The Pentagon Wants Backup Satellites Ready Before China Takes the First Shot

DARPA’s new space-war plan starts with a grim assumption: Satellites will die

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Hey friends.

The Pentagon’s research shop (DARPA) just asked the defense industry a question that should make your shitty Pentagon coffee go cold.

What if China kills our satellites on day one?

Right about now, a staffer at the Pentagon is reading this and hitting delete on his riveting slideshow titled “Space Resilience 2047.”

DARPA is quietly making the rounds and asking for ideas for restoring satellite services within hours to weeks after an attack.

Hours!

So, the assumption here is the US government believes that China could do a significant amount of damage in the opening hours of any future kinetic fight. Well, that’s unsettling.

Okay, I’m going to look at whether China actually has the ability to do this below, but first…

你好，同志。I’d like to welcome the individuals (or AI scrapers) from the People’s Republic of China who have visited my articles in the past 24 hours. I guess I do write the type of smut that gets scraped, indexed, translated, summarized, and fed into adversary OSINT workflows. 我也在盯着你。

Country locations, past 24 hours visiting wesodonnell dot com here on Substack

The news first

On June 12, DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office released a request for information titled “Rapid Reconstitution of Space Capabilities.” (A request for information is the government version of a help-wanted ad.) No contract, no money on the table yet, just “tell us what you’ve got.” Responses are due July 8.

The ask covers four buckets: the space vehicles themselves (the bus and the payload), launch vehicles, how you bolt the two together, and how you’d actually operate the whole mess in a fight.

DARPA listed dozens of areas of interest: modular and plug-and-play satellite designs, software-defined payloads, rapid manufacturing on the ground and in orbit, proliferated mesh networks, and backup navigation for when GPS gets jammed into uselessness.

Program manager Steven Chambers framed this as expanding the scope of the gap-filler capabilities the Space Force can lean on in a crisis, with the goal of restoring critical services to a minimum level or better on tactical timelines of hours to weeks.

That’s ambitious. Space launches take months to years to plan and execute.

But DARPA isn’t asking how to replace a satellite over three years… It’s asking how to rebuild capability before the enemy can finish exploiting the hole he just punched.

It’s an open secret that the modern American military is particularly dependent on space to wage war. It’s wired into it like a nervous system you can’t see until something cuts a wire.

Communications. Missile warning. GPS and the precise timing that GPS quietly hands out to everything else. Drone navigation. Targeting. Intelligence collection. Command and control. Blue-force tracking, which is the thing that tells your dudes where your other dudes are so you don’t shoot them.

Take that away and the US military goes slower, blinder, less precise, and badly out of sync; like a drunk Russian conscript stumbling into a badger sett at 2 a.m. and discovering, too late, that it was not, in fact, a house of ill repute.

Every advantage America has built since Desert Storm runs on speed, coordination, and knowing more than the other guy. Pull the satellites and you start yanking wires out of the joint force’s brain one at a time.

The body still moves. It just stops knowing exactly where its hands are.

Beijing has been taking diligent notes on the American way of war for thirty years, and they noticed the obvious thing: The US can’t fight across the Pacific without satellites tying the whole orchestra together.

A war over Taiwan would be fought across an ocean. Ships, subs, bombers, tankers, fighters, drones, and supply convoys spread across a battlespace the size of a continent, all of them coordinated through orbit.

China doesn’t have to beat every American platform in a fair fight. It just has to attack the thing that lets those platforms talk to each other.

The goal is friction.

Jam the GPS. Dazzle the optical sensors with ground lasers. Hit the ground stations with cyberattacks. Park a co-orbital satellite next to ours and let it shadow, inspect, or interfere. US Space Force officials have already described China practicing “dogfighting” maneuvers with satellites in orbit.

The empire strikes back

Okay, so does China even have this capability?

It’s a fair question…

The good news is that China is not going to mash one red button and turn the entire American satellite fleet into a cloud of glitter.

Satellites live in different orbits, at different altitudes, doing different jobs, talking to different ground stations, owned by different people, built with different amounts of backup.

Some are giant national-security birds.

Some are commercial comms satellites.

Some are imaging platforms.

Some are GPS or missile-warning systems.

Some are tiny nodes in a swarm of hundreds.

Some are American, some allied, some neutral, and some Chinese.

A big debris-spewing attack wouldn’t happen inside a tidy little military sandbox. It would happen in the same orbital neighborhood China lives in and Beijing has its own growing fleet up there doing surveillance, communications, navigation, and targeting. All of it needs that environment to stay usable.

Start smashing satellites wholesale and you poison the well you drink from.

So, I don’t think the danger was never China deleting space. The danger is China hitting the right satellites, at the right moment, in the right order, to leave the US military slower, blinder, and a half-step behind during the opening of a Pacific war.

China only needs to degrade the handful of space services that decide a Taiwan fight: communications across the Pacific, GPS and the timing signal that rides on it, missile warning, targeting data, radar imaging, carrier tracking, and the command networks lashing ships, subs, aircraft, drones, and ground troops into one coordinated punch.

Knock enough offline at the wrong minute and the joint force starts losing tempo, which in a fight that size is the same as losing ground.

Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall gets at the same problem in his forthcoming book, Lethal Autonomy. In his chapter on space war, Kendall warns that responsive launch only matters if the payloads are already built, available, and survivable. Otherwise, a fast rocket is just a very expensive way to get an empty launch pad excited.

DARPA’s request lands in that exact gap between launch speed and actual wartime reconstitution.

By the way, stay tuned for a review of Kendall’s book right here on Substack. I’ll be releasing it a little closer to book’s release day in July. You can pre-order here. I get no compensation for recommending or reviewing this book.

China’s suspected counterspace toolbox

There are five tools in the kit, and they run from loud to invisible.

First, the kinetic option: direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles. These are ground-launched interceptors that fly up and physically smash a satellite, mostly in low Earth orbit (the busy lane a few hundred miles up where a lot of imaging and comms birds fly).

China proved it could do this back in 2007, when it destroyed its own dead Fengyun-1C weather satellite and littered orbit with thousands of pieces of shrapnel that are still up there causing problems. The Pentagon assesses China already fields missiles to kill satellites in low orbit and wants the reach to threaten higher orbits too.

Outside analysts at the Secure World Foundation track this under the SC-19, DN-2, and DN-3 test programs. This is the bluntest instrument in the box, and the one most likely to make orbit dangerous for everybody including China.

Second, the co-orbital option: satellites that hunt other satellites. These maneuver in close to another spacecraft. Officially they’re for “inspection, servicing, or refueling,” and that’s a real and useful thing.

The catch is that a satellite that can gently dock with a friendly bird can also grab a hostile one, and the hardware looks about the same either way.

In January 2022, China’s Shijian-21 satellite used a robotic arm to drag a dead BeiDou navigation satellite up into a graveyard orbit, which is genuinely impressive engineering and also exactly the move you’d want for grappling someone else’s satellite.

In 2024, three Shiyan-24C experimental satellites and two older Shijian-6 craft ran a series of close-up maneuvers in low orbit, some within about a kilometer of each other, that the Space Force compared to dogfighting.

Third, the usable option: electronic warfare. This is probably the first thing China actually reaches for, because it’s reversible, deniable, and easy to dial up or down. Stop transmitting and the effect just ends, no debris, no smoking crater, plausible shrug all around.

The Pentagon says China fields ground-based jammers now and is working toward space-based ones, including kit to spoof GPS-type navigation signals (feeding a receiver a convincing lie about where it is) and to jam military SATCOM across multiple frequency bands, up to the extremely high frequency links the US uses for its most protected communications. They’re also assessed to be building jammers aimed at radar-imaging satellites.

Fourth, the directed-energy option: lasers, pew pew. These dazzle, blind, degrade, or eventually damage a satellite’s sensors, and they’re especially nasty against optical imaging birds, the ones that see by collecting light.

The Pentagon says China has chased directed-energy weapons for decades and has already deployed multiple ground-based lasers able to disrupt, degrade, or damage satellite sensors, with higher-power systems able to hurt the satellite’s structure expected by the mid-to-late 2020s.

Fifth, the quiet option: cyber. Maybe the most practical. You don’t have to shoot the satellite if you can get into the network that flies it, or the ground station that talks to it, or the commercial provider the military quietly leans on.

The Pentagon has tied China to cyberattacks on foreign satellite networks and warns that state-sponsored crews like Volt Typhoon are pre-positioning inside US infrastructure ahead of any fight. The assessment is blunt: Chinese cyber operations would go after satellites, ground stations, and support nodes early to choke the data flow the joint force runs on.

Put it together and you can see what DARPA is actually worried about, where enough of the network gets jammed, blinded, grappled, or hacked that the most coordinated military on Earth suddenly has to fight through fog at the exact moment it needs to see clearly.

That’s how you’d try to win the first day.

Russia has already proven this isn’t theoretical. Germany’s defense minister said Russian reconnaissance satellites were caught tracking two Intelsat satellites used by the German military, and the head of UK Space Command, Major General Paul Tedman, said Russia is persistently jamming British military satellites on a roughly weekly basis while flying close enough to collect off them.

A Canadian space commander put the number of anti-satellite weapons already orbiting Earth at more than 200, which he called a shocking figure. I agree.

So Russia shows you the behavior. China shows you the scale.

Or, Russia is the guy waving a knife in the gas station parking lot at 2 a.m. China is the sober engineer in the corner quietly photographing where the building keeps its fire exits.

Victus Nox solved half the problem

In 2023, the Space Force flew a mission called Victus Nox where Firefly and Millennium launched a satellite 27 hours after getting the order, shattering the old responsive-launch record.

That proved America can get a rocket off the pad fast.

But a fast rocket only answers half the question. The other half is what you’re putting on top of it. If the replacement satellite takes three years to build, a 24-hour launch is just a very expensive Uber idling at the curb with nobody to pick up.

DARPA’s new ask is about the passenger, not the Uber. Can industry build satellites in modular blocks?

Can payloads be reprogrammed on orbit?

Can manufacturers keep partial inventory warm?

Can a commercial production line surge for the military when the shooting starts?

Software-defined satellites are the actual story

A software-defined payload lets a satellite change jobs.

A comms satellite isn’t going to magically become a missile-warning satellite, but future satellites can be built with flexible radios, reconfigurable sensors, and mission software that lets them fill a partial gap when the network takes damage.

The military thinks in exactly these terms already. A platoon loses people, the squad reorganizes and keeps moving.

A ship goes down, another ship takes its station.

DARPA wants the satellite fleet to behave less like a collection of priceless one-off museum pieces and more like a rifle platoon.

Lose a capability, reshuffle, press on. This is why in the infantry we called ourselves “high-velocity projectile interceptors.” (AKA bullet catchers.)

We were, ahem, expendable. Hence, the dark humor I inherited for life.

But it’s on-orbit assembly that changes the repair game.

This is the most futuristic piece, so keep your feet on the ground. Instead of launching one finished satellite, you launch modules. A power block. A propulsion block. A sensor block. Then you dock and combine them in orbit, and you swap out the broken part instead of throwing away the whole spacecraft.

It’s hard.

Rendezvous, docking, robotics, standardized plugs, cybersecurity, debris avoidance, who’s allowed to give the command. Nobody’s pretending this is easy. But if it works, it drags the satellite fleet from “launch it and pray” toward “maintain it, repair it, reconfigure it.”

Right now, most satellites are sealed appliances. If your refrigerator is in orbit, you don’t fix it, you replace it. DARPA’s asking whether the next generation can be built more like field equipment: modular, repairable, and ugly in all the ways that keep you alive.

By the way, there’s a program called the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, and the best way to understand it is the Civil Reserve Air Fleet. CASR is modeled directly on that idea, where the military gets access to commercial aircraft in an emergency, except now it’s commercial satellites.

In a crisis, the Pentagon can lean on private operators for comms, imagery, data relay, and sheer numbers.

Commercial space has exploded, and the military no longer owns the whole problem. Ukraine proved the point in real time. Starlink, commercial imagery, and private radar data have all shaped that war from the first weeks.

The Pentagon is trying to bottle that lesson before a bigger one arrives. Commercial space is becoming the reserve component of the orbital battlefield, the same way the National Guard backs up the active force.

The deterrence payoff

Reconstitution might be about recovering after the punch. But what if you could make the punch not worth throwing? If China believes blowing up our satellites blinds America for months or years, that’s a tempting prize and a reason to swing first.

But if China believes the US can restore the capability in days, the prize shrinks until it’s barely worth the escalation.

“Fast rebuild” quietly takes that trophy off the shelf and tosses it in the trash with the rest of my participation trophys.

But all of this only works if the entire chain works: Spare payloads, launch vehicles, trained crews, hardened ground stations, approval authorities who can say yes in hours instead of months, pre-negotiated commercial contracts, manufacturing that can surge, cyber-secure command links, and funding for boring spare capacity in peacetime, when no crisis is screaming and the spreadsheet looks fat and happy.

That last one is the whole ballgame. You can’t improvise an industrial base after the satellites are already gone. Everybody loves resilience right up until somebody asks who’s paying for the spare parts in a quiet budget year.

There’s plenty still unanswered.

Whether industry can actually build fast enough.

Whether modular satellites can do the hard military missions or just the easy ones.

Whether “software-defined” turns out to be real flexibility or a buzzword with solar panels.

Whether reconstitution can even happen while you’re under cyberattack.

Worth watching… all of it.

What this says about the first day

So, an RFI is the Pentagon thinking out loud, and this one tells you what it’s now assuming.

A future war with China may open with attacks on satellites, navigation, and sensing. The first day might be about blinding, confusing, and delaying the American response before a single ship is hit.

The ships will still sail.

The jets will still fly.

The Marines will still eat crayons.

But the opening shots of the next major war might look like a screen going dark in an operations center while everyone in the room slowly realizes the map stopped updating.

DARPA is basically saying satellites just got drafted into the attrition fight, same as tanks and troops and everything else that bleeds.

America spent decades becoming the most space-enabled military on Earth. We’re learning that the incredible advantages that we once enjoyed may actually have a dark side.

May the Force be with you.

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