US is losing monopoly on long range and military satellite capabilities to a rapidly advancing China – maintaining lead over space tech is key to preventing Taiwan Invasion
Decker 5/2 [Audrey; Audrey Decker is the air warfare reporter for Defense One. She previously reported for Inside Defense, where she reported on the Navy and emerging defense technology. She's a graduate of the University of Maryland; “Chinese satellites are breaking the US 'monopoly' on long-range targeting”, MAY 2, 2024; https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2024/05/new-chinese-satellites-ending-us-monopoly-ability-track-and-hit-long-distance-targets/396272/] E.H
The U.S. military has long held a key advantage over China's: it can hit mobile targets at extremely long distances. But that “monopoly is over,” the Space Force’s intel chief said Thursday. China is building a massive architecture of remote-sensing satellites to help target U.S. forces if they move to defend Taiwan in a conflict, said Maj. Gen. Greg Gagnon, deputy chief of space operations for intelligence. “It’s to provide indications and warnings of sailors, Marines, airmen, trying to move west, if directed, to defend freedom. They will now—in a way that we’re not comfortable talking about in America—they will be inside a rapidly expanding weapons engagement zone,” Gagnon said Thursday at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. China has launched more than 400 satellites over the past two years, more than half of which are designed to track things on Earth, Gagnon said. These are “remote-sensing satellites that are purpose-built to survey and do reconnaissance in the Western Pacific and globally. Satellites that are designed with a proliferated architecture, with many numbers, so that they are resilient against attack. An architecture that isn’t designed for efficiency and cost effectiveness, an architecture that’s designed to go to war and sustain in war. And the purpose of reconnaissance and surveillance, from the ultimate high ground, is of course to inform decisions about fire control for militaries,” he said. Since the inception of China’s military space arm in 2015, the country has seen an 550 percent increase in on-orbit assets, Gagnon said. “The PLA has rapidly advanced in space in a way that few people can appreciate,” Gagnon said. Gagnon also discussed Chinese surveillance capability in geosynchronous orbit, an orbit further out in space where satellites generally hover over the same part of Earth. China launched the world’s first—and so far only—GEO satellite with a synthetic-aperture radar payload into space last year, called Ludi Tance-4 (Land Exploration-4 in English). The advantage of this kind of radar in GEO is that it provides constant coverage and imagery, even through clouds and during night hours. China has said the satellite is for purely civilian purposes—a claim Gagnon refutes. “They recently put a radar imager in GEO in August. It’s designed to look at the Western Pacific, even though they say it’s about agriculture. The Western Pacific that it’s looking at is over the ocean. We kind of know what the purpose is,” Gagnon said.