China has ‘changed the narrative’ by weaponizing space, leading U.S. contractor says

ASPEN, Colorado — China and Russia have been militarizing space with anti-satellite weaponry for more than a decade, and the U.S. should move faster to develop advanced defensive and offensive capabilities in the futuristic domain.

That was a core message of a panel at the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday featuring input from Robert Lightfoot, president of Lockheed Martin Space. Mr. Lightfoot said a “fundamental shift” happened in 2015 when China “declared space a warfighting domain.

“When they did that, they actually changed the narrative,” said Mr. Lightfoot, who had a 29-year career at NASA before joining Lockheed Martin. “Everything we had built before that was to support things that are happening here on Earth. So we didn’t have to worry about protecting that domain.”

Retired Space Force Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno, who also appeared on the panel, said the network of U.S. satellites, whether privately operated or controlled by the government, is “vulnerable because when they were first designed and built … there was no threat in space.”

For decades, the U.S. had the “luxury” of not worrying about urgent threats in space, said Gen. Armagno, who now chairs the Council on Foreign Relations task force on U.S. space policy.

“We don’t have that luxury anymore because Russia and China have built weapons and deployed them in space all the way back to 2007, when China launched an anti-satellite missile [that] destroyed one of their own defunct weather satellites,” she said.

She added that the incident resulted in “thousands of pieces of debris.”

“At first, the community said, ‘Oh my gosh, how could they be so irresponsible?’ But very, very quickly, the community said, ‘This wasn’t irresponsible. This was a statement. This was a show, a demonstration of their capability to destroy not only a Chinese satellite but any satellite that they could reach,’” Gen. Armagno said. “And this was in low earth orbit. Today, they can reach geosynchronous earth orbit, which is 23,000 miles above the Earth’s surface.

“Russia [and] China have ground-based anti-satellite missiles. In space, they can attack our satellites,” she said. “There are ways to attack our ground control stations. … We’re vulnerable to cyberattacks in space. Of course, everything is connected from the satellite — the connective tissue to the ground segment, and then the connective tissue to the user equipment. And for this audience, user equipment is your iPhone. All of those connections are vulnerable.

“The threat is real,” said Gen. Armagno, who emphasized that the U.S. Space Force, created during the first Trump administration in 2019, was “established to protect and defend the domain.”

The comments were made during the opening panel discussion of the Aspen Security Forum, an annual event that organizers tout as bipartisan or nonpartisan and that traditionally features top military and foreign policy officials. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke at Aspen in 2017 as the first Trump administration’s CIA director. Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser and secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, is a regular at the gathering and is slated to appear later this week.

A political cloud has hung over the forum this year because the Trump administration ordered high-level U.S. military officials slated to appear not to attend the gathering.

Chief Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell said Monday that the values of the annual gathering in the Rocky Mountains “do not align with the values of the DoD.” Another Pentagon spokesperson, Kingsley Wilson, said the forum promotes “globalism.”

Organizers have privately vented frustration about the development.

“We extended invitations to senior Trump administration officials, including several cabinet-level leaders,” the Aspen Institute said in a statement. “We will miss the participation of the Pentagon, but our invitations remain open. … The Aspen Security Forum remains committed to providing a platform for informed, non-partisan debate about the most important security challenges facing the world.”

Space Force Gen. Stephen N. Whiting, the head of U.S. Space Command, was slated to appear on a Wednesday panel, “Zero Gravity, High Stakes: The Future of Space.” He was replaced at the last minute by retired Air Force Gen. Timothy M. Ray, a former head of the Pentagon’s Air Force Global Strike Command.

Gen. Ray said that “if we prevail as a nation in the next 50 years, one of the most strategically important decisions we made was to build the Space Force.”

Gen. Ray threw his support behind President Trump’s push to develop a space-based Golden Dome missile defense shield in response to growing ballistic missile and nuclear weapons threats from China and Russia, as well as other rogue actors such as North Korea and Iran.

“It’s going to be key to our survival,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting to debate this.”

Mr. Trump has requested $25 billion for the development of the Golden Dome. His administration has indicated that it believes the missile shield’s development will cost at least $175 billion.

It remains to be seen which agency within the Defense Department will operate the system if it is built.

Gen. Armagno noted that the Space Force budget grew substantially during the service’s initial years but has been “flat” recently.

“They are small and maybe not as savvy as the other services as far as arguing for their capabilities,” she said, adding that the Space Force budget accounts for about 3% of the Defense Department’s roughly $850 billion total budget.

Mr. Lightfoot, meanwhile, said China has advanced dramatically in the space domain in the past decade.

“[They] have increased the number of satellites they have for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance by 500%,” he said, emphasizing the urgency of the situation and the challenge of quickly developing an advanced engineering U.S. workforce that can compete with Beijing in the space domain.

“How do we excite the next generation … to science, technology, engineering, math? That’s drying up,” Mr. Lightfoot said. “China’s graduating ridiculously more engineers than we are. How do we incentivize that as well so we’ve got the workforce? In some cases, it’s not about the money; it’s about the time and the people.”