U.S. cites growing China space and cyber threat

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military painted China on Tuesday as posing a growing threat to the United States and others in space and cyberspace.

China is "aggressively" honing its ability to shoot down satellites along with other space and counter-space capabilities, said Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Horne of the U.S. Strategic Command.

Such know-how has big implications for Beijing's potential to curb access in the Taiwan Straits "and well beyond," he told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressionally created advisory group.

Horne, deputy head of the Strategic Command's joint component for space, said recent Chinese People's Liberation Army writings suggested China might target an enemy's spy satellites along with navigation and early-warning spacecraft "to blind and deafen."

China's unannounced destruction of one of its own defunct weather satellites in January 2007 showed the PLA's ability to attack satellites operating in low-Earth orbit, he said.

The United States and the old Soviet Union demonstrated such anti-satellite capabilities of their own, initially in the 1980s. The Chinese embassy did not return a call seeking comment.

Horne did not spell out the implications for possible U.S. responses to any Chinese attack on Taiwan but said the United States must "proactively protect our space capabilities."

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