China’s first major defense white paper in four years attracted considerable attention for its paranoia about “separatism.” One section of the paper extends that paranoia into space, where China claims the United States is attempting to attain “absolute military superiority” so it can dominate the entire world.
The paper calls for China to develop the “relevant technologies and capabilities” needed to compete with the U.S. in space warfare.
Much of the ostensible strategy document is actually political theater. Every recommendation for military development is couched as something China must regretfully finance because the rest of the world has yet to embrace Beijing’s spirit of “win-win cooperation.”
The authors complain repeatedly about the oppressive power of the United States and wonder how the plucky underdogs of the tiny, underfunded People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can possibly keep China safe from America’s clutches. For example, the white paper risibly contends that China is only developing cyberwarfare capabilities for purely defensive purposes, to counter the “severe threat” posed to China by hackers.
This was the attitude taken toward space warfare, which the report portrayed as one of China’s nine vital military interests and a “critical domain in international strategic competition,” a realm where America, NATO, the European Union, and Russia are named as fierce competitors.
The PLA white paper regretfully concluded that the peace-loving Chinese Communist Party has no choice but to develop purely defensive weapons in a desperate race to keep up with the American, European, and Russian militarization of space. In reality, American military analysts are not confident that China does not already have a dominant position in anti-satellite missiles, ground-based lasers, and weaponized satellites.
Contrary to the white paper’s fretting about American space warfare superiority, the United States is almost certainly well behind China, and possibly behind Russia, in anti-satellite missile development.
Warnings to American policymakers of a potential “Space Pearl Harbor” attack date back to the turn of the millennium, but as Politico speculated in an April article on the Chinese and Russian advantage in space weapons, the emphasis on fighting terrorism after 9/11 diverted attention from satellite warfare.
President Donald Trump’s 2018 National Security Strategy document was the first time the U.S. military was directed to “advance space as a priority domain.” Until now, shockingly little investment has been made in hardening America’s vital satellite systems against attack from an enemy as sophisticated as the Chinese.
Current defense strategies depend largely on deterrence through the threat of retaliation by other means because the U.S. has not developed extensive capabilities to attack enemy satellites, and even if it did, responding in kind to a satellite strike might only make the U.S. position worse by filling orbit with clouds of dangerous debris. There are few scenarios in which the United States and its allies do not have exponentially more to lose from a battle in orbit.
China on Thursday belittled India as “paranoid” for conducting its first space war drill “in the backdrop of China’s rapidly expanding space and counter-space capabilities,” as Indian media put it.
China’s state-run Global Times mocked India by quoting the PLA defense white paper’s assertion that China is only interested in the “peaceful use of outer space” and friendly cooperation with other countries.