India’s
anti- satellite test wasn’t really about satellites
“India has no intention to threaten anyone,”
said Narendra Modi, the country's prime minister, during a successful
anti-satellite demonstration Wednesday.
The
modern battlefield has extended to space. Although
we’re not conducting laser battles in orbit (yet), satellite systems are
regularly used to guide missiles and drones to their destination, facilitate
communication between soldiers on the battlefield, and spy on adversaries.
Given how critical space assets are for national security, it’s hardly
surprising that militaries spend a lot of time developing ways to destroy their
enemies’ satellites.
On Wednesday, the Indian Defense
Research and Development Organization, or DRDO, launched a missile that
destroyed one of the country’s own satellites in low Earth orbit. The
successful demonstration, dubbed Mission Shakti, was
revealed during a live televised address from Indian Prime Minister Narendra
Modi, who claimed that “India has no intention to threaten anyone.”
“The main objective of our space
program is ensuring the country’s security, its economic development, and
India’s technological progress,” Modi said. “India has
always been opposed to the weaponization of space and an arms race in outer
space, and this test does not in any way change this position.”
Mission
Shakti made India just the fourth country to successfully destroy a satellite
in orbit, following the US, Russia, and most recently China. Compared with the
international backlash that followed China’s anti-satellite demonstration in
2007, though, the response to India’s test has been relatively subdued.
Daniel
Porras, the space security fellow at the United Nations Institute for
Disarmament Research, says this is likely because the debris from the Indian
anti-satellite test poses less of a hazard to other satellites. “The Chinese
demonstration was carried out at 800 kilometers and was widely condemned
because of the resulting space debris, which will likely stay in orbit for
decades or longer,” according to Porras. “India’s demonstration was conducted
at 300 kilometers, so the debris will likely be out of orbit in months. For
this reason, the reaction has been much less.”
Anti-satellite
missiles are generally touted as a deterrence mechanism, rather than a primary
attack vector. The idea is basically to send a message to other space-faring
nations: "If you destroy our space assets, we’ll destroy yours." The
problem, of course, is that the debris created by a missile ramming into an
adversary’s satellite makes operating in space more dangerous for everyone,
including the country that launched the missile. In this sense, every
successful anti-satellite missile attack is a Pyrrhic victory.
“One
thing to keep in mind about knocking out satellites with military weapons is
that it creates a debris field that all commercial and military satellites of
every country will have to avoid for years to come,” says Daryl Kimball, the
executive director of the Arms Control Association. Things are even worse if an
anti-satellite missile is deployed during a conflict with a nuclear-armed
nation. If that were the case, Kimball adds, the anti-satellite missile would
be seen as an “extremely provocative step, because it could potentially mean
that one side is trying to blind the other from detecting a nuclear attack.”
This could, in theory, escalate the conflict toward nuclear war.
This
is precisely why experts like Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political
science at MIT, think that India’s anti-satellite test probably didn’t have
much to do with satellites. From India’s perspective, its two greatest military
adversaries are Pakistan and China—both of which have nuclear weapons, but only
China has a robust military presence in space. Thus, Narang says, India’s
anti-satellite test is difficult to make sense of because it is “both more
dependent on satellites than Pakistan and it’s also less capable in a relative
sense than China.”
“If
Pakistan starts hitting Indian satellites, India can knock out Pakistan’s very
few satellites,” notes Narang. “China can knock out all of India’s satellites
whereas India cannot do the same to China. So it’s kind of a weird balance for
India if it’s interested in getting into the anti-satellite deterrence game,
[because] it doesn’t really have an advantage in either of its dyads.”
For
this reason, Narang says that the anti-satellite test was more a demonstration
of India’s ballistic missile defense system, rather than its ability to
challenge adversaries in space. Although the DRDO didn’t explicitly name the
type of missile used in the anti-satellite test, Narang pointed out that it
likely was a modified version of the Prithvi missile, which India has been developing
for more than a decade as a way to intercept incoming ballistic missiles.
Even
as a demonstration of the country’s ballistic missile defense system, however,
Narang says the significance of India’s achievement was way overhyped by Modi.
Blowing up a satellite is much easier than intercepting a ballistic missile,
which India successfully demonstrated in 2011, especially at such a low
altitude. Most medium- and long-range ballistic missiles reach apogees well
above 300 kilometers during their flight and have more complicated
trajectories.
“In a
lot of ways, an anti-satellite test is a baby ballistic missile defense test,”
according to Narang. “It’s very easy to hit a satellite [because] its orbit is
very predictable. A ballistic trajectory is harder because it’s coming at an
angle so you have vertical and horizontal differentials you need to deal with.”
Despite its limited effectiveness as
an anti-satellite weapon or a ballistic missile defense system, both Narang and
Kimball saw the test as a potent political symbol as India prepares for general
elections. “You can’t divorce it from the domestic politics in India,” Narang
says. “It’s very provocative to do an ASAT test. It seems like this is an
effort to brandish [Modi’s] security credentials with the general election
coming up and in the wake of the crisis with Pakistan.” Indeed, India’s
opposition party has called for a review of
Modi’s announcement of the ballistic missile test to examine whether it
violated election rules
Nonetheless, Kimball says the
anti-satellite demonstration must be taken seriously as a space weapon. Indeed,
the acting US defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, condemnedthe test,
but also said it shows why America needs to develop a Space Force. So far,
there has been no official statement from the US government—a silence that
Kimball says is “deafening.”
“This
is a problem, whether its a friend or an adversary that conducts a ballistic
missile test that destroys an Earth-orbiting satellite,” contends Kimball. “We
need to be aware that when a country conducts a test of a satellite-killing
technology, it’s a dangerous step. It underscores the urgent need to discuss
some common-sense rules of the road for space behavior.”
