Troy Meink, the US secretary of the Air Force, said on Monday that the US has weapons in orbit. As civilian head of the Department of the Air Force, Meink oversees both the Air Force and the Space Force, a military branch President Donald Trump created in 2019 during his first term.
Meink said the US has “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action”. Joint Force is the Pentagon's term for the US services operating together.
Reuters said it was the strongest admission yet by a Pentagon official of US weapons in space, and AP reported it as the first such confirmation. Meink did not say what the weapons were, how they work or whether they target objects in space or on Earth.
He told reporters afterwards that the wording was deliberate and that discussing specifics would weaken the deterrent. A Space Force spokesperson told ABC News the weapons can be used for offensive and defensive purposes at the direction of combatant commands, the joint headquarters that run US military operations in a region or domain.
A day later, Richard Palmer, director of the Capability and Resource Integration directorate at US Space Command, made the case for going public. He acknowledged that the weapons were fundamental to keeping deterrence from failing, and to being ready to use them if it did but also declined to discuss their nature or capability.
A game of satellites
{{/usCountry}}A day later, Richard Palmer, director of the Capability and Resource Integration directorate at US Space Command, made the case for going public. He acknowledged that the weapons were fundamental to keeping deterrence from failing, and to being ready to use them if it did but also declined to discuss their nature or capability.
A game of satellites
{{/usCountry}}Space has “moved from a supporting role to a centrepiece in how nations compete and fight”, said Kari Bingen, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think-tank. She was speaking at a May 22 discussion that CSIS co-hosted with the Secure World Foundation (SWF), a US non-profit that publishes an annual open-source assessment of counterspace weapons.
Such programmes are typically centred around satellites, which carry the communications, navigation and intelligence that armed forces rely on, as the wars in Ukraine and West Asia have shown.
For decades, once in orbit, they held fixed paths. Militaries now increasingly treat them as weapons platforms that can jam another satellite, dazzle it with a laser or even capture it. General Stephen Whiting, who commands US Space Command, has warned that adversaries would likely go after US space assets early in a conflict, and has called for orbital interceptors and other weapons.
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At the same discussion, Bingen said commanders would never let enemy aircraft fly over their forces unchallenged, and that satellites which help target those forces are coming to be seen the same way.
“Everyone on this planet is a user of space data in some form,” write Victoria Samson, SWF's chief director for space security and stability, and her co-editor Kathleen Brett in the foreword to the foundation’s 2026 report. They warned that a future conflict in orbit could cause lasting damage to economies and societies on Earth.
What space control covers
SWF uses “counterspace” and “space control” for the weapons a country uses to win space superiority, which it defines as the freedom to use space while denying it to an adversary for a limited time and place. An attack can hit the satellite, its ground stations or the radio links between them. SWF’s 2026 report tracks 13 countries across five categories of offensive capability.
They can be anywhere from reversible to permanent:
Electronic warfare uses radio energy to jam signals to or from a satellite. The US fields three acknowledged systems of this kind, all ground-based. They jam communications satellites in geostationary orbit, about 36,000 km up, where satellites keep pace with the Earth’s rotation.
Cyberattacks target software, usually on the ground. The largest publicly known case, which SWF attributes to Russia, hit user terminals of Viasat’s satellite broadband service in Europe on the first day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Directed-energy weapons use lasers or microwaves. A low-power laser can dazzle, and possibly blind, the sensors of an imaging satellite. Russia fields a mobile ground-based laser dazzler called Peresvet.
Also Read: US admits weapons are in orbit — Why China is warning of a new space arms race
Co-orbital weapons are satellites that manoeuvre close to a target and act on it. The same skills serve inspection, repair and refuelling, so intent is hard to judge from the ground. In 2007, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) ran an experiment called Orbital Express in which one spacecraft used a robotic arm to capture another autonomously. Russia has released two "sub-satellites" at high speed, which SWF says suggests some of its close-approach activity is weapons-related.
Direct-ascent weapons are missiles fired from the ground, sea or air that destroy a satellite by striking it, without entering orbit themselves.
SWF's report also warns of escalation. If a satellite is suddenly lost during a crisis, the loss could be mistaken for the start of an armed attack, even when a natural event or an onboard failure is to blame.
SWF’s Samson has made a guess about what Meink was describing. "I'm going to go with my first guess: space-based jammers, electronic warfare,” she told Defense One.
Weapons with other targets
A weapon in orbit can also be aimed at missiles or at the ground.
Trump's Golden Dome missile defence plan includes US weapons in space. In the first week of his second term as President, he ordered the Pentagon to pursue space-based interceptors, and he has said the system will be fully operational before his term ends in January 2029. Meink said on Monday that the interceptors are “flight ready”.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated in May that a system matching Trump’s order would cost about $1.2 trillion over 20 years, and that a layer of 7,800 interceptor satellites would account for about 60% of that. SWF says such interceptors would also be able to attack satellites. “These space-based interceptors can point up as well as point down,” Samson said at the May 22 discussion.
In the 1960s, the Soviet Union developed a fractional orbital bombardment system. It could send a nuclear warhead partway around the Earth in orbit, so that the warhead approached the US from an unexpected direction. CSIS has described a 2021 Chinese launch as a possible test of a similar system though Beijing said it was testing a reusable spacecraft.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty also bans nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction from orbit, but leaves conventional weapons outside its prohibition. A nuclear blast in orbit would disable satellites without discrimination. The 1962 US high-altitude test Starfish Prime damaged several.
In 2024, the Joe Biden administration said Russia was developing a space-based nuclear weapon that could loiter in orbit and then release a burst to knock out the satellites around it. The White House said at the time that the danger was not imminent. SWF says a Russian satellite thought to be linked to the programme, Cosmos 2553, is tumbling, and Samson said in May there had been no further news of the programme.
How we got here
SWF dates the first US anti-satellite test to 1959 and the first Soviet one to 1963. Cold War programmes on both sides ranged from nuclear-tipped missiles to missiles fired from fighter jets, and the Soviet Union also tested interceptor satellites.
Four countries have destroyed satellites in tests this century. After China's 2007 test, the US Navy destroyed a failing US reconnaissance satellite in 2008 with a ship-launched missile defence interceptor, saying the satellite’s toxic fuel posed a danger on re-entry.
India’s Mission Shakti destroyed an Indian satellite, Microsat-R, at an altitude of about 283 km in March 2019. The low altitude meant most fragments fell back quickly, though SWF counted more than 100 trackable pieces, some of which climbed much higher. India says it opposes the weaponisation of space, while SWF assesses it may be moving towards an offensive posture.
In November 2021, Russia struck its defunct Cosmos 1408 satellite with a Nudol missile, creating more than 1,500 trackable pieces and forcing the International Space Station crew to take shelter.
US officials have talked more openly since 2014 about preparing for war in space, SWF says. The Space Force published a warfighting framework for planners in April 2025. In December 2025, Trump signed an executive order, titled ‘Ensuring Space Superiority’, which includes attack among the Space Force's missions.
Who has what
SWF rates US military space capabilities the most advanced in the world, though it says China is narrowing the gap. US Space Command recently held Apollo Maneuvers. A command spokesperson said it was the command's largest exercise of its kind, both in the number of spacecraft and in the types of manoeuvre, and allied and commercial partners took part.
Russia has been rebuilding counterspace capabilities since 2010, according to SWF. Its Nudol missile appears limited to low orbits, and it uses electronic warfare heavily in Ukraine. Clayton Swope, deputy director of the CSIS Aerospace Security Project, said at the May 22 discussion that Russia worried him most. He pointed to Russian satellites placed in the same orbital plane as high-value satellites, a position that takes deliberate effort and fuel to reach.
SWF assesses that China's missile capability against satellites in low orbit is likely mature and may be deployed on mobile launchers. Chinese satellites have practised close approaches in low and geostationary orbits. Samson said two of them, SJ-21 and SJ-25, appeared to refuel repeatedly in geostationary orbit in 2025.
Germany has a €35 billion ($40 billion) military space spending plan. And French President Emmanuel Macron has said the country will deploy “patrol” satellites in 2027, to be followed by space-based lasers and jammers.
How others see the US move
Guo Jiakun, spokesperson for China's foreign ministry, urged the US to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia was counting on broad international support to keep working towards the complete demilitarisation of space.
Moscow has made that case before. In April 2024, Russia vetoed a US-Japanese Security Council resolution calling on countries not to develop or deploy nuclear arms or other weapons of mass destruction in space. It called the resolution hypocritical and proposed a rival text banning all weapons in space, which failed.
Palmer framed the disclosure around allies. He said some actors want to undermine the collective interests of the countries, and that the US was ready to preserve the access to space that armed forces and economies need.
Samson has questioned that course. She told Defense One that the US would now have to accept China and Russia doing and saying the same, and that she did not think this served US national security. At the United Nations, a working group on preventing an arms race in outer space began meeting in 2025 and runs till 2028, weighing both binding and non-binding measures, she had said in May.