Incentives for Anti-Satellite Capability Development Growing Globally: SWF

There's evidence of significant research and development by multiple nations of a broad range of destructive and nondestructive counterspace capabilities, but so far only nondestructive capabilities are being used in military operations, per Secure World Foundation's annual global counterspace capabilities report. Nations' growing reliance on space means bigger incentives for development and possible use of offensive counterspace capabilities, it said. It said the U.S. has done multiple tests of technologies for rendezvous and proximity operations on orbit, plus tracking, targeting and intercept technologies that could lead to a co-orbital anti-satellite capability. The U.S. doesn't have an acknowledged program to develop co-orbit anti-satellite capabilities, but it has the technological capability to develop one in a short time, the April report said. The U.S. has done R&D on ground-based high-energy lasers for counterspace. There's no evidence it has a space-based directed energy weapons capability, but the Missile Defense Agency is planning research into the feasibility of space-based DEWs as ballistic missile defense and those systems could be de facto anti-satellite systems, it said. The report also detailed known capabilities of Russia, China, India, Australia, France, Iran, Japan, North Korea, South Korea and the U.K.