Taking Off the Gloves: U.S. Loosens Rules on Offensive Counterspace Ops

How Space Policy Shift Will Impact Operations

Good morning,

This has been a fairly big week in space news. The DoD has loosened restrictions on Space Force and SPACECOM’s ability to conduct offensive counterspace operations. Much of those operations are electronic warfare (EW)—often jamming, a form of electronic attack (EA)—of other satellites. If you’ve missed it, we’ve been talking A LOT about EW and electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO) lately. China is taking EW very seriously and racing forward with plans that could catch the U.S. on our collective heels.

Other offensive counterspace operations include direct ascent anti-satellite (DA-ASAT), which is shooting a missile at a satellite. We have the ability to do that, but we don’t anticipate the authority to do so being delegated during competition. It’s too messy, too attributable. It exacerbates the already growing challenges of space debris. Similarly, rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO), in which a space craft maneuvers close to another before interactin…