U.S. Space Force Looking Into Attacking Chinese Satellites, Lt. Gen. Outlines
"Sometimes you got to turn around and punch."
At this year’s Air & Space Forces Association’s annual Warfare Symposium (February 23rd to 25th), a key commander within the U.S. Space Force outlined that the military space agency is exploring deploying capabilities to attack orbiting spacecraft, citing a so-called threat from China according to The War Zone.
The desire to deploy offensive orbital capabilites were shared by Lieutenant General Gregory Gagnon, head of the U.S. Space Force’s Combat Forces Command, tasked with ensuring that American spacecraft are combat-ready. In The War Zone’s report, Gagnon was quoted as stating:
“Sometimes you got to turn around and punch. . . . We also need, as part of our joint force, the ability to attack.”
The Lieutenant General’s rationale for needing offensive capabilities was China’s number of satellites in orbit, said to be about 1,900. Within those satellites, remote sensing spacecraft were singled out as the primary concern, where he broadly, and falsely, claimed:
“Over 500 of those satellites are remote sensing satellites, which are purposely designed and networked to track mobile forces such as U.S. carriers, destroyers, and cruisers in the Pacific, as well as aircraft that deploy around the Pacific. Those have been built with a purpose. The purpose is to cue their long-range fire weapons.”
It is accurate that China has over 500 remote sensing spacecraft, now over 640 as of the Chinese New Year, but they are not being deployed with the driving purpose of tracking American activity in its abundant global military bases. In reality, the number of dedicated remote sensing satellites has been driven by a for-profit commercial boom that has resulted in hyper-specialized spacecraft, such as the power-grid monitoring Power Infrared Satellite-A (电力红外卫星A星). Affordable services by a competitive market have allowed for niche-focused spacecraft.
Regardless of reality, Lieutenant General Gagnon outlined that a variety of offensive capabilities are wanted by the U.S. Space Force as it no longer wants to just ‘protect and defend’ its own satellites. Offensive capabilities would be highly destructive kinetic impactors and robots to tear a spacecraft's systems off, to less damaging laser, microwave, and chemical-based weapons, and non-destructive jamming or software hijacking.
Recognizing the wants of the military, American industry has put forward plans for orbiting ‘carriers’ to the Space Force, for which they have granted a contract to pursue the concept further. Additionally, a U.S. company is developing orbital weapons using its own finances, believing in the prospect of future military contracts.
Offensive capabilities could not just be limited to future U.S. military spacecraft, as back in December 2025 the Lieutenant General declared that the Combat Forces Command should be ready to fight with what they currently have in orbit.
Despite efforts to hype up a threat from China in orbit, a study from the U.S. Air Force’s Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute last year found that the country is unlikely to provoke or act in a way that would start a conflict in orbit. That ‘discovery’ was concluded from an unwillingness from China to put its own space-based communications, navigation, and weather infrastructure under threat, mainly to continue economic growth and national modernization plans.
In addition, if China were to start an orbital conflict, research has found that any ‘attack’ on another country’s spacecraft would be in a non-destructive and reversible way as a means to enable a path to de-escalation.