The U.S. Confirmed for the First Time That It Has Weapons in Orbit. Beijing Told Washington to 'Stop Preparing for War in Outer Space,' and the Kremlin Called for Total Demilitarization.

The United States has acknowledged for the first time that it has weapons deployed in space, a disclosure that drew warnings from both China and Russia within a day and that analysts say confirms one of the worst-kept secrets in modern defense.

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink made the statement Monday during a keynote at the Air & Space Forces Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland. "This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action," Meink said. He did not describe the weapons, say how many are in orbit or say when they were launched.

The vagueness was deliberate. Asked about the remark during a question-and-answer session, Meink said the wording had been "very well thought out," and he declined to say whether the systems are kinetic, meaning they physically strike a target, or non-kinetic, meaning they use lasers, jamming or cyber tools to disable satellites without destroying them. Revealing operational details, he argued, would undercut their deterrent value. "Is there any question in the room by anybody about whether or not the Chinese and Russians have been developing these sorts of weapons?" he asked.

A follow-up statement from the service defined the term without narrowing it. "Space control encapsulates the mission areas required to contest and control the space domain, employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities," it said. "These capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes."

China responded Tuesday. Foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said Beijing opposes the "weaponization of outer space, turning it into a battlefield, as well as an arms race there," and added: "We urge the U.S. side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space." Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said space must be kept "free of any weapons." "We are counting on broad international consolidation to continue working toward the complete demilitarization of space," he said.

Both governments have their own programs. In 2024 the White House said Russia was developing a new anti-satellite weapon that could be launched from space, though it called the danger not imminent. The U.S. Space Force says China "develops and operates space and counterspace capabilities as part of a military modernization strategy," and that Russia "views space as a warfighting domain and believes space supremacy will be a decisive factor in future conflicts." The Wall Street Journal has reported that Beijing supplied Iran with satellite imagery used to target U.S. troops in Jordan in July, a claim China denies. India destroyed one of its own low-orbit satellites in a 2019 missile test, joining Russia, China and the United States in demonstrating the capability.

Song Zhongping, a Hong Kong-based military commentator and former Chinese army instructor, told AFP the announcement was "no surprise at all," because the existence of such weapons "has long been an open secret." What changed, he said, is that "the U.S. used to keep it ambiguous, whereas now it has gone public." He warned that "China will not stand by and do nothing," and that "whether China deploys weapons in space will depend entirely on whether the United States moves in that direction."

The legal ground is thin. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit but says nothing about conventional or non-kinetic arms. "There is a regulatory vacuum because Article 4 of the 1967 treaty only forbids weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons in orbit," said space law expert Laetitia Cesari, who expects the issue to come up at the next U.N. disarmament meeting in November. Moscow and Beijing have pushed for roughly 20 years for a treaty banning the placement of any weapons in space, while Western governments have favored voluntary norms of "responsible behavior." The U.S. announcement, Cesari said, "will likely give impetus to the restrictive approach that Moscow and Beijing are pushing for."

The disclosure fits a broader shift. President Trump signed an executive order in December 2025 emphasizing the Space Force's attack mission alongside its defensive one, and the Pentagon's Golden Dome missile-defense effort has pushed space-based interceptors from an initial contract to flight-ready hardware in about a year, with a prize competition aimed at an initial capability by 2028. SpaceX was awarded a $4.16 billion contract in May for a constellation of satellites to track aircraft from orbit; the first are due to launch this month.

Meink used the same speech to sketch an Air Force that he said would look "radically different" by 2032, with one-way attack drones replacing artillery as the "primary killer." He said artificial intelligence now "competes with some of the world's top programmers, cyber operators and hackers," letting countries without deep resources "quickly adapt and scale their combat capabilities," and that the U.S. "must increase our combat power and innovate faster than anyone else, affordably."