The U.S. has weapons orbiting Earth that can be used to defend American forces from attacks in space, the Air Force secretary revealed this week in a rare public acknowledgment of capabilities the Pentagon has largely kept secret.
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said Monday that the Space Force now has “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” but declined to say what the weapons are, how they work or when they were deployed.
The carefully worded disclosure marks a shift in how openly the U.S. military talks about weapons in orbit as China and Russia develop their own capabilities to disrupt, disable or destroy satellites.
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“Is there any question in the room, by anybody, about whether or not the Chinese or Russians have been developing these sorts of weapons?” Meink told reporters after his remarks at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland — right outside of Washington, D.C.
“For over a decade, we’ve been talking about the fact, and we have expressed concern, that the Chinese and Russians were developing weapons for space,” he continued. “We need to focus on making sure we can protect ourselves operating in that environment.”
Exactly what the U.S. has put into orbit remains a mystery.
The U.S. has previously discussed placing weapons in space, including plans to deploy space-based interceptors capable of destroying incoming missiles as part of President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense system.
But Meink’s disclosure goes a step further: The Space Force already has weapons in orbit for “space control,” a mission aimed at protecting U.S. access to space and, if necessary, denying an adversary the ability to use it.
The Pentagon has historically revealed little about the weapons developed for that mission, with publicly known U.S. counter-space capabilities largely based on the ground.
“What the U.S. is going for is a wow factor here,” Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Fox News Digital. “Wow. The U.S. has never talked about space weapons like this before.”
“That’s really what is exceptional and newsworthy about this revelation,” Swope said. “The U.S. is saying we’re putting weapons in space to make sure that our adversaries can’t use space, or to make sure that we can continue to use space.”
Meink appeared to make clear that the ambiguity surrounding the weapons is intentional. He told reporters his language was “very well thought out” and declined to say whether the systems are kinetic or non-kinetic. Kinetic weapons physically strike or destroy a target — think bombs, bullets and missile — while non-kinetic systems can disrupt or disable it without blowing it up — like cyber attacks or radio jams.
“There are a lot of factors that roll into how we talk about these things,” Meink said, explaining that publicly revealing a capability can contribute to deterrence while disclosing too much about it can undermine that advantage.
“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,” he said. That leaves a wide range of possibilities.
Fox News Digital did not hear back from the Space Force when reached for details of the weapon.
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Swope said “space control weapons” could encompass everything from kinetic systems capable of firing missiles or projectiles at another satellite to jammers that interfere with satellite communications or lasers designed to temporarily overwhelm imaging sensors.
“We really don’t have enough information to know precisely which one of these types of capabilities we’re talking about,” Swope said. “It’s really anybody’s guess what type of weapon we’re talking about.”
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But whatever the Pentagon has deployed, putting a weapon in orbit rather than launching it from Earth could offer one potentially significant advantage: speed and surprise.
A weapon launched from Earth toward a satellite could potentially give an adversary warning that an attack was underway. A capability already positioned in orbit could dramatically shorten that window.
“Maybe something measured at dozens of minutes could be compressed into just mere minutes,” Swope said.
“And you wouldn’t have any indication that maybe a jammer was turned on, on the satellite, other than all of a sudden your signal is being interfered with,” he added.
“If you can act fast without your adversary knowing, if you can have surprise, that gives you a strategic or an asymmetric advantage in combat,” Swope said. “And having systems in orbit do just that.”
Even observing the spacecraft itself may offer few clues about what it can do.
“Space is a very transparent place,” Swope said, noting that governments and civilian observers can track where satellites are, how fast they are moving and what orbits they occupy.
“But what you’ll see often is, oh, it’s a satellite,” he said. “It’s a lot of technology with solar panels and antenna on it. And you don’t really know much beyond that.”
A satellite equipped to jam another spacecraft’s signals, for example, might look much like an ordinary communications satellite.
“Any signal can be a jamming signal,” Swope said. “It just depends on if it’s the one you want to receive, or the one that someone’s trying to use to jam you.”
The concept of weapons operating in orbit is not new. Swope pointed to the Soviet Union’s work on co-orbital anti-satellite weapons dating to the 1960s. Russia has continued developing counterspace capabilities, including systems designed to operate in orbit near other satellites.
China has also developed and tested technologies that could threaten spacecraft, including satellite-servicing and debris-removal systems that have legitimate civilian uses but could potentially be repurposed to interfere with another satellite.
Other forms of interference are already widespread.
“When we talk about jamming and spoofing and cyberattacks against space systems, these happen all the time, both from Russia and China and other countries like North Korea and Iran,” Swope said. “There is so much jamming and spoofing happening around the world right now, it’s almost ubiquitous.”
Those attacks can target systems such as GPS and satellite communications without physically destroying a spacecraft.
That distinction could become critical during a conflict. Jamming, spoofing or cyberattacks may remain below the threshold that prompts a major military response, while physically destroying a satellite could represent a significant escalation.
“If you drop a bomb on a satellite ground station or you shoot a missile at a satellite in space, that’s a big difference,” Swope said. “That’s a huge escalation.”
The stakes are particularly high because modern U.S. warfare is deeply dependent on space-based systems for communications, navigation, intelligence, missile warning and targeting.
“Space is an enabler of joint operations,” Swope said. “We can’t do military operations the way that we do them today without satellites, without systems in space.”
China increasingly faces the same dependency, making control of space potentially decisive in a conflict between the two powers.
“Whoever has space and can deny that to their adversary has a huge asymmetric advantage in a conflict,” Swope said.
“China depends on space as well, and their use of space for joint operations looks very much like the United States,” he added. “Both countries, I would go so far as to say, depend on space to conduct military operations on Earth.”
