[ArsTechnica] Earlier this year, officials at US Space Command released a list of priorities and needs, and among the routine recitation of things like cyber defense, communications, and surveillance was a relatively new term: "integrated space fires."
This is a new phrase in the esoteric terminology the military uses to describe its activities. Essentially, "fires" are offensive or defensive actions against an adversary. The Army defines fires as "the use of weapon systems to create specific lethal and nonlethal effects on a target."
The inclusion of this term in a Space Command planning document was another signal that Pentagon leaders, long hesitant to even mention the possibility of putting offensive weapons in space for fear of stirring up a cosmic arms race, see the taboo of talking about space warfare as a thing of the past.
"While we've held it close to the vest before, some of that was just kind of hand-wringing," said Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top general in the Space Force, who also serves on the joint chiefs of staff. "It wasn't really something we needed to protect."
One reason for the change in how the military talks about warfare in space is that the nation's top two strategic adversaries—China and Russia—are already testing capabilities that could destroy or disable a US military satellite.
The Space Force was established nearly five years ago, in December 2019, to protect US interests in space. Satellites provide the military with intelligence data, navigation, communications, and support missile defense, and in the next few years, they will become even more crucial for weapons targeting and battle management.
This week, Saltzman laid out the military's view of offensive weapons in space in perhaps the plainest language yet.
“Space is a war-fighting domain," Saltzman said at the Space Force Association's Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Florida. "Ten years ago, I couldn’t say that. That’s the starting point. Think about that. In 2014, we had senior leaders start to talk about space and war in the same sentence. They got kind of berated by the senior leadership. So this is still a relatively new condition when we’re talking about war-fighting in space. I don't think we should underestimate the power of that."
AN ALERT POSTURE
Gen. Stephen Whiting, the four-star chief of US Space Command, identified "integrated space fires"—again, these are actual offensive or defensive attacks against an enemy vehicle—as his organization's most pressing need. These could be based in any domain—land, air, sea, or space—and aimed against targets within and above the atmosphere.
So what would these weapons look like? They might be electronic or cyber in nature, allowing US forces to hack a satellite or its ground-based support network. Russia has already done this, when hackers launched a cyberattack on a commercial European satellite communications network in 2022, the same day the country began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Then there's directed energy, which would use a laser beam to blind or dazzle satellite sensors in orbit. Directed energy weapons could be based on the ground or in space. There's another option that would involve one satellite sidling up next to an adversary's and using a claw or robotic arm to capture it and take control.
Finally, there are the kinds of space weapons that can blow a satellite out of the sky. These antisatellite weapons (ASATs) are perhaps the most low-tech solution—the United States, China, Russia, and India have openly demonstrated them—but they come with dangerous side effects.
For example, a Chinese ASAT missile test in 2007 destroyed one of the country's own satellites, creating more than 3,000 trackable debris objects in low-Earth orbit, the largest cloud of space debris in history. The United States performed a similar ASAT missile test against a satellite in 1985.
Destructive ASATs, like directed energy weapons, can be based on the ground or in space. In 2021, Russia launched a ground-based direct-ascent ASAT missile to take out one of its own satellites. The year before, Space Command reported Russia tested a space-based ASAT weapons system in which a Russian military satellite released a projectile moving fast enough to destroy another satellite if it made an impact. 
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