[Defense] China's "space weaponry" arsenal "includes missiles that launch from the Earth that go up and destroy satellites, it includes lasers, it includes jammers, it includes a whole magazine of diversity for that," a top Space Force officer said.The Space Force is concentrating fully half of its intelligence-gathering activities on China to keep tabs on Beijing’s rapid evolution as a space power to reckon with, according to the service’s senior intelligence officer.
"From an intelligence perspective ... about half of what we do is focused on China. About 25 percent of what we do is focused on Russia, and a lot of that has to do because of the current conflict [i.e., in Ukraine]," Maj. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, Space Force deputy chief of space operations for intelligence, told the Space Force Association yesterday.
"And about 25 percent of what we do is focused on what we call the rest of world, or the commercial sector — not spying on the commercial sector, but just understanding the commercial sector from an intelligence perspective."
Gagnon said that there are now "1,500-plus space intelligence professionals" in the Space Force, and that the service is already seeing benefits, particularly with regards to educating the Defense Department writ large about the growing threats to US space systems.
The Space Force’s key intelligence operation is the National Space Intelligence Center (NSIC), also known as Delta 18 under Space Operations Command, which was stood up in June 2022, at Wright Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio.
"NSIC ... does an excellent job of understanding kind of that that broader portfolio China, Russia, rest of world plus commercial so that we can not be surprised," Gagnon noted.
Referencing Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s focus on China as the US military’s key peer adversary, Gagnon explained that the Chinese government in particular bears persistent monitoring because of the pace at which it has been improving its space capabilities across the board.
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