The U.S. is about to deploy a new ground-based jammer designed to blunt Chinese or Russian satellites from transmitting information about U.S. forces during a conflict, the Space Force disclosed.

The Pentagon’s space service branch tested the system for the first time earlier this year at two different locations, with control of the system at a third. The devices aren’t meant to protect U.S. satellites from Chinese or Russian jamming but “to responsibly counter adversary satellite communications capabilities that enable attacks,” the Space Force said in a statement to Bloomberg News.

The Pentagon strives — on the rare occasions when it discusses such space capabilities — to distinguish its emerging satellite-jamming technology as purely defensive and narrowly focused. That’s as opposed to a nuclear weapon the U.S. says Russia is developing that could create high-altitude electromagnetic pulses that would take out satellites and disrupt entire communications networks.

The first 11 of 24 Remote Modular Terminal jammers will be deployed in several months, and all of them could be in place by Dec. 31 at undisclosed locations, according to the Space Force statement. The terminals “are small, transportable and low-cost satellite communications jammers that can be deployed in austere environments to protect” U.S. forces, the Space Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office said in a posting online.

The new terminals augment a much larger jamming weapon called the Counter Communications System that’s already deployed and a mid-sized one called Meadowlands “by providing the ability to have a proliferated, remotely controlled and relatively relocatable capability,” the Space Force said. The Meadowlands system has encountered technical challenges that have delayed its delivery until at least October, about two years later than planned.

China has “hundreds and hundreds of satellites on orbit designed to find, fix, track, target and yes, potentially engage, U.S. and allied forces across the Indo-Pacific,” General Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, said Wednesday at the annual Aspen Security Forum. “So we’ve got to understand that and know what it means for our forces.”

‘Off-the-shelf components’

The Space Force’s operations chief has said the U.S. and its allies need to be able to block space-enabled attacks on U.S. and allied forces in a way that won’t generate debris in space. In response, the Rapid Capabilities Office developed the small terminals and hired Sterling, Virginia-based contractor Northstrat Inc. to operate the jammers.

“We intentionally designed a small and modular system using commercial off-the-shelf components,” the Space Force said.

U.S. officials say their weapons are “responsible” ones that wouldn’t destroy satellites but only disable them temporarily. Still, they aren’t “defensive weapons” but rather “are intended to attack rival capabilities,” according to Victoria Samson, the chief director of space security and stability at the Secure World Foundation, which produces an annual report on counterspace weapons.

“You can argue that it will only be used defensively, but I would say that that is an offensive counterspace capability,” Samson said.

“Add it to the very small list of public U.S. offensive counterspace capabilities” that are “reversible, temporary, non-escalatory and allow for plausible deniability in terms of who the instigator is.”

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