US-China Race For Orbital Supremacy Could Decide A Taiwan War

Elefteri distinguishes this from broader space warfare, which in general encompasses multi-domain counterspace actions, including ground-based missile strikes against satellites or orbital strikes against terrestrial infrastructure. Orbital warfare refers to purely spacecraft-on-spacecraft operations conducted entirely within orbit.

He adds that by excluding Earth-to-space and space-to-ground strikes, the concept focuses military doctrine on dynamic in-orbit maneuvers, rendezvous proximity operations and gray-zone coercive harassment, pressing allied armed forces to treat orbit as an active, standalone warfighting arena.

Maneuverable satellites are key assets in orbital warfare. As Simone Montandon argues in a September 2025 article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Strategic Security, high-thrust and autonomous systems enable hostile spacecraft to execute evasive trajectory shifts, conduct covert rendezvous and proximity operations, and bypass ground-based tracking.

Montandon notes that such maneuverability enables adversarial platforms to shadow high-value assets, conduct non-cooperative dockings, intercept sensitive telemetry or deploy kinetic and directed-energy payloads to neutralize critical navigation, missile defense and reconnaissance networks during the initial combat phases.

That vulnerability extends beyond satellites themselves. Bharath Gopalaswamy argues in an April 2026 Space Review article that modern AI-enabled kill chains are fundamentally space architectures rather than autonomous software feats.

Looking at Operation Epic Fury, Gopalaswamy argues that targeting systems like Project Maven depend entirely on an underlying orbital layer of imaging, communications, signals intelligence and navigation satellites to execute rapid strike packages. He argues that orbit has become both the backbone and primary vulnerability of modern targeting.

Gopalaswamy points out that if orbital infrastructure is blinded, jammed or kinetically denied, algorithmic targeting collapses into processing stale data, rendering sophisticated strike networks blind regardless of their software capabilities.

The stakes are particularly acute in a Taiwan scenario. Zachary Burdette, writing in the May 2025 issue of International Security, notes that China's orbital presence has surged to more than 1,000 satellites - including nearly 500 reconnaissance platforms - eroding the long-held US space advantage and turning orbit into a shared backbone for Pacific strike networks.

In a Taiwan invasion scenario, Burdette highlights that while the US relies on orbital surveillance, communications and navigation to close long-range kill chains against Chinese amphibious transports from outside China's anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) zones, China increasingly depends on similar architectures to threaten US power projection by targeting vulnerable forward bases and carrier strike groups.

One possible US approach is to attack that backbone directly. Matthew Smokovitz argues in an August 2025 Modern Warfare Institute (MWI) article that space-based interceptors envisioned for the Golden Dome missile defense system could be adapted into an offensive orbital spear against China's military battle network.

Smokovitz argues that orbital interceptors, directed-energy weapons and cyber payloads could hit China's integrated kill chains - its so-called“kill webs” - across the Pacific at once.

Rather than methodically hunting terrestrial launchers, such effectors could blind reconnaissance satellites, corrupt command nodes and disrupt navigation timing, fracturing People's Liberation Army (PLA) operational coherence before coordinated strikes materialize.