- Russian and Chinese activities in space highlight the dangers that NATO countries now face when operating up there, according to NATO's supreme allied commander transformation.
- "Until now, space was considered by everybody as a safe haven," French Gen. Andre Lanata said. "It's not the case anymore."
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Russian and Chinese efforts to maneuver spacecraft close to Western satellites underscore the danger that Western powers now face beyond Earth's orbit, according to a NATO general.
"Of course, it is a threat to our allies," France's Gen. Andre Lanata, NATO's supreme allied commander transformation, told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview. "It's a key question. We need to be sure that we give to our forces this space asset support."
The Russian defense ministry has given the transatlantic alliance a reminder of the importance of that question, with the launch of a small satellite that has "recently synchronized its orbit" to trail an American spy satellite, as space watchers have noted. The maneuvers came on the heels of NATO declaring space an "operational domain" in November, following years of US warnings that Russia and China were developing ominous anti-satellite weaponry.
"Until now, space was considered by everybody as a safe haven," Lanata said. "It's not the case anymore."
New technologies in the space industry present a challenge for military strategists and diplomats, who struggle to define a "weapon" in space. The same new systems that might repair one satellite could be deployed to destroy another. Russia, for instance, has developed a "space apparatus inspector" satellite, but American officials have doubted their true purposes for more than a year.
"Its behavior on-orbit was inconsistent with anything seen before from on-orbit inspection or space situational awareness capabilities, including other Russian inspection satellite activities," Yleem Poblete, who led the State Department's arms control bureau, told the United Nations Conference on Disarmament in 2018. "We don't know for certain what it is, and there is no way to verify it. But Russian intentions with respect to this satellite are unclear and are obviously a very troubling development."
Some analysts and military officials believe that Russia and China are deploying space assets near American satellites in order to cripple the US military's communications and GPS networks in a crisis. "We can imagine many different ways and many different kinds of aggression in space," Lanata said.
These potential attacks demand attention because "we need to be sure that we give to our forces this space asset support," he said. And yet it's not clear how individual nations nor the alliance as a whole will plan to counteract those threats — but the problem will have [to be] addressed by individual nations rather than the alliance, Lanata said.
"NATO will not own any space assets," he said. "It will not be the responsibility of NATO to take specific measures to protect such or such national assets."
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