China poses burgeoning threat in space

WHILE the mention of growing Chinese nuclear arsenal in the annual US Department of Defence report to the US Congress made global headlines, greater attention, perhaps, should be paid to what it has said about Beijing’s growing space activity and the implications for its war-fighting capabilities.

An indicator of Chinese activity comes from the fact that this year, the Chinese have sent up 55 rockets. The US leads with 80 launches and the Russians came a poor third with 22. Beijing’s maturity as a space-faring power was confirmed earlier this year when it added the third and last module to its Tiangong space station, which has been occupied by three-man crew since June 2021.

According to the Pentagon report, the Chinese are investing heavily in space and putting money into everything from intelligence assets to weapons such as kinetic-kill missiles and ground lasers. Since 2018, China has almost doubled its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites that are now more than 260, which is about half of the entire world’s ISR systems.

China has one of the most-advanced space programmes in the world and its origins lie in its military doctrine. The Chinese programme was launched by the Fifth Academy of the National Defence Ministry in 1956 and launched its first satellite in 1970.

But today, China has a broad-based programme that includes human space flight, exploration missions to Mars and the moon, alongside the military applications such as enabling long-range precision strikes and using satellite-based command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) and at the same time denying them to adversaries.

The military applications come under the PLA’s Strategic Support Force (SSF), which was set up in 2015 and has since centralised all of the PLA’s strategic space, cyberspace, electronic and psychological operations. It has two broad divisions — the Space Systems Department (SSD) responsible for military space operations and the Network Systems Department (NSD), which handles information warfare.

The SSF space activities are about war fighting and war winning and are deeply integrated with information warfare, which includes cyberwar, technical intelligence, electronic warfare and psychological operations. The current commander of the SSF is General Ju Qiansheng, who earlier headed the NSD.

The SSF’s Space Systems Department is responsible for most of PLA’s space operations, including space launch and support, space surveillance, space information support, space telemetry, tracking and control and space warfare. The SSD runs the Yuan Wang space support ships, one of which created a furore when it visited Sri Lanka earlier this year.

Perhaps, most significant developments are in the PLA’s counter-space capabilities which seek to degrade and deny space capabilities to adversaries. China, according to the Pentagon report, believes that space-based operations are a crucial element in the US military system and has, thus, pursued a strategy to negate this American advantage. Thus, US reconnaissance, communication, navigation and early-warning satellites will be targeted early in any conflict.

In January 2007, China had tested a direct-ascent ASAT missile that destroyed an old-weather satellite. The resultant debris created a controversy and China has not undertaken such a test since then. The Chinese have also conducted anti-satellite tests using the DN-1 and 2 missiles in 2010, 2013 and 2014, and by a DN-3 missile in 2015. They claimed that these were ballistic missile defence tests, but the Americans insist that these were direct-ascent missiles aimed at ramming into satellites to destroy them. Their assessment is that these missiles are capable of taking out satellites in near geosynchronous orbits where most intelligence and navigation satellites are located.

Reports on China testing a manoeuvring satellite to capture another satellite in space began to appear in 2013 and in July, China tested a deployment involving three satellites in which one of them was fitted with a mechanical arm. The Chinese claimed that this was a test of a system to collect space debris. There is little doubt that China today has the ability to neutralise adversary satellite by capturing them or knocking them off their orbit.

According to a 2020 report of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, the PLA also has an operational ground-based satellite electronic counter-measures capability designed to disrupt satellite communications, navigation, missile early warning and other satellites through jamming.

The technology was incidentally sourced from Ukraine in the late 1990s and developed indigenously. It is well known that the Chinese also have a well-developed cyberwar capability, which can work in tandem with these jamming systems.

It’s clear that the PLA’s advances in both kinetic and non-kinetic counter-space activities will be a serious problem for the US, which has otherwise enjoyed enormous advantage in space. But by the same measure, India needs to think of ways to meet this burgeoning Chinese threat.

Kartik Bommakanti of the Observer Research Foundation has pointed out that India’s record of heavy-launch vehicles — the type that is needed to hoist certain militarily useful satellites into the orbit — is patchy. By contrast, the Chinese Long March series “are a visible demonstration and example of the Chinese progressing more rapidly than India in the development of geosynchronous launch vehicle.” But this is not the only area where China is ahead of India.

With just five launches in the past year, India can hardly compete with China. It took a tentative step forward when it created the Defence Space Agency under the Integrated Defence Staff in 2019 along with a Defence Space Research Agency. But, it needs to urgently work on a strategy to deal with the China challenge.