Top security analysts have long noted that if China disables Taiwan’s underseas cable and disrupts its microwave, cell and space-based communications systems, Beijing could secure a smokeless victory over the island.
Over the last five to 10 years, however, private commercial space-based communications and internet services have grown dramatically in importance. The critical role of Starlink in supporting Ukrainian military operations amply demonstrates this point.
This prompts several policy questions: What national security roles should governments require commercial space service providers to play during a security crisis or war? Should governments set minimum standards for cyber and physical hardening for commercial satcom providers to meet in order to be eligible to compete for government contracts? What is the proper response to repeated “accidental” or deniable assaults on commercial and military space systems?
To find out, the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center conducted a space war game that focused on a near-term Taiwan-China scenario. It utilized the talents of current and retired officials, congressional staff, and outside experts to play the game.
In the game, China cut communications cables, disrupted microwave and cellular services, attacked Taiwan’s electrical supply system locally and jammed its satellite communications. The United States and its space-faring allies acted slowly. Private space service providers were no quicker.
Finally, the President of the United States authorized covert cyberattacks against China’s Beidou satellite ground stations. China responded by launching similar cyberattacks on U.S. GPS systems and the U.S., redoubling its attacks against the Beidou system. With U.S. naval forces closing in to disrupt a Chinese naval quarantine of Taiwan, Beijing called for a mutual ceasefire in exchange for bilateral talks to lock Taiwan’s future as a province of China. The U.S., allies and Taiwan rejected this offer, opening the door for further military escalation.
In the hot wash, the players discussed three key findings:
- Washington, its space-faring allies and industry players must clarify how they might backfill Taiwanese communication systems well before China might try to disable them.
- The US and its allies must address Taiwan’s lack of legal recognition, which leaves it uniquely vulnerable to offensive Chinese space and terrestrial military actions against Taiwan’s communications systems.
- Washington and its space-faring allies must develop additional military space options with plausible deniability to deter and counter similar Chinese capabilities.
The recommendations paired with each of these findings. Taiwan needs to be more vocal about its communications systems’ vulnerabilities and consider developing mechanisms to disable China’s satellites temporarily, in a deniable manner. The United States should lower the classifications associated with its non-kinetic anti-satellite systems and create an operational working group on space security that includes Taiwan.
You can access a full copy of the report below. As always, I’m interested to get your take on the attached.
September 16, 2024
Authors: Henry Sokolski
War Game Reveals Chinese Attacks on Communications Could Paralyze Taiwan’s Efforts to Resist
By Henry Sokolski
Earlier this year, the chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party asked Elon Musk if he was withholding StarShield satellite services from United States service members on and around Taiwan. Musk replied that he was in full compliance with his Pentagon contract. Shortly thereafter, Musk refused a Taiwanese bid to secure Starlink services and Taiwan announced it would be developing a “Starlink” constellation system of its own. As a stopgap, Taiwan contracted with OneWeb for satellite internet and communication services.
Top security analysts have noted how China could disable Taiwan’s undersea cable and disrupt its microwave, cell and space-based communications systems in order to secure a smokeless victory over the Island. What has complicated this prospect is the increasing importance of private commercial space-based communications and internet services. The controversy surrounding Starlink’s selective support of Ukrainian military operations amply demonstrates this point.
The increased military relevance of private space-based services raises several policy questions. What national security roles should governments ask or require commercial space service providers to play during a security crisis or war? What conditions, if any, should governments place on commercial space operations under their jurisdiction or that they contract with? Should governments set minimum standards for cyber and physical hardening that commercial satcom providers must meet in order to be eligible to compete for government contracts?
What obligation, if any, does the government have to protect private space firms’ assets in grey conflicts and wars? What are the U.S., its space faring allies and industry willing or able to do to backfill communication systems that a customer, like Taiwan, might suffer? What is the proper response to repeated “accidental” or deniable assaults on one’s commercial and military space systems?
To find out, the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center conducted a space war game that focused on a near-term Taiwan-China scenario. It tapped the talents of current and retired officials, Congressional Staff and outside experts to play the game. They were divided into multiple teams, representing Taiwan, Eutelsat OneWeb, the Allied Space Nations (the U.S., U.K., Japan, France, Russia and India), and China which was played by the Control team.
The War Game
The game begins in late 2026, at which point the crowding of satellite mega-constellations in low-Earth orbit (LEO) has increased the potential for near-miss collisions. China is completing its deployment of three planned LEO communication internet service constellations. China warns Eutelsat (a European space operation that provides Taiwan with communications and internet services) that China SatNet intends to launch several of its Guowang constellation satellites at an altitude similar to several of OneWeb’s satellites. China publicly objects to Eutelsat OneWeb’s “irresponsible” placement of its satellites so close to China’s. In anticipation of possible conjunctions, China launches a small fleet of “peaceful” debris removal satellites.
Meanwhile, in an effort to increase communications resiliency, Taiwan reaches an agreement with Japan to host OneWeb downlink terminals on Japan’s nearby islands. China condemns the agreement and demands Japan dismantle any terminals that may have been installed. China also announces an expanded air defense identification zone and sends civilian vessels close to where the cables are being laid.
Amid these rising tensions, Eutelsat OneWeb maneuvers one of its satellites to avoid a conjunction with one of China’s Guowang satellites, but fails, prompting Beijing to make a formal legal complaint against Eutelsat OneWeb.
At this point, the game players begin their first move. The Eutelsat OneWeb team tried to gather data to prove that OneWeb was blameless for the conjunction with China’s satellite. The Taiwan team reached out to the Allied Space Nation team to blame China for the conjunction but failed to gain an international audience because it lacked legal sovereign status. The Allied Space Nations team, however, did support Taiwan’s request for an investigation and assigned the U.K. to handle the liability claim.
Following the conjunction, Taiwan experienced disruptions to its satellite communications via jamming and cyberattacks. Taiwan also learned that several of its key undersea communications cables were cut.
When Taiwan asked for assistance, the Eutelsat OneWeb team worried that helping Taiwan might displease its shareholders and risk Eutelsat’s future Asian markets, including in China. The Taiwan team requested military and emergency communications support from the U.S. Meanwhile, Taiwanese public confidence in the Taiwanese government wavered. The Allied Space Nations team made an effort to repair Taiwan’s communications infrastructure but took no offensive action against China.
The U.S. Navy, which has been tracking Chinese submarines, confirms that a submarine was responsible for cutting Taiwan’s cables, prompting the U.S. to deploy naval forces near Taiwan. Further cable cuts, locally launched drone strikes against Taiwan’s microwave stations, electrical supply system and cell towers, as well as additional jamming of OneWeb signals, lead to widespread communication outages and public panic.
Separately, China mobilized debris removal satellites in LEO near critical U.S. military satellites, damaging one of them. Amidst this chaos, China announced a maritime quarantine of several Taiwanese ports, deploying coast guard and naval vessels to enforce new inspection rules.
At this point, the Eutelsat OneWeb team refused to offer additional communications support to Taiwan beyond existing contracts. The Taiwan team urgently asked Washington for additional immediate military and communications support. Washington could not meet this request. In desperation, Taiwan then asked the Allied Space Nation team to sanction China, send a carrier strike group, jam China’s communications satellites and cut its undersea communication cables. The Allied Space Nations team instead pushed for a U.N. resolution condemning China (which Beijing and Moscow vetoed) then dispatched naval vessels east of Taiwan and airlifted replacement satellite communication downlink equipment. The Allied Space Nation team still took no offensive military action against China.
A second LEO conjunction between a U.S. military satellite and a Chinese debris removal satellite coincided with a Chinese fighter jet intercepting and damaging the wing of a U.S. humanitarian airlift plane to Taiwan. The cargo plane returns to Japan.
At this point, the President of the U.S. decides to launch covert cyberattacks against China’s Beidou satellite ground stations. China responds by launching similar cyberattacks on American GPS systems; the U.S. redoubles its attacks against the Beidou system. With U.S. naval forces closing in to disrupt China’s naval quarantine of Taiwan, Beijing calls for a mutual ceasefire in exchange for bilateral talks over Taiwan’s future as a province of China. The U.S., allies and Taiwan rejected this offer but had no diplomatic or economic sanctions strategy to pressure Beijing to be more reasonable. Further military escalation seemed likely.
Key Findings
At this point, the game ended. In the hot wash, the players made three key findings:
- Washington, its space-faring allies and industry players must clarify how they might backfill Taiwanese communication systems well before China might disable them. The game spotlighted how vulnerable Taiwan’s current communication systems are to military assaults. The Island’s ground and undersea cable systems were by far the most vulnerable and difficult to repair. With these and Taiwan’s space-based communication systems disabled, China could conceivably absorb Taiwan in a relatively bloodless war. One fix to help prevent this would be for America and its space-faring allies to give Taiwan access to their communications systems. Private space firms could also offer to backfill prospective Taiwanese communication losses. Making such offers now, before there’s any war over Taiwan, would help deter China. In the midst of war, however, the game’s play demonstrated that orchestrating practical communications rescue packages would be difficult. First, Taiwan had not openly shared what its communication vulnerabilities were until after China disabled them. Second, once Taiwan asked for help, the private sector team’s deliberations were bogged down as it tried to divine the market implications of doing so. The OneWeb team also had difficulty juggling how to deal with Chinese shareholders on their parent organization’s board. Finally, it was unclear which U.S. agency should play what role during the game, and coordinating actions with space industries and allies proved challenging.
Recommendations: The U.S., Taiwan, its allies and industry must address Taiwan’s communications systems vulnerabilities more openly. Certainly, friendly governments and private space service providers won’t volunteer to backfill prospective Taiwanese communication losses in a war if Taiwan itself is unwilling to identify its communications system vulnerabilities in peacetime. Seriously embattled states such as Ukraine openly discuss their vulnerabilities with considerable vigor. Taiwan needs to follow their example. Meanwhile, the U.S. and allied governments must open the public aperture on Taiwan’s communications vulnerabilities by exploring how government entities and private space firms might reconstitute Taiwanese space communications systems and ground-based terminals. Routine government hearings, reports, and war games, both official and classified and unofficial and unclassified, would help. Also, the U.S. and its space-faring allies must clarify how commercial space firms under their jurisdiction (such as Starlink and Kuiper) might balance their China interests with requests that they come to Taiwan’s aid. Again, conducting routine unclassified and classified war games with industry and U.S. and allied government staff could help clarify what proportionate responses might be to Chinese cyber intrusions, degradations of U.S. and allied space awareness systems, as well as other acts of war in space. The same clarifications should be made regarding future Chinese disruptions of undersea cable, ground-based microwave, cell phone and electrical supply systems. This would help clarify for both friends and enemies how the U.S. might counter and deter offensive Chinese communications misbehavior both in space and on Earth. Such simulations should also seek to clarify what roles U.S. agencies and private industry should play in different crises.
- The U.S. and its allies must address Taiwan’s lack of legal recognition, which leaves it uniquely vulnerable to offensive Chinese space and terrestrial military actions against Taiwanese communications systems. Taiwan is not recognized as a sovereign state. As such, it lacks legal standing to protest any clear acts of war China may perpetrate against it in any recognized international forum. Worse, no American laws stipulate that America has any legal obligation to come to Taiwan’s defense nor does any law clarify the circumstances under which it might do so. Finally, Taiwan no longer holds membership in the international organizations most relevant to addressing interruptions of communications and other hostile actions China may take against it. In the game, the Taiwan team asked states that still recognized it to plead Taiwan’s case before the United Nations and other international organizations. This failed: No state could effectively spotlight a violation of international law against Taiwan at forums where Taiwan was viewed as being a Chinese province. Taiwan’s ambiguous sovereignty also limited what the OneWeb team was willing to do. The firm had to balance maintaining its reputation for providing reliable service to Taiwan with continued access to China’s massive market. Other private space service providers are likely to face this same dilemma. China’s being a shareholder in Eutelsat, OneWeb’s parent organization, presented an additional complication.
Recommendations: Washington can hardly expect Taiwan to invest in its own defense if the U.S. and its allies are unwilling to recognize Taiwan as an entity worth defending. Recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation or codifying when the U.S. might come to its defense would obviously resolve this. Neither, however, are politically easy steps to take. At a minimum, however, the U.S. and its space-faring allies can and must do more to demonstrate Taiwan’s defense matters. One idea players suggested was to have the U.S. organize and invite Taiwan to multilateral exercises focused on likely military and civilian space-domain crises. Besides clarifying what the most likely space threats and optimal counters might be, these gatherings could clarify space communications standards the U.S., its allies and private space firms might adopt to maximize space interoperability in any future Asian-Pacific conflict. They could also consider mandating minimum cyber and physical hardening standards for commercial companies to compete for government contracts. The decision to meet these standards would be up to the commercial companies. They also could be used to clarify how to prevent dangerous Chinese participation in private satellite firms. Finally, to help assure Taiwan has credible standing at such exercises, Taipei should consider devising anti-satellite capabilities of its own that could temporarily disable Chinese satellites in plausibly deniable ways.
- Washington and its space faring allies must develop additional plausibly deniable military space options to deter and counter similar Chinese capabilities. Proving hostile intent is required in prosecutorial legal proceedings. In space, proving such intent is difficult. Humans operate hundreds and thousands of miles away from key military and commercial space systems. Diminishing differences between military and civilian space systems further complicates proving hostile intent: Unlike navies, air forces, and armies, space forces can legally be employed with systems that lack any military insignia. As a result, hostile space acts may seem just as likely to be accidents as not. Yet another complicating factor is that plausibly deniable temporary countermeasures against other states’ satellites are almost all highly classified and, therefore, difficult to spotlight. Each of these factors slowed the U.S.-Allied team’s game play. Eager to establish a legal casus belli before taking military action, most of the U.S.-Allied team held off recommending any military action. Fortifying their reticence was the team’s lack of familiarity with what space capabilities were available to disable China’s space-based systems temporarily in a deniable fashion. These systems include U.S. rendezvous satellites that can cause damage, move out of position and de-fuel hostile satellites; space and ground-based lasers that can temporarily dazzle an imagery satellite’s optics; offensive cyber and electronic warfare capabilities that can temporarily interfere with a satellite’s operation; and more. Many of the game participants’ unfamiliarity with and initial wariness to discuss these sensitive systems worked to China’s advantage: In specific, it induced the U.S.-Allied and Taiwan teams to take traditional military measures: sending aircraft carriers, conducting air lifts and mounting naval blockades. These were slow and actually invited Chinese offensive counters. A Chinese fighter plane attacked and damaged a U.S. “Berlin Airlift” cargo plane while in flight. An egregiously slow aircraft carrier task force deployment afforded China the time it needed to further disable Taiwan’s communications systems underwater, in space and within Taiwan. Only after China had damaged three of America’s most exquisite military satellites, cut nearly all of Taiwan’s underseas communications trunk line cables, attacked Taiwan’s electrical supply system (hobbling much of the Island’s cell communications), blockaded three major Taiwanese ports and destroyed four microwave stations on the island did the U.S. team choose to blind Chinese Beidou satellites with ground-based lasers and threaten to enforce a maritime exclusion zone around China. Shortly thereafter, China offered to suspend any further quarantine of Taiwan in exchange for U.S.-Chinese negotiations over the future of the island. Upon reflection, some players suggested it would have been useful for the U.S. allied team to have acted against China’s space assets sooner.
Recommendations: To counter the grey space warfare America’s foes might exercise, a much broader spectrum of U.S. policymakers and military planners need to appreciate America’s options for temporarily disabling an enemy’s space capabilities in a deniable manner. This, in turn, requires reducing the extremely high levels of classification associated with these capabilities so a wider number of mid-level officials can gain experience and judgment regarding their possible use in crises. This will require much more extensive space war gaming that should include not only U.S. government officials and staff (in realistic, simulated Excom-like meetings), but members of allied governments, private space firms, and government lawyers. Such gaming should be used to clarify what might precipitate the use of temporary disabling capabilities and what additional capabilities might be desirable. All of this would likely increase U.S. and allied demand to develop and deploy additional reversible offensive space capabilities. These should be designed to give Washington and its allies options other than to retreat or to use terrestrial military measures that could be far more escalatory.
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