Pentagon to use data from satellites to counter China and Russia

Pentagon to use data from satellites to counter China and Russia

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satelliteThe Pentagon and intelligence community are developing war plans and an operations center to fend off Chinese and Russian attacks on U.S. military and government satellites.

According to Defense One , the ops center, to be opened within six months, will receive data from satellites belonging to all government agencies, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said Tuesday at the GEOINT symposium, an annual intelligence conference sponsored by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation.

Senior officials at the Pentagon and Office of the Director of National Intelligence are still finalizing details of the new center, which will back up the military’s Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

The center will help the military and government coordinate their preparations for and responses to any attack, said Lt. Cmdr. Courtney Hillson, a spokeswoman for Work.

The hope is that it will also shore up the U.S. technological advantage over China and Russia—the latter of which Work said “represents a clear and present danger”—by coordinating the development of new capabilities. The Defense Department intends to “double down” on geospatial intelligence, and so, via data from satellites, establish patterns of information to suggest unusual movements or suspicious images.

Space, once a “virtual sanctuary,” must now “be considered a contested operational domain in ways that we haven’t had to think about in the past,” he said.

In 2007, China shot down one of its own weather satellites, creating a large field of debris that still orbits Earth. In 2013, China launched a more powerful rocket that could threaten U.S. satellites currently beyond range of ground-launched missiles.“