Future great power conflict is unlikely to be limited to the land, seas and skies.
Great powers also rely on space assets for a broad range of military functions: weapons targeting, communication, navigation.
They are also core to warfighting capabilities – particularly for the US.
“The Americans fight ‘away games’ – they’re not fighting their wars on the North American continent,” noted Dean Cheng, a senior fellow and space specialist at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. “How have the Americans done reconnaissance, battle damage assessment, weapons guidance, communications, force coordination? They have relied upon space systems.”
That makes space systems critical to US force projection – and an obvious target in the case of war.
Taiwan, the US and other partners “will have some information sharing, or connect with each other via the space domain,” said Dr Sheu Jyh-Shyang, an assistant research fellow at INDSR, the Taiwanese defence ministry’s think tank. (He noted that the views expressed here are his own.) “That is, of course, the reason that China needs to sabotage [adveraries’ space assets in a conflict]”.
Chinese military doctrine assumes preparation for first strikes on US assets in Okinawa and other targets on the ground. “[But] I don’t really think [they] will forget [to target] the space domain,” added Sheu.
The US government is increasingly worried about the vulnerability of its space assets. General Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations in the US Space Force, said in April: “There is no good training for a day without space—we are not built for it, and we cannot work effectively around it. Space is an integral platform for force projection, and we must defend it accordingly.”
The 2025 US Annual Threat Assessment states that “Counterspace operations will be integral to PLA military campaigns” – referring to the People’s Liberation Army, the military wing of the ruling Communist Party of China – “and China has counterspace-weapons capabilities intended to target US and allied satellites.”
A spotlight on GPS
So how could China use space in a conflict?
In a testimony for the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission in March, Saltzmann said that the Space Force categorises counterspace weapons into six types: radio frequency jammers, kinetic weapons, and directed energy weapons (lasers), each of which can be ground-based or space-based. He said China was investing in all six kinds.
Analysts posit pre-war scenarios in which China uses temporary, non-kinetic moves as a way to warn the US against involvement in any conflict. China could jam signals from GPS or communications satellites, or “dazzle” reconnaissance satellites with lasers. China has also demonstrated the capability to “tug” other satellites into different orbits, and could theoretically use debris-removal satellites to direct debris towards strategically important satellites.
Even now, analysts see China testing its anti-satellite and other space capabilities, though not engaging in the kind of aggressive behaviour that Russia does.
“I think China is trying to deter [the US] with what they’re doing in space,” said Todd Harrison, a space policy expert and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “They’re trying to show that if we got involved in a conflict, the cost would be high for us, because we would not be able to use all of our space capabilities.”
The US and China would likely avoid destroying satellites in a pre-war stage, not least because the orbital debris created would raise the risk of future collisions, potentially endangering future use of certain orbits by anyone. In November, a spacecraft docked at China’s Tiangong space station was damaged by a piece of debris.
But China would still have several potential targets – such as missile warning satellites – for non-destructive attacks argued Harrison. “We only have five or six missile warning satellites, and only two or three are even able to cover the areas around China. If you put a laser in the sensors of those satellites and blind it, that’s a big problem for us.”
Perhaps the most obvious target would be GPS, which is “absolutely critical to virtually everything the military does,” Harrison told Resilience Media.
A 2023 report from the China Aerospace Studies Institute in the US synthesises Chinese military writings on use of electronic jamming. It notes that “in a PRC regional battle, satellite uplink and downlink jamming are both expected.” However, according to the report, various Chinese writings argue for caution and precision in the use of electromagnetic attacks, which could otherwise accidentally disrupt China’s own equipment.
The impact of GPS jamming would be felt in several areas of US military capabilities, though its exact impact is debated.
For example, a 2025 research paper argues that losing GPS would not pose a serious problem for US military navigation, given the availability of alternatives such as STELLA, which use infrared sensors to work out position based on the stars or the USAF’s astroinertial system R2-D2.
However, the increasing capability of China’s air defences means that precision long-range weapons have become more critical. So if GPS were jammed across a large area, missiles guided using GPS would be less accurate, forcing the US to deplete its non-GPS weapons inventories more quickly and/or accept a lower probability of hitting targets.
The US military also has not moved fast enough in reducing its vulnerabilities around GPS signals. For example, the military has developed a new M-Code technology that is far more resistant to jamming. The aim has been to integrate M-Code into GPS constellations and receivers, but some analysts say that the US military has failed to prioritise installing M-Code receivers into its equipment. One source blamed this on delays by contractors.
In the case of a full-scale war, experts think China is unlikely to start blowing up GPS satellites.
“I don’t think GPS is a smart target for anti satellite weapons to actually blow up the satellites,” argued Harrison, “because you just have to hit so many satellites before you start having a significant effect.” Only when the constellation is reduced from 30 or 31 to around 24 does the performance start to degrade at all.
Moreover, targeting these from the ground would be challenging. There is limited public information about China’s DA-ASAT capabilities – direct-ascent anti-satellite equipment, typically missiles sent from earth targeting satellites in orbit – to destroy satellites this far from the Earth. The Secure World Foundation concludes that ”Chinese DA-ASAT capability against deep space targets [meaning middle and geo orbits] is likely still in the experimental or development phase.”
This contrasts with China’s capabilities against satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). China demonstrated this destructive capability in spectacular fashion as far back as 2007, when it destroyed a defunct weather satellite – an event that, incidentally, led to a significant increase in orbital debris. The Secure World Foundation judges that the country has “mature” capabilities against LEO targets which could potentially be fielded on mobile launchers. The US, it continues, has no currently acknowledged operational DA-ASAT programme, but it retains the technical capacity. Additionally, the US’s SM-3 and GBI missile interceptors have potential DA-ASAT applications.
Different applications=different impacts
This would impact certain capabilities more than others.
For example, a 2025 research paper argued that in a cross-Strait conflict between China and Taiwan, satellites were more critical to certain “missions” than others. For the anti-surface warfare mission – preventing China from being able to transport troops and resources to Taiwan – satellites would “play a valuable role” in a sensing ecosystem.
Other capabilities such as undersea sensors would also be used, but high-altitude sensors are able to track Chinese ships beyond the sensor range of US and Taiwanese vessels. It would be difficult to completely degrade this capability by attacking satellites – though intelligence could be made intermittent. The paper concludes that “even if China destroyed half the United States’ imaging satellites, the remaining systems would still regularly pass overhead to provide imagery.” The main limiting factor in America’s ability to prevent troops being transported across the Taiwan Strait – the paper argues – would be its limited supply of long-range missiles, not the vulnerability of its satellites.
That being said, space assets that enable certain capabilities are becoming less easily hindered. Plummeting launch costs have led to a proliferation of satellite constellations, reducing the cost-effectiveness of DA-ASAT systems. While any individual satellite is vulnerable to such attacks, it would require a large number of such weapons to degrade the performance of the constellation as a whole.
For example, the US military’s Starshield – an upgraded military version of Starlink with missile warning and reconnaissance capabilities – has around 200 satellites in orbit.
However, a 2025 report from China Aerospace Studies Institute notes expectations of use by China, the US and Taiwan of LEO constellations in a conflict “whose numbers, low cost and technological sophistication will make them resistant to attack.”
Defeating the command and control capabilities, it continues, will be difficult, “and enable persistent communications and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities that will make the battlefield more transparent.” Nevertheless, any conflict would likely see “large scale and less discriminate use of counterspace capabilities”, it argues, which could potentially degrade mission critical space-based capabilities.
The US military is aware of the vulnerabilities of its space capabilities and is working to boost its resilience. For example, it has already begun initial production of satellites for a new missile-tracking layer.
Preparation is about protecting and boosting the resilience of space systems, said Harrison. The US Space Force is working on hardening its satellites against electronic warfare, such as electromagnetic pulses.
Additionally, “as China increasingly builds missiles and other forces capable of striking at long distances, they are becoming much more dependent on space to be able to see over the horizon”, noted Harrison. The US should have “forces essentially [capable of] doing the same thing to them that they’re trying to do to us.”
He is clearly not the only person in DC policy circles arriving at this conclusion. A US-China Economic and Security Review Commission report from November notes, “As Beijing has expanded its military space capabilities, it has also deepened its own dependency on space assets, potentially creating vulnerabilities of its own.”
