The Satellite Slayers
Picture this: A United States Space Force technical sergeant mans his post at the Space Command Joint Operations Center in Colorado Springs, as he has done through hundreds of solitary nights. But on this night, his systems suddenly report numerous intercontinental ballistic missile launches from Russia and China.
It seems mad. Why would they dare? U.S. forces worldwide, connected by almost instantaneous communication, can strike back from bases on land, warplanes in the air, carrier strike groups at sea and submarines far below the waves. All they need are the right signals. The result: “mutually assured destruction.”
But there is a problem.
While this technical sergeant and numerous personnel hit the necessary buttons and enter the necessary codes to sound the alarm and activate U.S. defenses and its nuclear triad, something is happening 700 miles above their heads. A Chinese satellite jumps out of its orbit and extends a magnetic arm out toward a satellite from the U.S. Defense Support Program constellation. The arm fastens then retracts, pulling the American satellite toward it. A small bomb erupts inside the Chinese unit, turning both into a cloud of space debris.
Within seconds, 80 other critical U.S. satellites—not just from the Defense Support Program but also the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, Space Based Space Surveillance, Space Based Infrared System, Wideband Global satcom system, LeoLabs, ExoAnalytic, Starlink and Global Positioning System—have been given the same treatment. And hundreds of additional satellites have been damaged by expanding fields of space debris.
The Russian and Chinese missiles vanish from glitching early warning monitors. Despite arduous efforts, U.S. defenses and offenses fail to activate.
The missiles fly at supersonic speeds toward a sleeping America.
Such a “Space Pearl Harbor” scenario may sound like science fiction. But a new report from the U.S. military has revealed that Russia and China are making major strides in their development of technologies that can “deny, disrupt or destroy satellites.”
The “Competing in Space” report was produced jointly by the U.S. Space Force’s National Space Intelligence Center and the U.S. Air Force’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center. It emphasizes that the two Asian giants are channeling vast resources into satellite-slaying technologies mainly because they “view the U.S. as overly reliant upon space for military and information superiority.” And Russia and China are “seeking asymmetric advantages” over America “in future conflict.”
Strong-arming in Orbit
Among the most concerning technologies are satellites that are maneuverable by Russian or Chinese operatives on the ground and equipped with robotic arms controlled by those same operatives. “Space-based robotic arm technology could be used in a future system for grappling other satellites,” the report states.
China’s Shijian-17 satellite is one such model. It’s up there now, circling Earth in the same Geostationary orbit as nearly 600 other satellites, the vast majority of them being American. Shijian-17 is fitted with a massive robotic arm, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies has observed it engaging in “unusual behavior,” including navigating up to and interacting with other satellites in orbit.
So far, Shijian-17 has manhandled only other Chinese satellites. But U.S. Space Command officers and other experts say that it is just as capable of approaching, nudging, affixing spy equipment to, damaging or destroying satellites from other nations.
Another Chinese satellite, the Shijian-21, is fitted with not just a grappling arm but also a net. In 2022, it was observed capturing another Chinese satellite that had been in rapid motion. The Shijian-21 snatched the other unit and towed it to a graveyard orbit, then returned to its position. Parts of the maneuver happened so quickly that U.S. observers lost track of the Shijian-21 for over an hour. One expert told the Economist the maneuver was “like a magician’s sleight of hand.”
From 2017 to 2022, Russia is known to have placed at least four maneuverable satellites into various orbits. One of them, Kosmos 2543, “birthed” a new object into orbit in 2020 and used it to conduct a test of a space-based weapon. Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, then commander of U.S. Space Command, told Time the move was “unusual and disturbing,” adding: “It has the potential to create a dangerous situation in space.”
Two years later, the Russians put Kosmos-2558 into the same orbit as and bizarrely close to the U.S. military’s classified, state-of-the-art satellite: usa-326. The Russian unit is maneuverable and may well have the capacity to disrupt the U.S. satellite, which it has been trailing ever since. Gen. James Dickinson of U.S. Space Command called it “really irresponsible behavior.”
On February 9, Russia launched the Kosmos-2575 into orbit, a classified military satellite believed to be related to Russia’s ambitions to put a nuclear satellite-killing weapon in space.
Since Russian and Chinese space-based assets are shrouded in secrecy, the number of satellites equipped with robotic arms and other offensive warfare capabilities is unknown. But it is well known that from 2019 to 2023, China more than doubled its satellites in orbit. Over 100 of those launched during that time are known to be remote-sensing satellites, and may well have secret destructive abilities. The report states: “Russia and China … often mask or conceal” their satellites’ capacity to “deny, disrupt and destroy satellites and space services.”
Aiming high
Russia and China are also developing ground-based anti-satellite weapons, including missiles, jammers and directed-energy weapons.
Russia tested a ballistic missile in late 2021, firing it from the Plesetsk cosmodrome into low-Earth orbit, where it blasted an old Soviet satellite into 1,800 pieces. The sudden cloud of debris forced astronauts in the International Space Station to take refuge for hours in their escape craft. Kaitlyn Johnson, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, asked the obvious question: “What message are they trying to send?”
China tested an anti-satellite missile in 2021 that, according to the report, “could prevent reliable missile warning and complicate defense engagements.”
The Chinese are also developing “ground-based laser systems of varying power levels that could blind or damage satellite sensors,” the report states. “By the mid-to-late 2020s, Beijing may have higher-power systems capable of damaging satellites.”
Brian Weeden, director of program planning for Secure World Foundation, told National Defense that open-source evidence indicates “four or five main sites” where China has laser systems believed to be capable of blinding satellites in orbit.
On February 8, the South China Morning Post reported that China has also developed a high-power microwave weapon powered by Stirling engines that could zap satellites with steady-state magnetic waves some 68,000 times more powerful than Earth’s magnetic field.
Russia and China are also developing cyberwarfare weapons, such as logic bombs and computer viruses, for potential use against satellites.
Is it MAD?
Whether from space or the ground, Russian and Chinese abilities to incapacitate U.S. satellites are “significant,” according to Nikkei Asia chief desk editor Ken Moriyasu, because “the next major war could be decided in the opening minutes of the first day, as each side attempts to disable the enemy’s communication tools.”
Some may suspect that a fear of “mutually assured destruction” would stop Russia and China from attacking U.S. satellites. The Russians and Chinese also have many important satellites in orbit that America could target. But the reality is that America has far more satellites than any other nation, and relies on them far, far more heavily. Of the total 7,096 satellites in space, 4,723 are American, more than twice the number of the rest of the world combined.
The U.S. depends on its thousands of satellites for everything from weather monitoring and television broadcasting to telephone and Internet connections. It also operates the Global Positioning System, a constellation of 33 satellites that Washington makes freely accessible to anyone on the planet with a gps receiver. This $12 billion marvel of engineering provides users with all manner of positioning, navigation and timing services. Most importantly, around 130 of America’s satellites are used exclusively by the U.S. military for numerous reconnaissance, communication, navigation and targeting systems.
This means America is considerably more vulnerable to satellite attacks than any other nation, a fact that countries such as Russia and China well understand. They may even be willing to jeopardize their own space-based assets in order to destroy those of America. Frank Rose of the Brookings Institution said: “Adversarial nations are developing anti-satellite weapons because they believe space represents an asymmetric vulnerability of the United States.”
Steve Lambakis, an international affairs analyst, also addressed this threat and emphasized America’s vulnerability. “U.S. space systems are among the most fragile and vulnerable assets operated by the U.S. military,” he said. The multibillion-dollar infrastructure is “vital to nearly every activity of the United States and, increasingly, the armed forces of U.S. allies.”
Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has written on several occasions about the perils of America’s reliance, specifically that of its military, on computer technology that is susceptible to enemy attack. In a January 1995 article, he quoted analyst Joseph de Courcy, who termed this reliance “the Western world’s Achilles’ heel.” This was a reference to the apparently invulnerable warrior of Greek mythology who was susceptible to harm only on his heels. “America is the greatest superpower this world has ever known,” Mr. Flurry wrote. “But we have a very vulnerable point in our military—our own Achilles’ heel.”
Mr. Flurry said de Courcy’s warning about America’s vulnerability brought to mind a Bible prophecy recorded in Ezekiel 7. The first three verses of that chapter show that God is addressing “the land of Israel” in the time of “the end,” which refers primarily to the U.S. and Britain in the modern day. (You can prove this by reading our free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.)
Ezekiel 7 discusses a future when God will punish these countries for their “abominations” and their rejection of Him (verse 8). Verse 14 vividly pictures one aspect of that punishment: “They have blown the trumpet, even to make all ready; but none goeth to the battle: for my wrath is upon all the multitude thereof.”
Mr. Flurry said this “alarming” scripture describes a time when U.S. military technology will have been compromised by adversaries. “It seems everybody is expecting our people to go into battle, but the greatest tragedy imaginable occurs!” Mr. Flurry wrote. “Nobody goes to battle—even though the trumpet is blown! Will it be because of computer terrorism?” (Trumpet, May 2005).
Isaiah 59 provides more detail that may be applicable to this future time of calamity for the United States. In verses 9 and 10, the people of America are shown to be stripped of vision: “[W]e wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness. We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night ….”
Such blindness is already evident in a spiritual sense for the U.S. and Britain today: Many in these nations are groping around in spiritual blindness. And the vision that is absent in this prophecy might also include physical types of seeing, including those made possible by America’s thousands of satellites.
In his booklet Isaiah’s End-Time Vision, Mr. Flurry discusses prophecies recorded in Ezekiel 5 and 27, Isaiah 22 and 23 and Revelation 18, which reveal the nations behind the attack on America and its allies. He lists them as a German-led European empire and certain Asian powers, including Russia, China and Japan.
When these prophecies are examined together, the significance of America’s increasingly vulnerable eyes-in-the-skies becomes plain. It shows that some terribly dark times—times of suffering and destroyed vision—are on the horizon. Yet the Bible also makes clear that there is a different kind of vision we can cultivate that is not at risk of these kinds of attacks.
To understand the prophetic context of trends now underway, and the type of vision that can withstand the conflicts on the horizon, order your free copy of Isaiah’s End-Time Vision.