US General Says China Has Tripled Number of Surveillance Satellites in 6 Years

A Long March 5 rocket, carrying the Chang'e-6 mission lunar probe, at the Wenchang Space Launch Centre in southern China's Hainan Province on May 3, 2024. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

Communist China tripled its number of on-orbit satellites that could be used for intelligence or military purposes in recent years, according to a senior U.S. military official.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) oversaw the launching of several hundred satellites for intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance (ISTAR) purposes, said Space Force Gen. Stephen Whiting during a July 17 talk at the Aspen Institute think tank.

“In the last six years, they’ve tripled the number of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance satellites they have on orbit,” Gen. Whiting said.

“Hundreds and hundreds of satellites purpose-built and designed to find, fix, track, target, and yes, potentially engage U.S. and allied forces across the Indo-Pacific [area of responsibility],” he said.

Gen. Whiting’s comments closely follow a spate of China-linked cyber campaigns that have targeted Western governments and defense companies with malware and appear in line with a wider CCP ambition to dominate critical technology fields, including space technology.

The CCP stated its ambition to become the world’s “space power” leader in a 2022 white paper published by the regime’s State Council Information Office.

Following that publication, the regime became the world’s foremost nation in annual satellite launches and has overseen the development of new modular rocket systems and the ongoing construction of a joint moon base with Russia.

Importantly, the CCP white paper said that the regime would be “proactive” in developing China’s domestic space industry to copy foreign technologies, a process colloquially referred to as technology transfer.

“[The regime will] seize the opportunities presented by the expanding digital industry and the digital transformation of traditional industries, to promote the application and transfer of space technology,” the paper said.

“A number of major space and science projects are in place to promote the leapfrog development of space science and technology, which spearheads overall technical advances.”

Gen. Whiting said that the Space Force had taken actions to make U.S. satellite constellations “more resilient” in the face of such threats by including new defense capabilities on satellites and using larger satellite constellations to ensure that an attack on one would not necessarily disrupt the activities of the whole system.

“We’re seeing a whole host of our constellations now heading in a direction of being more disaggregated, more distributed, having built-in defense capabilities against these threats,” he said.

Gen. Jeff Kruse, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, also spoke at July 17’s event, saying that the CCP sought to use its new space assets to erode U.S. dominance in the international order.

“China aims to displace the United States as the global leader in space and to exploit space in a way that is to our detriment,” Gen. Kruse said.

To that end, the general said that CCP strategic leadership was targeting a perceived “over-reliance on space” by the United States, which depends on space-based infrastructure for everything from financial transactions to mobile map applications.

The regime is therefore investing in the development of weapons designed to destroy or degrade U.S. on-orbit systems, he said.

CCP leadership, he said, believes the threat of these weapons will allow the regime to compel U.S. behavior to align with China’s strategic goals.

“Both Russia and China view the use of space early on, even ahead of conflict, as important capabilities to deter or compel behavior,” Gen. Kruse said.

“Where we see that is just a tremendous increase in directed energy weapons, in electronic warfare, in anti-satellite capabilities.”

Reversible attacks, in which U.S. satellite architecture or cyber systems are compromised temporarily, are largely understood to be a testing of the waters.

That strategy also aligns with the regime’s wider technology-centric operations, including cyber campaigns.

U.S. intelligence leaders state those efforts are part of a strategy to preposition assets in critical infrastructure so that the regime can launch attacks on the U.S. homeland in the event of a military conflict.