With the increasing reliance on space based networks for communication especially in war, American based Secure World foundation has in its report has detailed that Russia, and latest China, have stepped up their electronic warfare efforts to curb the use of commercial satellites in their regions of operations.
In their open source assessment report, titled ‘G L O B A L C O U N T E R S P A C E CAPA B I L I T I E S’, SWF states that Elon Musk’s Starlink has become the primary target of American biggest adversaries.
Russia’s Tried And Tested Systems
Russia, currently in war with Ukraine, has reportedly been able to block Ukraine’s access to Starlink in the past, and according to the report, the first ever reported outage in Ukraine was detected May, 2024. Ukraine attributed the outage to Russia testing different electronic warfare techniques to hinder the ability to use Starlink by Ukrainian military.
Secure World Foundation believes that Russia is currently using two Key systems: Tobol, and Kalinka to target Starlink network.
Tobol was originally developed to protect Russian Satellites from jamming, but some of the Tobol systems, estimated to be three out of the total seven, have been repurposed and used to target Starlink’s signals in the Eastern Ukraine.
But Russia’s latest systems, named Kalinka, posses more threats than the former, and can reportedly detect and disrupt signals to and from Starlink satellites, including Starshield, the military version of Starlink’s terminals used by American military.
China’s Military Focus
The report also indicate that China is stepping up its efforts to ensure it will be able to successfully disrupt American commercial satellites in case of future war with the US.
But unlike Russia’s tried and tested systems, the reports relies on the 2022 study financed by the China’s PLA strategic support force which laid emphasis on the need for China to develop counterspace capabilities to target commercial satellite communications.
China’s military doctrine places special importance to gaining initiative at the onset of a conflict. And the report indicate that China will likely target Space networks of the adversaries in case of a conflict.
Despite this, the Starlink’s constellation of low earth orbit satellites has demonstrated resilience against Jamming and other electronic warfare tactics.
There’s no doubt that while the world increases reliance on space tech, the competition to dominate and/or deny operation in certain areas will also grow, and commercial operators may be caught in the middle of global conflicts.