Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein speaks at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington, D.C., March 7, 2024. (US Air Force photo by Eric Dietrich)
WASHINGTON — US “near peer” adversaries are “practicing dogfighting” in space to simulate orbital combat in yet another step up their wide-ranging effort to develop capabilities to deny, disrupt, degrade and/or destroy US space capabilities, the Space Force’s second in command warned today.
Gen. Michael Guetlein, vice chief of space operations, told the McAleese annual Defense Programs Conference that commercial partners had provided space situational awareness data to the Space Force on a demonstration involving coordinated moves of five different satellites.
“There are five different objects in space maneuvering in and out around each other, in synchronicity and in control. That’s what we call dogfighting in space. They are practicing tactics, techniques and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another,” he explained.
And while Guetlein did not specify which countries five satellites were involved, a Space Force spokesperson later told reporters that the demonstration was Chinese.
“Gen. Guetlein referenced Chinese satellite maneuvers observed in space. China conducted a series of proximity operations in 2024 involving three Shiyan-24C experimental satellites and two Chinese experimental space objects, the Shijian-6 05A/B. These maneuvers were observed in low Earth orbit. These observations are based on commercially available information,” the spokesperson said in an email to Breaking Defense.
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A representative of Colorado-based space tracking firm LeoLabs confirmed that the company had observed the Chinese demonstration of what are known in the space community as rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) using its network of ground-based radar — as well as another, ongoing case involving Russian satellites.
“The Russians are right in the middle of a three-spacecraft RPO,” the LeoLabs rep added.
Both countries in the past have demonstrated RPO ability with two spacecraft moving closely around each other in LEO, raising Defense Department concerns. US officials have said that China further has been using several satellites to stalk US government and commercial satellites stationed in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO).
But the demonstrations of the ability to synchronize movements of several satellites at once are relatively new, piling on to a long list of growing adversary space capabilities that Guetlein said require the Space Force to step up its game “to deter and, if necessary, defeat aggression” in the heavens.
“The environment has completely changed. There used to be a capability gap between us and our near peers, mainly driven by the technological advancement of the United States. That capability gap used to be massive. That capability gap is significantly narrowing, and we’ve got change the way we’re looking at space or that capability gap may reverse not be in our favor anymore,” Guetlein stressed.
And while the term dogfighting brings to mind scenes from Star Wars with Rebel Alliance X-Wing and Y-Wing starfighters zipping in and out among the Empire’s sporty TIE Fighters, in reality the laws of physics put heavy constraints on the speed of any future satellite-to-satellite warfare. Space war will be slow, with satellite maneuvers often taking hours, days or even weeks.
That said, Guetlein’s use of the evocative air warfare term highlights the Space Force’s escalating rhetoric about the need for the service to improve its capabilities to establish “space superiority” in any future conflict, including via “space control” operations that include not just defensive measures such as to avoid hostile actions but also offensive operations to take out adversary satellites.
“Space superiority is the reason that we exist as a service, and the vagaries of warfighting must inform everything we do if we are going to succeed,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told the annual Air and Space Forces Association Warfare Conference in Colorado on March 3. “Space superiority is our prime imperative.”
Further, he said, “space control” is how the Space Force can achieve space superiority; thus is the service’s newest “core function.”
“Put simply, Space Control encapsulates the mission areas required to contest and control the space domain — employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities through disruption, degradation, and even destruction, if necessary,” Saltzman elaborated. “It includes things like orbital warfare and electromagnetic warfare, and its counterspace operations can be employed for both offensive and defensive purposes at the direction of combatant commands.”
