.

The U.S. military responded to the threats establishing U.S. Space Command and the Space Force. "Now, it is about having professionals laser-focused on this problem: How do we defend against these threats?" Whiting said.

There is no one answer, he said. The United States is making current satellite constellations more resilient, Spacecom is making low-Earth satellites more difficult to target. "We're seeing a whole host of our constellations now heading in a direction of being more disaggregated, more distributed, having built-in defensive capabilities against these threats," he said. "But resilience is not going to get us there solely by itself."

Whiting said that's because the United States depends on legacy systems built before the new threats emerged. "We've got to defend those constellations because they are going to be with us for a much longer period, even as we replace them," the general said.

On the purely military side, Space Command must work to protect the joint force against the space-enabled militaries of China and Russia, he said. "China is building a kill web … in space [that is] tailor-built to find, fix and track targets and help provide … engagement vectors for over-the-horizon fires against U.S. and allied forces throughout the Indo-Pacific area of responsibility," Whitling said.

The command also must build a test and training infrastructure for new capabilities. "We're planning for a war we hope to deter, a war we hope never happens," he said. But unlike in the air, the maritime and the ground domains where we have hundreds of years of history and we have very robust training infrastructures, we don't have that in space at the level that we need."

Whiting also addressed Russian threats to put nuclear weapons in space. "The Soviet Union was the original signer of the Outer Space Treaty, which was signed the year I was born, in 1967," he said. "My entire life, it has been an expectation for mankind that we will not put a nuclear weapon or weapons of mass destruction in space. And now, they are potentially doing that. And if that were to happen, it is a completely indiscriminate weapon. It would affect United States satellites, Chinese satellites, Russian satellites, European satellites, Indian satellites, Japanese satellites. It's really holding at risk the entire modern way of life.

"It is just an incredibly reckless decision," he continued. "It is not the action of a responsible space actor. And we hope that Russia returns to its roots as a responsible space actor ... ."