UK must prepare for ‘orbital warfare’, think tank warns

The United Kingdom must adopt ‘orbital warfare’ into its military lexicon and shift from ground-based protections towards offensive in-orbit combat capabilities, according to a new paper from the Council on Geostrategy seen by the UK Defence Journal ahead of publication.

The Primer, entitled ‘Embracing orbital warfare’ and written by Gabriel Elefteriu, Senior Research Fellow in Space Power at the think tank, argues that space has transitioned into a practical warfighting domain and that British and allied policy is being held back by reliance on what it describes as passive, defensive terms such as ‘space control’ and ‘counterspace operations’.

Such vocabulary, the paper contends, allows policymakers to remain in their comfort zones by prioritising cheaper, ground-based electronic warfare, cyber or space domain awareness systems, when the decisive arena for securing spacepower advantage is orbit itself.

According to the analysis, sub-threshold orbital warfare is already an operational reality, with aggressive operations designed to spy on, harass and coerce allied space systems now routine in a manner mirroring grey-zone confrontations in the maritime and terrestrial domains. The paper points to a recent incident in which a formation of Russian spacecraft closed in on a Finnish ICEYE radar satellite that provides intelligence to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and notes that such harassment has at times prompted allied spacecraft to take evasive manoeuvres.

The study also details the acceleration of Chinese counterspace capabilities, citing a simulation in which a team of Chinese scientists modelled 99 satellites successfully hunting and intercepting nearly 1,400 Starlink satellites within a 12-hour window, reportedly using a new artificial intelligence algorithm that can be re-run for a different scenario in under two minutes. Both Moscow and Beijing view Starlink as a key military threat and are developing in-space capabilities to counter it, the paper says.

With orbital congestion growing rapidly, from just over 3,000 active satellites five years ago to more than 16,000 today and around 100,000 expected by 2030, the author argues that expanding constellations are becoming high-impact military targets, while congestion complicates tracking and offers hostile actors greater opportunity to conceal their activities. SpaceX’s filing this month for a 100,000-satellite third-generation constellation is cited as an illustration of the scale involved.

“The UK and its allies cannot meet a threat they have not named,” Elefteriu writes, as quoted in the release. “Continuing to fold in-orbit combat into overarching concepts like space control and counterspace will keep policy tethered… meanwhile, the decisive arena for securing spacepower advantage is orbit itself, and the key means is hard orbital capability.”

The paper proposes a tightened definition of orbital warfare, confined to spacecraft-on-spacecraft engagements and understood as the employment of space-based assets to control the space domain through in-orbit kinetic or non-kinetic effects, movement and manoeuvre. It recommends that the term be formally integrated into British and allied doctrine as a core mission for national spacepower, in the same way the Royal Navy uses ‘surface warfare’, alongside prioritised funding for assets capable of agile, sustained manoeuvre, a transition towards a more offensive national space posture, and expanded tracking capability to counter congestion and adversarial concealment.

Elefteriu, a former Director of Research and Strategy at Policy Exchange, concludes that clarity in language is the first act of preparation, arguing that the nations that name the fight will be the ones equipped to win it.