Air Force Secretary Troy Meink made the first public declaration Monday that the United States has placed “space control weapons” in orbit, an announcement that will surely reverberate in the power centers of Beijing and Moscow.
Space Force officials have previously expressed their interest in acquiring space-based weapons, and Pentagon leaders have become more open to discussing space warfare in recent years. Therefore, Meink’s announcement Monday at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference near Washington, DC, was not entirely unexpected.
“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats, wherever they exist. This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” Meink said in prepared remarks.
Meink did not reveal any details about the weapons, but the disclosure of their existence underlines a remarkable turnaround in the Pentagon’s thinking about orbital warfare, something no senior official wanted to discuss publicly until a few years ago. Military officials recently have openly discussed orbital combat, defensive countermeasures on satellites, and anew ground-based weapondesigned to disable an enemy satellite in orbit.
“There are a lot of factors that roll into how we talk about these things,” Meink said. “We spend a lot of time talking about how we’re going to talk about these things. It is important from a deterrence perspective. But on the other hand, me talking about the details of what we’re doing would actually not benefit deterrence, so we’re not going to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing, whether we’ve tested it, not tested it, or anything else.”
