CHINA AIMS AT AMERICA'S ACHILLES' HEEL

China aiming at US military's Achilles' heel with anti-satellite missiles

Published on Monday, June 25, 2007.

Source: Press Esc

China’s strategists have concluded that the easiest way to defeat US military power is to target its Achilles' heel: its space-based capabilities and their related ground installations, and the Chinese anti-satellite test (ASAT) was part of that strategy to combat US military superiority, according to a policy brief published by Carnegie Endowment.

Author Ashley Tellis argues that China is highly unlikely to abandon its counterspace program, as doing so would condemn its armed forces to inevitable defeat against US power, and as a result, it will not enter into any arms-control regime that would further accentuate its competitors’ military advantages.

The US domination of space, which underwrites both its civilian and military advantages, is at risk, and therefore necessitates a series of remedial investments, the report warns.

The advanced military might of the US depends inordinately on a complex, exposed network of command, control, communications, and computer-based systems that provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, that utilise the medium of space for communications.

Tellis explains that these space-based capabilities enable American forces to detect and identify different kinds of targets, exchange vast and diverse militarily relevant information and data streams, and contribute to the success of combat operations by providing everything from meteorological assessment to navigation and guidance to different platforms and weapon systems to early warning and situational awareness.

The author states that the China is heavily focused on developing all possible means of defeating the superior US conventional forces
it expects to encounter in any war over Taiwan, and the Chinese capability for space warfare implies that an American victory is no longer guaranteed.

On January 11, 2007, a China fired a home-made medium-range ballistic missile from a launch site at the Xichang space facility in Sichuan Province to destroy a an aging Chinese weather satellite deployed in a low Earth orbitat an altitude of 864 kilometers.