Low-orbit communication satellites make proxy wars more diverse

Recently, a US media quoted Musk's biography and reported that Musk refused to start the "Starlink" service near the coast of Crimea last year to prevent the Ukrainian army from attacking the Russian fleet. On September 11, Musk responded to this, saying that the closure of "Starlink" was related to the US sanctions against Russia. After the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the US military conducted a comprehensive test of the militarization capabilities of low-orbit communication satellites such as "Starlink" and found that they have great war potential. So how will the militarization of low-orbit communication satellites change the traditional proxy war model? How should countries deal with the threats posed by the militarization of low-orbit communication satellites?

Broad prospects for military applications

In the past, the U.S. military relied heavily on synchronous orbit satellites for communications, so it could not afford the consequences of the loss of high-value satellites. In order to avoid risks, the U.S. military proposed the "mosaic warfare" thinking, replacing high-value satellites with low-value, networked, and self-organizing satellites, so that even if the enemy destroyed some nodes, the remaining nodes could still ensure wartime communications. Against this background, low-orbit communication satellites, as a substitute for synchronous orbit communication satellites, began to emerge in the military field.

Due to its advantages such as high transmission rate, wide coverage, strong survivability, small ground terminal and convenient frontier deployment, Starlink has become an important communication core in just a few years. The US military even plans to embed it into the military communication network to provide communication guarantee for the global operations of the US military and its allies. In addition to the communication function, the "Star Shield" solution based on the second-generation "Starlink" can even provide comprehensive services such as remote sensing, communication and payload hosting. Judging from the practice of the first and second generations of "Starlink", low-orbit communication satellites are bound to become an important infrastructure for major military powers to strengthen the integration of intelligence chain, command chain and strike chain in the future.

As the information warfare practices of countries around the world are evolving towards unmanned and intelligentization, low-orbit communication satellites will also become important logistical support facilities for future unmanned combat clusters. At present, the entire kill chain from discovery, positioning to evaluation mainly relies on the construction of high-orbit space-based satellites, which is prone to problems such as the inability to close the kill chain in time during wartime. After a large number of unmanned combat nodes are connected, the pressure of the kill chain on the normal operation and damage control of the communication system will be further increased. Low-orbit communication satellites can connect unmanned equipment in different regions and different systems, which can not only quickly increase the speed of kill chain closure, but also greatly shorten the data interaction time of unmanned combat clusters.

In addition, low-orbit communication satellites can also serve as computing nodes. When performing combat missions, existing unmanned combat clusters will aggregate massive amounts of battlefield information into the command and control system, which requires not only strong communication links for support, but also a powerful computing system to identify the authenticity, timeliness and value of intelligence. If low-orbit communication satellites are upgraded to intelligent computing nodes, the combat information obtained by the unmanned combat cluster can be directly evaluated and processed on the battlefield, and the comprehensive effectiveness of the unmanned combat cluster will inevitably be greatly improved.

Changing the war model

Proxy wars are characterized by small scale, asymmetry, and the lack of direct participation of the dominant powers behind them. The decisive factor affecting the final direction of proxy wars is usually the change in the combat power comparison between the two proxies as the war progresses. After entering the information age, since it is difficult for small countries to have a significant generation gap in weapons, informationization capabilities have become one of the core indicators for measuring the asymmetric combat power between countries. On the one hand, low-orbit communication satellites have significant benefits in improving the informationization capabilities of the military. On the other hand, due to their dual-use characteristics, they have a weaker color of intervening in wars, and naturally become an important tool for major countries to upgrade their technology for proxy wars.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict is a typical example of the United States and Western countries using low-orbit communications satellites to wage a new type of proxy war against Russia. Western strategic scholars have also vividly summarized this new type of proxy war model as "Starlink + Katyusha."

"Starlink + Katyusha" is first reflected in ensuring the smooth flow of military orders, political orders and intelligence during wartime. With the help of "Starlink", the Ukrainian command department not only obtained a large amount of high-value Russian military battlefield situation and military personnel intelligence from NATO, but also guided the front-line troops to carry out precise fire strikes against Russia in real time. In addition, the Ukrainian front-line troops reported the battle situation to the command organization and requested support, which was also achieved by relying on the stable network communication capabilities provided by "Starlink".

The second function of "Starlink + Katyusha" is to ensure the internal and external communications of ordinary people in the war zone and strengthen the international public opinion war. In the early urban battles of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Ukrainian people used the traditional mobile communication network restored by "Starlink" to transmit a large number of Russian military pictures and text intelligence through their mobile phones. This real-time battlefield broadcast based on the perspective of the people has won a lot of international sympathy for Ukraine on the one hand, and on the other hand, it has provided processable materials for NATO countries to launch an international public opinion war.

"Starlink + Katyusha" is finally reflected in supporting unmanned cluster combat, although this has not been fully demonstrated in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The main unmanned equipment used by Ukraine in the conflict is the TB-2 drone produced in Turkey. This type of drone does not have satellite communication capabilities and is less intelligent, so "Starlink" mainly plays a role in communication support between the drone ground control cabin and the front-line troops. In the foreseeable future, as a new generation of drones embedded with artificial intelligence mechanisms are put into production and spread to small countries, new low-orbit communication satellites that integrate intelligence, communication and some command functions are bound to play an important role in new proxy wars.

How to deal with threats

In addition to applications, how to deal with the threat of low-orbit communication satellites that may appear in new proxy wars will also become a practical problem that major countries have to solve. Judging from the lessons learned by the Russian military in dealing with "Starlink", to solve this problem, it is mainly necessary to deal with two aspects: one is the low-orbit communication satellites in the sky, and the other is the satellite terminals on the ground. However, it is not realistic to directly attack satellites, because on the one hand, it will escalate the proxy war into a direct conflict between major powers, and it is easy to fall into a passive position in terms of international public opinion; on the other hand, using expensive anti-missile systems to attack cheap low-orbit communication satellites is not cost-effective.

A more reasonable approach is to deal with satellite terminals. The Russian army has two methods in this regard: one is hard destruction by firepower, and the other is electronic soft kill. Hard destruction by firepower is to first use the "Palanting" or "Baizhi" system for positioning. The former relies on multiple frequency and direction measurement antenna vehicles to cross-locate the terminal; the latter can directly determine the terminal location within a range of 10 kilometers. After determining the location of the satellite terminal, the Russian army will call for drones or artillery fire to eliminate it at a fixed point.

In terms of electronic soft kill, the Russian military will use a combination of electronic warfare systems such as the Tiradar-2s and the Shawl-K. The directional interference signals generated by the former will cause low-orbit communication satellites to consume a lot of electricity to counter interference, thereby destroying the on-board power system, while the latter can suppress satellite ground stations and radio relay communication ground terminals. In addition, the Russian military is also developing space electronic warfare systems that can fly in the same orbit as low-orbit communication satellites to collect and analyze enemy satellite signals to support ground electronic jamming operations. (Author: Wang Jiangning)