Jeffrey Kluger writes:

On Sept. 14, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said the quiet part out loud. Speaking at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md., Meink openly conceded something U.S. policymakers have been avoiding acknowledging for years—that the American military intends to weaponize space, and indeed, that it already has hostile hardware in Earth orbit.

“We are increasing readiness against existing threats,” Meink said. “[T]he United States has on orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action.”

The announcement was headline-making both for what it said about the escalation of weapons development to off-planet domains, and for Meink’s surprising candor. Weaponization of space has been officially forbidden under international law since Jan. 27, 1967, when the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies—better known simply as the Outer Space Treaty—was signed and ratified by the U.S., the U.K., and the old U.S.S.R. Since then, 112 other countries have joined the pact. China, which was not remotely a global power at the time the treaty was adopted, signed on to it in 1983.

But the agreement has been honored as much in the breach as in the observance—at least by the U.S., China, and modern-day Russia. As long ago as 1985, the U.S. Air Force shot down a defunct American weather satellite with a missile launched by a military jet flying at 31,500 ft., a first test of a technology that could just as easily be used against the space assets of enemy nations. The Soviet Union experimented with similar R&D beginning in 1983, but did not succeed at it until 2021, when it famously destroyed a Soviet-era satellite with a ground-based missile. Beijing beat Moscow to the punch 14 years earlier, skeet-shooting a Feng Yun-1C weather satellite out of the sky with a projectile fired by a ground-launched ballistic missile, scoring a hit more than 500 miles up.

The U.S. has—officially at least—disavowed and condemned this kind of cosmic escalation. At the time of the Chinese action, senior members of the George W. Bush administration criticized the move as “very troubling,” “very worrisome,” “destabilizing,” and “quite unpleasant.” A senior Air Force spokesperson told the media flatly, “We don’t want to do that.” But what America ostensibly wants to do and what it has actually been doing are two different things. [Continue reading…]