[Jamestown.org] PLA Perceptions of and Reactions to U.S. Military Activities in Low Earth Orbit
Executive Summary:
- Space industry experts within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have observed and drawn lessons from the United States’s use of space as a warfighting domain since the 1990s. These experts tend to characterize the deployment of proliferated low earth orbit (pLEO) constellations, such as the privately-owned Starlink constellation, as an application of the Department of Defense’s resilient space concept.
- The PLA views Starlink as challenging its core operational concept of multi-domain precision warfare due to the decentralized nature of pLEO constellations. It attributes many unconfirmed, hyperbolic capabilities to Starlink, which contributes to the belief that Starlink is creating a strategic imbalance between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in space.
- The PRC has begun developing its own comparable megaconstellation, Project SatNet, which PLA analysts see as enabling similar capabilities to Starlink and which they also envision as countering Starlink.
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