While the possibility of anti-satellite weapons, jamming and cyber-attacks aimed at the U.S. military’s fleets of communication satellites is making them vulnerable to adversaries, declining defense budgets constitute an equal threat to the space architecture the services rely upon, according to a report released July 24.
Like the Maginot Line that gave the French a false sense of security prior to the German Blitzkrieg in World War II, the U.S. military has assumed since the end of the Cold War that no one would dare launch an physical attack on its satellites because that would violate international norms. Just as the Germans did away with such niceties and invaded France through a neighboring country, an adversary could go after one of the military’s biggest Achilles’ heels, its space-based communication system, said Todd Harrison, senior fellow for defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and author of a new report, “The Future of Milsatcom.”
China used an anti-satellite weapon in 2007 to destroy a spacecraft and demonstrate its capabilities, Harrison pointed out at a presentation on Capitol Hill. An adversary could also launch so-called killer satellites that can carry out an attack on nearby spacecraft. Terrestrially, communication satellites are vulnerable to jamming or the interception of data. There is even the possibility that a cyber-attack could allow an enemy to take control of a satellite, he said.
“As the space domain has become more crowded, and contested, and we have become more dependant on its capabilities, our space systems have not adjusted to take into account the new reality that they face,” Harrison said. “In short, we have been making juicier targets for our adversaries in a conventional conflict.”
The problem is how to address these problems in an era of fiscal restraint, he said. Building satellites that could protect themselves by shooting down anti-satellite missiles or killer spacecraft would be costly, and an adversary could simply build more space weapons, he said. Passive defenses such as nuclear hardening, frequency hopping to prevent jamming, and encryption are also expensive.
As part of the rebalancing to the Pacific region, the military could ask allies such as South Korea, Australia and Japan to invest in the Advanced-EHF highly protected communication satellites. That could serve as a deterrent. An attack on one spacecraft would be an attack on all the allied nations, he said.