Mastalir said China is “copying the American playbook” in the way it integrates satellites into more conventional military operations on land, in the air and at sea. “Their specific goals are to be able to track and target U.S. high-value assets at the time and place of their choosing,” Mastalir said.
The Chinese strategy, known as Anti-Access/Area Denial, or A2AD, aims to prevent U.S. forces from gaining access to international waters located hundreds or thousands of miles from mainland China. Some of the islands occupied by China over the past fifteen years are closer to the Philippines, another treaty ally, than to China itself.
The A2AD strategy “extended first to the first island chain (bordered by the Philippines), and now the second island chain (extending to the U.S. territory of Guam), and eventually all the way to the west coast of California,” Mastalir said .
U.S. officials say China has stationed anti-ship, anti-air and anti-ballistic weapons in the region, and many of these systems rely on satellite tracking and targeting. Mastalir said his priority at the Hawaii-headquartered Indo-Pacific Command is to defend U.S. and allied satellites, or “blue assets,” and challenge “red assets” to break the Chinese military's “long-range killing chains” to break through and protect the joint force. of an attack in space.”
What this means is that the Space Force wants the ability to disable or destroy the satellites that China would use to provide communications, command, tracking, navigation or surveillance support during an attack on the US or its allies.
Buildings and structures are seen on October 25, 2022, on an artificial island built by China on Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. China has gradually asserted its claim to ownership of disputed islands in the region.
Credit: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
Mastalir said he believes China's space capabilities are “sufficient” to achieve the country's military ambitions, whatever they are. “The sophistication of their sensors certainly continues to increase: the interconnectivity, the interoperability. They are challenging for a reason,” he said.
“We see that all signs point to us being able to target US aircraft carriers… high value airborne assets such as tankers, AWACS (Airborne Warning And Control System),” Mastalir said. “This is a strategy to prevent the US from intervening, and that's what their space architecture is.”
That's not acceptable to Pentagon officials, so Space Force personnel are now training for orbital warfare. Just don't expect to know the details of these weapons systems anytime soon.
“The details of that? No, you don't get that from any war organization – 'Let me tell you exactly how I plan to attack an adversary so that they can respond and counter that' – those are not the details. ” discussions we're going to have,” Saltzman said. “We're still going to protect some of these details, but broadly speaking, from an operational concept, we're going to be ready to contest space.”
A new board
The Space Force will likely receive new policy guidance after President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. The Trump transition team has not yet identified any changes for the Space Force, but a list of policy proposals known as Project 2025 may provide some clues.
Project 2025, published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, calls on the Pentagon to transition the Space Force from a largely defensive posture to offensive weapons systems. Christopher Miller, who served as acting Secretary of Defense in the first Trump administration, wrote the military portion of Project 2025.
Miller wrote that the Space Force must “restore offensive capabilities to ensure a favorable balance of forces, efficiently manage the full spectrum of deterrence, and severely complicate enemy calculations of a successful first strike against U.S. space assets.”
Trump disavowed Project 2025 during the campaign, but since the election he has nominated several authors and policy agenda contributors to key administration posts.
Saltzman met Trump last month while attending a launch of SpaceX's Starship rocket in Texas, but he said the encounter was incidental. Saltzman was already there for talks with SpaceX officials, and Trump's travel plans were only announced the day before the launch.
The conversation with Trump at the launch of the Starship did not go into policy details, according to Saltzman. He added that the Space Force has not yet had formal discussions with Trump's transition team.
Regardless of the direction Trump takes with the Space Force, Saltzman said the service is already thinking about what it needs to do to maintain what the Pentagon now calls “space superiority.”– a twist on the term air superiority, which could have seemed just as fanciful at the dawn of military aviation more than a century ago.
“That's why we are the Space Force,” Saltzman said. “So from board to board, that's still going to be true. Now it's just about resources and the discussions about what we want to do and when we want to do it, and we're ready to have those discussions.”
