The next disruption to global trade and shipping lanes may not come from a missile at sea, but from a signal in space.
The era of sixty years of strategic silence comes to an end. On September 14, US Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink publicly acknowledged that, “US has on-orbit Space Control Weapons”. There was no press release, no doctrine document, no threshold. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Schiess made a statement the following day, “Today, Guardians operate on-orbit weapons capable of defending against space-enabled attacks”. Both statements signify the shift in the US policy of long-standing ambiguity over offensive counter-space capabilities. Just like that a new dilemma was given to maritime world which it was never consulted on.
The disclosure coincided with the first live-fly exercise in dynamic on-orbit operations, Apollo Maneuvers 2026, which was conducted concurrently with six allied nations, and followed weeks after the VICTUS HAZE mission launched into orbit on a sixteen-hour notice. It is highly likely that the U.S. has had some counter-space systems in place for years. The disavowal of restraint was not what the ended on September 14, it was deniability.
Now there is a stockpile of questions left unanswered making international environment more vulnerable than it already is, “What will happen when other states follow the suit? Who will be responsible when space competition begins to jeopardize the trade and communication systems of maritime world and Will US be able to answer these questions with mere deterrence?
It’s not that the capability is new, the difference is that declaration changes the strategic calculations. The arms-race dates back to even before the admission itself: History remembers, “the 2007 Chinese ASAT test that scattered debris, Mission Shakti by India, and the 2021 Russian shot where the ISS crew had to go into hiding”. It was considered a diplomatic taboo to publicly announce orbit weaponization as that made deployments too costly, given the faacts that everyone knew about them. What has chnaged now is normalization. Maybe US knows the line begins where he stands but this move won’t be a good precedent . That cost was taken off by Meink. The Americans did it first: that’s the public-relations shield Moscow now has. Beijing gets a justification template as it has 1,506 payloads already on orbit with 140 launches in the target for this year. In a domain that can never hide, never maneuver away and never be armored, offense is the superior option and security dilemmas spiral in it, CSIS Space Threat Assessment 2025.
The contemporary era is witnessing a new chapter of orbit warfare right above the world shipping lanes. UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport reveals that more than 80 per cent of world merchandise trade is transported by sea and that all of this trade relies on chokepoints for which the space layer above them is the sole enabler. It is not just any theoretical fantasy, the vulnerability is a bitter fact. GPSPatron’s cumulative tracking revealed over 10,000 vessels reporting interference with GNSS in the second quarter of 2025 alone, with the figure increasing by eight times compared to the same period last year; in February, it was fourteen states that issued warnings about interference from Russia in the Baltic region, caused by GNSS jamming and AIS spoofing. In 2023, Chinese-affiliated ships cut through cables and disabled the satellite communication system at Taiwan’s Matsu Islands; the same template being used by Chinese ships now in the European waters.
Space, a support to maritime security is rapidly becoming the new threat to it with the dual-capability defense systems now being placed in orbits.
Satellite-based infrastructure is increasingly vital to modern communication and trade. Under the satellites are 597 operational subsea cables which transmit by far the most intercontinental data and trillions of dollars in daily settlement; all satellite-location-relying cable-repair ROVs need the very positioning; a satellite war would disable first. Satellites offer navigation and accurate time, link vessels to ports and operators, surveillance and monitor illegal fishing, evasion of sanctions and other activities at sea.
Already, space satellites are helping to monitor sanctioned tankers sailing dark: HawkEye 360 and ICEYE satellites and others are now arbitrating who can trade, who cannot. That makes them by function belligerents and thus targets.This dependency makes the ocean vulnerable. The satellites that are going to be blacklisted are the same satellites being hardened for targeting systems. No arms race will announce itself as the exploding ships. It will be delivered in Singapore, Rotterdam and London as “war-risk” notices.
Legal Vacuum & the Way Forward
The dilemma of multi-domain competition is that fight waged in one domain paralyzes the other. Yet international regulation regimes have not caught up with this reality. The legal void is profound: the Outer Space Treaty only prohibits nuclear weapons in space and no treaty specifies what constitutes a “space-enabled attack”. The solution is in the ocean: The 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement did not relate to possession, it related to behaviour: notifications, banned manoeuvres, annual reviews. It prevented rival navies from falling into war for 50 years. The 5 steps are invented to move that logic up from the bottom. Publish thresholds, Take action to universalize the moratorium on debris as called for in UNGA Resolution 77/41, which was adopted by a vote of 155-9. Have a “NOTAM for orbit” (pre-notify) close-approaching maneuvers in the UN registry.
Create a Space Incidents Investigation Board, based on the ICAO Annex 13 model, for maritime jurisdiction; first case files for the jamming in the Baltic, the Matsu cuts and the Russian satellite feed to the Iranian strike already exist. And create a dual domain crisis channel, in which a satellite failure over the Baltic, a GNSS spoofing attack near Hormuz, and a cable cut near Matsu are all a class of incident that warrant a single deconfliction call, which is how an adversary will fight them. These rules can be extended to universality through a plurilateral coalition like the Artemis Accords, which can be fed into the UN Open-Ended Working Group. This is the way for UNC LOS to evolve: into custom.
The arms race in orbit didn’t start with Meink’s words and it may not end with them. So ambiguity, and the fanciful notion that space competition is different from maritime commerce, died on September 14. In the maritime sector the war has been declared 400 kilometres in the air but the ships and cables that carry 80 percent of global trade have no voice at any table where the rules are being drawn up. Statesmen should establish and mutually agree to guidelines for all. Otherwise, these regulations will be thrust upon us by a future crisis through destruction, failures of communication channels and increasing monetary expenses.
Author: Marusha Kamran Hashmi, Research Intern, Center for International Strategic Studies, AJK.
