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It's hard to imagine any great-power war against the US not involving kesslering every useful orbit as the first move, which would likely destroy any long-range precision weaponry advantage that the US has (consider how even the medium-range kit Ukraine got is creaking under mere GPS jamming, and every Starlink outage causes pandemonium). Under lower-tech conditions, contesting China's geographical advantage over Taiwan may be hard for the US, whose military seems quite addicted to its C&C capabilities, and even the lessons of Ukraine's defense may not be applicable in a scenario where real fog of war is once again a factor.
The US would do well to fix in doctrine that destroying enough of its space assets will be grounds for unbounded nuclear retaliation, but it might require some preparatory propaganda to get people to accept it as reasonable so soft power doesn't suffer for it.
Long range missiles have inertial guidance and compare the ground beneath them to topographical maps. And they've had these features for decades. I'm sure destroying all satellites wouldn't improve their circular error probable, but they'd still mostly work.
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I wouldn't be surprised if it's the US that makes the first move against satellites in a Pacific war: aircraft carrier battlegroups are actually pretty hard to locate if you don't have any imaging or radar satellites in orbit.
I agree that taking out the huge US satellite constellations will degrade US war fighting capabilities, but in a Pacific war over Taiwan I suspect a Kessler syndrome asymmetrically helps the United States: China is surrounded by Taiwan, South Korea and Japan in a ring, and their naval and shore-based assets will be able to track Chinese naval activity, identify it for targeting, and communicate that to US bomber strike packages originating from well outside China's effective reach. Meanwhile, the US carrier fleet will be free to steam in circles in the middle of nowhere, Pacific, and China will have to resort to trying to locate them with submarines, recon aircraft, and possibly ELINT (very fun and fancy until the carrier turns off its radios). It's possible there's some other options I haven't thought of, but the long and short of things is that targeting a ship at sea is much easier with orbital assets and much harder otherwise.
I also think it's worth considering that the US has a lot of nuclear-strike-warning orbital assets, so hitting US satellites indiscriminately may send the signal that you're planning to go ballistic in the nuclear way – but those same assets are helpful for all sorts of stuff, with resolutions sensitive enough to pinpoint the release of small weapons. I assume if you're China you just shoot them down anyway.
I should note that there are a lot of soft-kill ways to deal with satellites and (additionally) plenty of hard-kill ways that don't result in massive debris clouds. That doesn't mean people won't create said debris clouds – either because they're just using basic ASAT missiles or to make it harder for the US to simply putting more assets in orbit with its massive edge in earth-to-orbit transport.
Carrier strike groups, or the planes launched from them, still need to get close to be useful - close enough that you could find them with clouds of cheap drones flying WWII-style search patterns (China has overwhelming manufacturing advantage there) or radar. I don't see why China would need to strike them while they are circling out in the open Pacific, if they can't do anything significant to interfere from out there because they have no significant quantity of weaponry in the intersection of "gets past layered air defence" (something that China will have in its own vicinity and the US won't) and "finds its target". Taiwan, too, has layered air defense and proximity, but without the US being able to bring much to the table anymore it would just get overwhelmed.
The point, I think, is more in that the US must know and fear this possibility; a loss of its space-based recon and targeting would spell trouble not just in Taiwan but in every other theatre (would Ukraine or Israel be able to hold on without their current ability to be forewarned of any troop concentration and surface construction ability almost immediately?). My lay sense would be that yielding Taiwan and trying to make the best of the outcome would be better for global US power prospects than yielding the space advantage and fighting for Taiwan, even if the latter fought can somehow be won (as in Taiwan stays independent and US-aligned).
The F-35 has a 750ish mile combat range, which can be extended by in-air refueling. You can tack another, say, 100 - 200 miles onto that with an anti-ship missile, so a carrier strike group could hang out midway between Guam and Taiwan and launch effective strike packages against targets in the Taiwan strait. And one thing that the war in Ukraine has proven is that stealthy cruise missiles launched by low-flying aircraft can evade layered air defense, so our assumption should be that this strategy is at least somewhat effective. Of course, the US can also sortie effective strike packages from CONUS, but they will take a lot longer to get to the target.
The "cheap drones" you mention the Chinese using will be Predator-style drones – quadcopter types won't have the range, you'll need large, long endurance surveillance assets – basically unmanned U-2s. Which means they show up very nicely on every radar within a couple hundred miles and a fighter will likely show up and dispatch you before you get within range of the carrier. Optics aren't necessarily particularly effective maritime search assets anyway, as you mention you really want long-range radar, but that's 1) expensive, 2) prone to being spoofed, and 3) lets everyone know you are out looking for a carrier well before you can actually find the carrier, if their electronics are working correctly. You can try to build a stealthy drone to mitigate these problems but at this point you're no longer a cheap drone, and probably not a cloud. And, well, see how well WWII-style search patterns worked out for the participants in WWII.
Now, I'm not saying that a carrier battle group couldn't be spotted in such a manner. I'm just saying it's not an easy win.
Something that might be is over-the-horizon radar. I'm not sure how effective that would be, or what limitations it might have.
The big advantage the US has re: space is that it can just put more space-based recon in space pretty quickly. At least, I assume that's what the X-37 is for. So quite possibly you could see a situation where China knocks down all our satellites and we just put up a maneuvering recon asset that they can't touch the next day.
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As I understand it, the idea of using carriers against China would be to interdict shipping coming to and from them from far away, as well as any naval assets attacking Taiwan.
I'm inclined to think that China and Russia have more to lose in losing space-based assets than the US, even assuming no retaliation in other arenas. Gaza is tiny, the IAF can monitor them just fine with conventional aircraft and drones. Russia is vast, but I think Ukraine is mostly covered with AWACS aircraft operating outside of actual Ukrainian territory, and there probably isn't all that much advantage there from the ability to monitor deep inside Russia. Meanwhile, satellite surveillance is probably the best way Russia has to see what NATO is doing outside of Ukraine. Invading Taiwan is logistically complex, China would probably benefit greatly from having intact GPS to pull it off, as well as the ability to see where those carrier groups are and what they're up to, which would be tough to get any other way.
I'm not sure how confident to be in all that, but I think it's enough to make the case that all-out space war is not likely to be a clear win for the counter-US powers.
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It’s ridiculous to assume the US military hasn’t fully prepared for the possibility of kesslerization given it’s been theorized as a warfare tactic for almost 50 years. In any case, I imagine both Russia and China would be extremely reluctant to use it given how much damage it would do to either side’s allies all over the world. The destruction of high orbit satellites is far from assured. The speed of it is also unclear and is actually pretty slow iirc in a lot of models.
Good point about the speed at which it would happen - I didn't consider that it could only amount to a "debris threshold passed now leads to inescapable exponential growth that will reach the point that no sats survive for long in 10 years" scenario.
I do however doubt that either of Russia and China would be particularly concerned about the damage loss of international space capabilities would do to their remaining allies (Google Maps? Degradation of weather forecasts? Loss of landsat-type commercial imagery?) if they are in an existential-ish struggle against the US. All of those sound to me like they would be minor relative to the effects of disturbances to the financial system and supply chains such a war would impose on everyone either way.
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GPS satellites are in a high enough orbit that chain-reaction "Kessler syndrome" is not trivial to cause up there. Space is too sparsely populated up there for chain reactions to occur on invasion timescales.
If that's the case, it might still be possible to ASAT them individually because there are so few?
That would be how one probably has to do it. But let's see: China's 2007 ASAT test was carried out with a modified medium-range ballistic missile with a ground range of about 4000 km. That's not going to reach 20000 km altitude; I don't think even an ICBM could get up there. Probably it would take individual killer-satellites, launched on one space rocket apiece, which would themselves be much more vulnerable to existing ASAT weaponry before they reach their targets. Probably not cost-effective.
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