The US Military Can’t Stop Talking About Space Weapons

After decades of silence, the US military is suddenly chatty on the topic of space weapons.

Earlier this week, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink revealed at the Air, Space & Cyber Conference in Maryland that the US has fielded “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action.” The next day, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Schiess echoed the same message. 

Two days later, I listened to Gen. Stephen N. Whiting, the commander of the US Space Command, put his own spin on the space weapons announcement during the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference.

“The Joint Force retains on-orbit space control weapons fully capable of defending the United States and its interests against hostile adversary actions,” Whiting said. 

Whiting did not elaborate on what those weapons are, if they’d target objects in space or on Earth or how long they’ve been active. 

“We need the ability to affect targets,” he told a group of reporters after his address. “The discussion that we’ve had over the last couple days just highlights that we have those capabilities.”

The idea that the US is fielding space weapons didn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone in the industry. The shock was the timing. Why are Washington’s top commanders suddenly broadcasting the militarization of space this week?

“I still don’t get it. Why now?” said Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability, Secure World Foundation. “Russia and China are going to look at this as continued evidence that the US is a bad actor in space. This makes our job of getting international participants to sign on to our vision of responsible behavior in space that much harder.”

I sat down with Whiting and a group of reporters to ask these questions. But like the other commanders discussing space weapons this week, he largely declined to get into specifics.   

Military officials blame China and Russia

In the meeting with reporters after his address, Whiting pointed to China and Russia as the first countries to deploy space weapons. 

“China and Russia have developed and fielded counter-space weapons, the whole range of kinetic and nonkinetic capabilities,” he said. “That is not in doubt, and that has happened.”

Russia used a ground-based missile to blow up one of its own defunct satellites in 2021, an event that created more than 1,500 pieces of debris larger than a softball and likely hundreds of thousands of smaller pieces. China has also deployed similar antisatellite weapons in the past – most notably a 2007 incident that created the largest debris cloud in history. 

While there haven’t been confirmed instances of China and Russia deploying orbital weapons against adversaries, the experts I spoke with at AMOS said aggressive behavior is commonplace, including actions that look like data siphoning from adversary satellites or communications jamming. 

“Between China and Russia on orbit, this is happening all the time,” said Jason Ruggieri, a director at COMSPOC, a company that tracks objects in space. “We can’t make an assessment when they have a close approach with a satellite about what exactly they were doing, but we can make assumptions based on open-source intelligence.”

What do space weapons look like?

When I polled space experts at AMOS about what type of weapon the US military officials are referring to, communications jammers was the most common answer. 

“The Russians and Chinese are thought to have them. It seems pretty obvious,” said Samsen. “Before this, the US had three declared offensive counter-space capabilities — all jammers. Those are like intro to counter-space capabilities or basic stepping stones. So if it was like that on Earth, I don’t know why it wouldn’t be that in space.”

Both China and Russia swiftly condemned the US for escalating tensions in space. 

“We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space,” Chinese ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said in response to Meink’s comments. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also called on Tuesday to keep space “free of any weapons.”

Whiting framed this week’s flurry of announcements as the logical conclusion to a decade of militarization in space. 

“Uniformed warfighters have capabilities to be able to defend American interests in their domain. That is not a controversial statement for those who operate in the air or at sea, on the land or in cyber. But it may be a new statement for us in space,” he said. “It is all about normalizing the domain as a place that we defend American interests.’

President Donald Trump has made dominance in space a priority during his second stint in office. On Aug. 20, he set a target of “1,000 launches and reentries every year” by 2030, many of which would deliver military payloads to orbit. For comparison, 2025 saw 193 launches in the US – 85% of which were from SpaceX, according to BryceTech. 

A week after taking office in 2025, Trump also directed the Department of Defense to create a Golden Dome missile defense system using thousands of satellites that would be equipped with orbital weapons. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would cost $1.2 trillion to develop and operate over 20 years. 

None of the military officials said what kind of space weapon the US has deployed already, but an official who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity said it could be a weapon that would allow the military to take out an enemy’s satellite if it’s being used to target American troops or a US satellite.

“US allies and partners are going to say, ‘Oh, if the US thinks it needs weapons in space, we probably do too.’ And it will proliferate,” Samsen said. “Truly it’ll be an arms race in space.”