Space, often called the final frontier, is fast becoming central to how wars will be fought on the planet. From communication to guiding weapons onto the cap of a bottle to keeping the adversary under persistent observation, a lot of critical opportunities are now permanently on orbit. From the earliest days of combat, the importance of high ground has been well understood. This high ground has been moving higher and is now well established in space. With nations continuously strengthening their space-based capabilities. Even India is planning to have a constellation of 52 satellites up in space by 2029. These satellites will provide the Indian armed forces a continuous set of eyes in the sky, provide secure communications and improve the situational awareness for commanders. The assets established in this new high ground will cut through what for centuries has been known as the fog of war.This dependence on space-based assets is only growing, with more capabilities now being put in orbit. The more widespread use of precision weapons and now the increasing use of autonomous systems has increased the dependence on satellites for the purpose of Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT). Increasingly, as the nature of combat moves towards a network-centric environment, this new paradigm primarily differs from the previous modes as it depends more openly on different systems located at various locations to form a common battlefield picture in which the sensors and shooters talk to each other automatically. In such a large design, satellites provide an invisible thread to a large number of nodes in a massive web of assets that could be spread across hundreds of kilometers. Satellites provide the most efficient solution of keeping all systems in the same information network. Before this new pattern, militaries relied on linear kill chains, which were rigid and linear, the destruction or neutralisation of a single element in this paradigm would put an end to the entire operation.One effective way to degrade a kill web would be to neutralise or destroy satellites that are instrumental in bearing the weight of the entire network. This is easier said than done. Four countries, including India, apart from the US, China and Russia, possess the capability to take down satellites of hostile nations.
Treaty governing warfare in space
The era of space exploration is closely intertwined with the Cold War between the United States, which led NATO, and the Soviet Union, which formed the Warsaw Pact. From before the launch of he very first satellite, both sides of the Iron Curtain were looking at ways to weaponise the last frontier. As the danger of weaponizing became clear to both sides, it was decided to limit the use of the black skies of space to bring darkness to Earth. In 1967 Russia and the US, just a decade after the launch of the first satellite—Sputnik—signed the Outer Space Treaty, formally called the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. 118 countries, including India and China, are parties to the agreement, while another 20 nations are signatories to this critical multinational agreement.The Outer Space Treaty bars nuclear weapons in space and reserves the Moon and other celestial bodies strictly for peaceful use. It establishes space as free for exploration by all nations and blocks any country from claiming sovereignty over it. This also hurts Donald Trump’s claim to the moon, as the US is a party to the agreement found under the auspices of the United Nation. Military bases, weapons testing and manoeuvres on celestial bodies are explicitly prohibited. Notably, though, the treaty does not ban all military activity in space. It also does not prevent nations from setting up military space forces or deploying conventional weapons in orbit.
The act of destruction
Find, fix and finish, this as the name suggests is how militaries define the three stages of destroying a target. Find as the name suggests is the first step, this phase is linked to identification and initial detection of a target. The process here relies on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to discover where the target is located. Once the position of a target is identified, the next step is to fix the target, this means pinpointing the target’s exact position with high accuracy and locking down its movement. The terminal step oof this stage act is called – finish. In this phase the actual violent act of firing the weapon to neutralise or destroy the target.In terms of satellites, these tasks get progressively more difficult as one moves through the sequence. Finding a satellite being the easiest phase as satellites are continuously monitored as our their orbits. This is done due to deconflicting. As thousands of satellites are now in space, it becomes imperative to keep the space deconflicted as a collision between two objects each flying through space at speeds measured in thousands of kilometers per hour could create a large debris field that could affect even more satellites. For this reason the movement of all satellites is tracked by space agencies. The known orbits of a satellite helps in tracking and accurately predicting the position of these objects, thereby taking care of the find and fix element.Finish on the other hand is the most difficult task and only four countries have this advanced capability. Space is fast turning into a contested battlefield, and the tools of anti-satellite warfare are already being tested in real conflicts. The Ukraine war opened with a cyberattack on the Viasat satellite network hours before Russian tanks rolled in, degrading Kyiv’s military communications before a single shot was fired on the ground. Jamming and spoofing have since become routine on that battlefield, with China and Iran both fielding jammers, and low-powered GPS jammers now available for a few dollars online. Satellites in the geo-synchronous orbit are out of reach of most ground based anti-satellite weapons, but are deadly to objects in the low earth orbit.Kinetic ASAT weapons remain the most destructive option on the table. China’s 2007 missile test on a dead weather satellite created thousands of debris fragments expected to linger in orbit for seven decades, prompting America’s own Operation Burnt Frost the following year. Any nation with basic missile and tracking capability, even Iran or North Korea, could theoretically strike a satellite given how predictable orbital paths are.Equally worrying are co-orbital satellites like Russia’s Luch-1 and Luch-2, which have made suspicious close approaches to other spacecraft. The larger fear underpinning all this is Kessler Syndrome, a scenario where cascading collisions generate so much orbital debris that entire swathes of space become unusable, threatening the satellite-dependent global economy itself.As reported by ToI in May last year, India too ran a sophisticated space “dogfight,” with a chaser and target satellite conducting coordinated, close-range manoeuvres nearly 500 kilometres above Earth, an extension of ISRO’s SPADEX mission. The exercise followed China’s own satellite dogfighting tests in low Earth orbit back in 2024. Travelling at 28,800 kilometres per hour, some 28 times faster than a commercial jet and ten times the speed of a bullet, the two satellites autonomously executed rendezvous and proximity manoeuvres, essentially practising the delicate choreography of approaching, tracking and manoeuvring around each other in orbit, a capability with clear strategic as well as societal applications for India’s growing space programme.ISRO laid the groundwork for protecting India’s space assets back in August 2019, when it laid the foundation stone for a Space Situational Awareness Control Centre in Bengaluru. Built around NETRA, the Network for Space Object Tracking and Analysis, at the ISTRAC campus in Peenya, the facility combined radars and telescopes to monitor and track debris and potential threats to Indian satellites. The setup included a sophisticated multi-object tracking radar in Nellore, another in Northeast India, and telescopes in Thiruvananthapuram, Mount Abu and North India, covering all directions of approach.Crucially, the network was designed to reduce India’s reliance on the US-run NORAD for space situational awareness data. A related Space Situational Awareness Data Sharing pact with the US, signed later in 2022, allowed ISRO to collaborate directly with America’s Combined Space Operations Center to safeguard both countries’ satellites from natural and man-made threats. The move reflected ISRO’s growing recognition that with more assets in orbit, India needed its own independent capability to detect and respond to collisions, debris and hostile activity in space as the new high ground will dictate how wars are fought on the surface.
