U.S. Space Force General Details Strategy U.S. Is Using To Counteract Chinese Aggression In Race For Space Dominance

General David Thompson, Vice Chief of Space Operations, United States Space Force, told Fox News on Sunday that while China is aggressively challenging U.S. dominance in space, the U.S. is launching more lower-cost satellites to deter any attacks on American satellites in space.

“China is a tremendous threat,” Thompson said, “Now, I don’t think it’s a forgone conclusion that they will be the leader in space by the end of the decade, but they’re on an incredible pace. We are still the best in the world in space. Our capabilities are the best in the world in space, but they’re moving aggressively, they’re moving quickly, and we need to adapt our approach. We need to adapt what we do and how we do it in order to keep pace and outpace them. But they are a threat. They can threaten us kinetically.”

Thompson warned that China has “robots in space that conduct attacks” and “they can conduct jamming attacks and laser dazzling attacks” in addition to having “a full suite of cyber capabilities.”

When asked by anchor Chris Wallace if China could get to a point where they could “take out U.S. sensors and thereby have a first strike offensive capability,” Thompson responded, “I would say that’s a potential.”

“That’s one of the reasons the Space Force was created, to understand that threat, to design tactics and techniques, to design counters to that threat, to design a system that provides for intelligence collection and awareness and understanding,” Thompson said. “So that just as we do in other domains, we know their capabilities, we know their tactics, we know their systems, and we create counters. And it’s our job in the Space Force to ensure, should they propose to attack us with something like a space robot or other things, we have counter measures, we have tactics, and we have means to employ to prevent that attack from being successful.”

Wallace later asked about the U.S. “putting more, lower cost satellites up” in space and whether that was part of a strategy.

“Exactly right,” Thompson responded. “The, you know, the term we use is resilience, and we make it such that it’s too hard, too expensive, and too unlikely that they’ll succeed in creating a — the effect they want because, rather than the past, when we’ve had a small number of very sophisticated, very capable satellites, we now intend to field more and more and more lower-cost, lower-capable that provide, in aggregate, the same capability. Therefore, there’s not as much value in attempting to attacking them in space.”

CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: This week the Biden administration laid out its approach to space policy with a focus on national security given provocative actions by countries like China and Russia. Earlier, I discussed those threats with General David Thompson, the vice chief of operations for the U.S. Space Force. General Thompson, welcome.

GENERAL DAVID THOMPSON, VICE CHIEF OF SPACE OPERATIONS, UNITED STATES SPACE FORCE: Good morning. Great to be here.

WALLACE: Your boss, General Raymond, compares space to the wild west. Just how wild is the situation in space?

THOMPSON: Well, first of all let me say that it’s an incredibly growing and dynamic domain, and — and some of that contributes to what you’ll call the wildness of — of space. In the past two years alone, the number of active satellites in space has doubled. It’s gone to nearly 5,000 things. Now, a lot of energy is in the — in the commercial investment and innovation we see, but there aren’t really an agreed to international set of standards and norms of behavior that are expected in space.

WALLACE: Yes, I want to pick up on that. If the Space Force is the new sheriff in town, how do you keep law and order in that kind of situation, and what constitutes an act of war in space?

THOMPSON: So, the answer — let me start there, the answer to what constitutes an act of war in space is not really clear — I’ll say clearly defined or understood and perhaps there’s been less thinking in that — and then in other areas and other domains. What we are not, though, is we are not the sheriff in town, we are a military force, but we firmly advocate for regulation and conduct and standards of norms behavior that everybody should follow and that we should follow as well.

WALLACE: And does anyone — the other nations, especially China, especially Russia, do they listen to us in that area?

THOMPSON: There are conversations ongoing. They put forward proposals as well. So do we. But things have not proceeded very — very far in the recent past. We’ve tried to facilitate it. It’s really under the leadership of the Department of State. But, recently, the Secretary of Defense outlined what I’ll call five tenets

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