Covid-19 has garnered the world’s attention this year, often blotting out other significant developments around the world. One of those stories concerns China’s successful completion of its five-year civilian-military fusion plan to reform how the PLA operates in space. In late December 2015, under President Xi Jinping’s direction, the PLA announced a major, five-year military reorganization to integrate the civilian-military infrastructure (军民融合) and to develop a space-based military organization with both offensive and defensive capabilities (空间攻防). China is ahead of schedule.
The new Strategic Support Force (SSF) integrates space as a third level of its military operations. The first two are the traditional forces (Army, Navy, Air Force) and the Rocket Force. The SSF encompasses space, cyber, electronic warfare, psychological warfare and is responsible for satellite operations. China’s “information umbrella” in space is open and conducting business in August 2020. It is a cultural and historical win for the country, as well as a significant advance for its national security and offensive military capabilities.
The primary and direct warfighting role of the new space force appears to be the electromagnetic and cyber domains. Its aim is to enable the PLA to not only fight but to win a war pitting China against a technologically-advanced nation-state such as Japan or the United States. The SSF today can impact US military operating in the Indo-Pacific region. President Xi Jinping called the SSF a “new type of force” and a “significant growth point” to improve China’s operational capabilities. The PLA has maintained platforms in space for more than a decade that can threaten and destroy satellites. It has successfully conducted counterspace missions to destroy low earth orbit satellites, including remote sensing platforms. Today it appears capable of reaching and eliminating the geosynchronous satellites that support the West’s Global Positioning System (GPS) and satellite communications.
Completion of the PLA’s five-year-plan indicates that China’s kinetic-energy, direct-energy, co-orbital, electronic warfare, and cyber weapons programs are mature, fully operational, and mostly integrated into PLA joint operations. China has increased its long-range precision strike capabilities which allow it operate at a greater distance from its shores. The SSF provides the PLA with improved command control, communications, computer, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities that make the country a potential formidable adversary should it decide to take on US forces in the Indo-Pacific. China is capable of jamming US civilian and, perhaps, military satellite communications and taking down computer networks operating in space and on the ground. One intelligence source reported that China has operational robotic technology that can literally grab a communications satellite in space.
With its the elevation of information warfare to space China wins on many fronts. The PLA is stronger and can operate offensively farther from its shores. The CCP leadership also benefits with the population at home on the prestige front as the PLA claims the technology is indigenously developed by Chinese patriots. Only a few countries can match Chinese capabilities in space. It sees itself as reclaiming great power status and provides some legitimacy of the CCP in the eyes of the Chinese population. Chinese military strategists argue that the technology in the SSF will help Beijing’s emerging overseas interests in distant parts of the world, stop US intervention in the region, and also act as a key component of strategic deterrence.
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As early as 2012 Paul Martin, an Inspector General with NASA, testified before the House Sub-Committee on Investigations and Oversight of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee that China’s cyber intrusions targeted and took over the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s computer networks. In the eight years since that event China has brought its info-warfare units under a single command and doctrine, advanced its offensive, and defensive systems, and created an information umbrella in space that rivals other advanced nations.
It is time the west paid closer attention.
DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. Each Saturday, she presents key updates on U.S. foreign policy from the State Department.
Illustration: Tian-Gong spacecraft