For the first time, the US military confirms it has deployed weapons in orbit

The categories include directed-energy, such as lasers, radio frequency jammers, and kinetic weapons capable of physically destroying a target. These types of weapons could be positioned on the ground or in space. In 2025, Gen. Chance Saltzman, until earlier month the Space Force’s chief of space operations, said other countries, presumably China and Russia, are pursuing all six categories. “We’re not pursuing all of those yet,” Saltzman said at the time.

But Saltzman argued that maybe the United States should. “There are good reasons to have all those categories,” he said.

The Space Force revealed its first acknowledged weapon system in June, when it announced the operational acceptance of a ground-based mobile satellite jammer called Meadowlands. Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at the Secure World Foundation think tank, speculated that the “space control weapons” announced by Meink on Monday could be jammers placed in orbit.

“China and Russia are both thought to have space-based jammers,” Samson wrote in an email to Ars. “I’ve always thought that the US must have them, too.”

Anti-satellite tests, particularly those using direct ascent or other kinetic weapons, have been widely condemned because they generate space debris.

US officials have repeatedly voiced a preference for “counterspace” weapons that do not generate space debris. A space-based kinetic weapon would leave behind a cloud of space junk jeopardizing countless satellites in orbit, including the US military’s own assets, and there’s no public indication that the United States has tested such a weapon (the US military has demonstrated a ground-based anti-satellite weapon), according to Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Then there are non-kinetic weapons such as signal jammers and spoofers and laser dazzlers. From an under-the-hood hardware standpoint, such weapons are doppelgängers to technology already found at scale in orbit,” Swope said. “Any radio transmitter could be a jammer. Any inter-satellite optical link could be a laser dazzler. Certainly, a jammer or dazzler could be purpose-built, too.”