Russia may be learning dangerous lessons from its space mischief, DIA says

ASPEN, Colorado—The West may not be pushing back hard enough on Russia’s increasingly aggressive activities in space, a top U.S. intelligence official said. 

“Russia [is] actively targeting, through electronic warfare, the lower orbit domain, and, you know, having minimal repercussions,” Lt. Gen. Jeff Kruse, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday. “We need to make sure we understand what lessons Russia might be drawing from that. And then how do we want to change the environment so that we understand essentially that there may be repercussions with respect to that?”

Kruse also said Russian forces’ performance in Ukraine has revealed them to be fundamentally weak, and so Moscow may turn to asymmetric tactics. These might include targeting U.S. and even global space communications and navigation assets. 

“Their lack of potential superiority drives…asymmetric issues,” he said.

Speaking on the same panel, the head of U.S. Space Command described recent Pentagon efforts to make sure that its satellites can withstand attacks.

“We have put better capability on board our newest generations of GPS satellites,” Gen. Stephen Whiting said. “Now we fly with something called M-CODE, which is available to military users. It's a military-specific satellite that improves our anti-jam capability.”

He also said the military is developing satellite-communications terminals that can jump from constellation to constellation to avoid jamming.

Whiting said China represents a very different threat than Russia. While Moscow is increasingly willing to target space, including via weapons that could render useless the satellites of multiple countries, Beijing’s military reliance on space is growing—especially as it seeks to build stronger forces to potentially confront the United States in the Pacific. 

“In the last six years, they've tripled the number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites they have on orbit,” Whiting said. China is flying “hundreds and hundreds of satellites—again, purpose=built and designed to find, fix, track, target and, yes, potentially engage us and allied forces across the Indo-Pacific.”