(The Epoch Times)—China and Russia are populating space with dual-use satellites while concealing their military applications, according to a new report from the U.S. military.
“China and Russia view the U.S. as overly reliant upon space for military and information superiority. Seeking asymmetric advantages in future conflict, both countries are designing, testing, and demonstrating counterspace weapons to deny, disrupt, or destroy satellites and space services,” the report says. “They often mask or conceal these activities to avoid international condemnation.”
The report, titled “Competing in Space,” was jointly written by the National Space Intelligence Center, a U.S. Space Force unit, and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, a U.S. Air Force unit.
“The dual-use nature of some spacecraft technologies makes counterspace tests or hostile activity difficult to detect, attribute, or mitigate,” the report adds. “For example, sensors to inspect other satellites and robotic arms for servicing other satellites support peaceful missions, but can also be used to target or attack spacecraft.”
A debris mitigation satellite could function as a weapon system, the report says, pointing to China’s satellite Shijian-21, which in January 2022 towed a defunct Chinese navigation satellite to a graveyard orbit.
The report named another Chinese satellite, Shijian-17, which is equipped with a giant robotic arm. “Space-based robotic arm technology could be used in a future system for grappling other satellites,” the report says.
Russia has deployed several prototype orbital anti-satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), including Cosmos 2504, 2519, and 2536, for testing “kinetic kill capabilities,” according to the report.
Most Earth-orbiting satellites are located in LEO, which is about 1,200 miles from the surface of the Earth. Other orbits include the medium Earth orbit (MEO), the highly elliptical orbit (HEO), and the geostationary orbit (GEO). GPS satellites are located in the MEO.
Space Capabilities
The report said Chinese military exercises “regularly incorporate jammers against satellite communications” and other targets, thus making Beijing likely to have been developing jammers targeting “a wide range of satellite communications supporting government and military operations.”
Other space capabilities that China and Russia are pursuing include directed-energy weapons.
“China has multiple ground-based laser systems of varying power levels that could blind or damage satellite sensors. By the mid-to-late 2020s, Beijing may have higher-power systems capable of damaging satellites,” the report says.
In 2021, China tested a hypersonic weapon system that, according to some experts, employs a deployment method similar to the Soviet concept known as the fractional orbital bombardment system. The report said the Chinese hypersonic weaponry “could prevent reliable missile warning and complicate defense engagements.”
Since December 2018, when a previous version of the report was published, there has been a drastic increase in the number of satellites. As of the end of 2022, there were 7,096 satellites, more than triple from 1,880 six years ago, according to the report. The United States led with 4,723 satellites, while China had 647 and Russia 199. The rest of the world had 1,527 satellites.
“Over the past decade, China has rapidly developed into a major international space power, effectively multiplying its number of on-orbit satellites tenfold,” the report says. “More than half of the approximately 200 satellites China launched in 2022 were remote sensing satellites.”
Now, China operates more than 300 remote sensing satellites with diverse sensors, the report said, thus “improving the Chinese military’s ability to observe U.S. aircraft carriers, expeditionary strike groups and deployed air wings.”
Space Norms
Competition pitting the United States against China and Russia extends beyond Earth’s immediate orbits. Asteroids, the moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies could provide countries with valuable resources or strategic advantages, according to the report.
China is aiming to put its astronauts on the moon by 2030. Meanwhile, several nations including Venezuela, Pakistan, South Africa, and Belarus, have signed up for a planned moon base project led by China and Russia. It is officially known as the International Lunar Research Station.
The report highlighted Chinese and Russian activities at the Lagrange Points in space, including China’s Queqiao relay satellite, which is stationed at one of these five points. Due to these points’ relative distance between the Earth and the moon, spacecraft can remain in these regions for a longer period while consuming less fuel. Experts have compared these points to strategic oceanic gateways such as the Strait of Hormuz.
“These regions are uniquely valuable for long-term missions, such as surveillance, space environment monitoring, or data relay, in deep space,” the report says.
The key to the future in space is “preserving space access” for all nations, the report said, but there is a lack of international consensus on space norms.
“Despite the substantial increase in new space operators, technologies, and spacecraft, the international community has not achieved consensus on major norms, rules, or principles governing activities in space since the 1970s,” the report says.
It noted that China and Russia have endorsed a draft treaty for space that “fails to address a variety of anti-satellite weapons and lacks meaningful verification mechanisms.”
As of December 2023, 33 nations have signed up to the U.S.-led Artemis Accords, which commit signatories to a common vision of peaceful, sustainable, and transparent cooperation in space.
“The expanding utility of space systems has extended the boundaries of conflict and exacerbated the world’s vulnerability to dangers in the space environment. Actors seeking to challenge international order will have access to systems capable of devastating and lasting impacts on our progress on Earth and in space,” the report concludes.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
