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Khushboo Razdan

A senior US Space Force official said the Pentagon has set its sights on the early 2030s to deploy satellites bearing advanced sensors for tracking airborne and ground targets so that America can keep pace with security threats posed by China and Russia.
“I would say you’re looking at probably the early ‘30s for some of that capability to start coming online,” said General Michael Guetlein, vice-chief of space operations, at a Defence News conference in Virginia on Wednesday.
Guetlein shared his estimate when asked about the Space Force’s timeline for deploying new intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities in space.
As adversaries had become “very good” at “denying oversight of their territory”, the US now needed to operate from increasingly higher altitudes to maintain battlefield visibility, he said.


Guetlein also stressed a need to focus on ground moving target indication (GMTI) and air moving target indication (AMTI), noting that the US had begun to invest in both.
Moving target indicators are radar sensors that can track objects in real time, such as Chinese warships entering the South China Sea or Russian tanks moving through Ukraine.
The advanced sensors can distinguish between moving and stationary objects, offering precise location data and even predicting future trajectories.
At present, the US Air Force manages space-based AMTI missions, but its ageing Boeing E-3 Sentry aircraft, also known as Awacs, are due for replacement.
Meanwhile, America’s spy satellites are overseen by the National Reconnaissance Office, a Pentagon agency, with the Defence Department’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency distributing space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance imagery and analysis to US government users.
Guetlein saw the American arrangement as offering “a layered set of capabilities to increase survivability, first and foremost”.
He believed the US faced its most challenging global environment since the Cold War, describing the great-power competition “between near peers” as having returned “with a vengeance”.

China and Russia represented “pacing challenges”, he explained, each possessing “incredible” capabilities that threatened “our space, our use of space, as well as our allies’ and partners’ use of space”.
The long-time US Air Force general said China “has nearly 1,000 satellites in orbit, about 500 of which are capable of tracking and targeting our joint and coalition forces”.
And he argued that “our competitors also demonstrated deployment of offensive capabilities that can target and destroy space systems in all orbital regimes”.
“If we fail to counter them, our adversaries will control space, which will enhance their ability to wage war, and the world as we know it will change dramatically,” Guetlein said in advocating that Space Force get a bigger portion of the Pentagon’s budget.
In view of the threats, the Space Force budget needed “more, not fewer, resources to do our job”, he added, saying “resources need to double or triple to adequately fund the Space Force’s mission”.
In the yet-to-pass Pentagon budget for 2025, the Space Force has requested US$29.4 billion – about US$210 million less than in 2024 – owing to budget constraints.


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Senior Space Force official describes Beijing and Moscow as ‘pacing challenges’ that can ‘target and destroy space systems’ in all orbits.
