As China rockets beyond Earth, ‘it will not be long before space becomes a battleground’

Hours after China launched its first manned spaceflight, a senior US general and a former Pentagon official said they foresaw combat in space.

“In my view it will not be long before space becomes a battleground,” Lieutenant General Edward Anderson, deputy commander of US Northern Command, said in response to a question at a geospatial intelligence conference. Anderson formerly served with US Space Command.

“Our military forces … depend very, very heavily on space capabilities, and so that is a statement of the obvious to our potential threat, whoever that may be,” Anderson said.

Without referencing China, Rich Haver, former senior intelligence aide to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, agreed: “I believe space is the place we will fight in the next 20 years.”

Potential enemies of the US “can see that one of the ways that they can certainly diminish our capabilities will be to attack the space systems,” Anderson said.

For additional information, read New Developments In Russia-China Military Relations: A Report on the August 19-23 2003 Moscow Aerospace Salon (MAKS), by Richard D. Fisher, Jr., Asian Security Studies Fellow at the Center for Security Policy. This report was prepared for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.