The U.S. Air Force has a top-secret space weapon and is preparing to show the world how to deter the enemy from targeting U.S. satellites.
The service has been preparing for months to decrypt the “black” weapon, but according to Breaking Defense’s exclusive information, it doesn’t want to miss the right timing. This will first require the leadership of the Air Force and the signature of President Joe Biden. The main details of the unnamed weapon system are still unknown. he knows a very senior U.S. government leader. Although it is not clear exactly what capability they may reveal, insiders say the revelation is likely to involve a real demonstration of an active defense capability capable of damaging or destroying a target satellite or spacecraft.
The U.S. military already he also has several rudimentary weapons for use in space. The U.S. Navy, for example, maintains the SM-3 missile, which was originally designed to fire the warheads of incoming ballistic missiles. The warheads of ballistic missiles briefly follow the same general path as satellites orbiting the low Earth orbit. This proved useful in 2008 when the Navy used an SM-3 to destroy a malfunctioning spy satellite called USA-193
Other services also have their own space weapons. The U.S. Army’s ground-based ballistic missile defense system, the Ground-Based Interceptor, also captures missile warheads in the so-called halfway phase, and theoretically has anti-satellite capabilities. Meanwhile, the U.S. Space Force uses a truck-mounted jamming device called the Counter Communication System, which is designed to prevent enemy forces from accessing their own communications and navigation satellites.
No one outside the U.S. government nor does it know what an Air Force space weapon looks like, but the news is that the system is not a kinetic anti-satellite system like the SM-3 or GBI. One possibility is that the weapon is a terrestrial laser designed to blind blind enemy satellites in space. This would be similar to the existing Russian anti-satellite weapon Peresvet, which is a satellite truck-mounted blinding laser. Russia also maintains the Nudol ground-launched anti-satellite missile and the Burevestnik air-launched anti-aircraft missile
he wanted to move on until he dealt with the current crisis in Afghanistan.
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