Image: RNTF with assistance from Wordclouds.com
Blog Editor’s Note: CSIS issued it’s annual threat assessment for space last month. It has an excellent forward by Mr. Martin Faga, who also happens to be the Chairman of the Board for the RNT Foundation.
The document is an excellent catalog of threats and provides great background information on some of the biggest players threatening, or possibly threatening US space assets.
One of the many interesting things we found in it was a reference to the article about a nuclear powered jamming satellite we posted on yesterday.
Unlike most threat assessments, though, it doesn’t do much in terms of evaluating the credibility of various threats, the likelihood of each being translated into an attack, nor the impact such an attack would have.
It does offer the following in its “What to Watch” section at the end:
“Electronic counterspace weapons continue to proliferate at a rapid pace in both how they are used and who is using them. Satellite jamming and spoofing devices are becoming part of the every-day arsenal for countries that want to operate in the gray zone—i.e., below the threshold of overt conflict. The jamming and spoofing of satellites has become somewhat common, and without strong repercussions these adverse activities could gradually become normalized…. One should expect that the rate of satellite jamming and spoofing incidents will only increase as these capabilities continue to proliferate and become more sophisticated in the coming years.”
Since CSIS didn’t explicitly say which threats and actors were the most important, we though that perhaps it could be inferred from the number of times each was mentioned. Our thanks to Wordclouds.com for helping us create the graphic at top using the CSIS report.
