The Other New Revolutionary Russian Weapons Systems: ASATs

Porubshchik-2 – the newly revealed ASAT

In a recent article by RIA Novosti news agency yet another ASAT system is described: the Porubshchik-2. RT picked up on this article and posted this article in English.  While the RT article focuses mostly on the new electronic warfare capabilities of this aircraft, the Russian text puts more emphasis on the fact that this EW aircraft will have ASAT capabilities.  This system is still in development, but at the very least these show that the Russians are now developing a full array of anti-satellite systems.

Let’s add this all up

The Russian plan to counter the US military threat is becoming clearer and clearer with each passing day.  I would summarize as follows:

By targeting US space-based capabilities Russia is aiming at an exceedingly important and currently extremely fragile segment of the US armed forces and the impact of that cannot be overstated. It is already well known that the US military has almost no practice operating in a highly contested electronic warfare environment and that, in fact, US EW capabilities have stagnated over the years. In the age of advanced communication and network-centric warfare, the disruption or elimination of any meaningful segment of the US space-based capabilities would have a dramatic impact on US warfighting capabilities. Just like US tactical air is practically completely dependent on AWACs support, all the branches of the US military have grown accustomed to enjoying advanced command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities (C4ISR) and this is what the Russians want to deny them (and you can bet that the Chinese are working along the exact same lines).

This is not to say that Russia has achieved anywhere near full-spectrum dominance over the United States but it does mean that the United States has totally failed in its efforts to achieve anything near full-spectrum dominance over Russia and, therefore, over the rest of the planet. It is important to understand that while, for the USA, it is crucial to achieving superiority, for Russia it is enough to deny that superiority to the USA. Russia, therefore, has no need to achieve anything even remotely resembling full-spectrum dominance over the USA/NATO – all she needs to achieve is to make it impossible for the Empire to make her submit by force or threat of force.

The big problem of internal competition

Just as I had predicted in my article “Making Sense of the Russian 5th Generation Fighters in Syria” there is now high-level official statements indicating that Russia might only produce a limited amount of Su-57s. The reason? That the 4++ generation Su-35S is already very good good and much cheaper than the Su-57 and that Russian money should go towards developing a 6th generation multirole fighter. In other words, the main threat to the Su-57 program is not foreign competition (the Russians want to offer the Su-57 for export!), but internal competition. The same thing happened to the MiG-35 program (and before that to the MiG 1.44 project): they were beaten by Sukhoi. The MiG-35 appears to finally have been selected as a frontal aviation fighter, but the overall pattern is clear: unlike the USSR, Russia cannot afford to develop many similar or overlapping weapons systems at the same time. Some weapons systems will be produced in limited quantities while others might be canceled altogether.

Something similar will probably happen inside the Russian ASAT programs: projects will compete and not all will be deployed. Still, what is clear is that the Russians are working with a great deal of intensity on a number of different technologies whose purpose will be to take out US space capabilities in the early phases of any conflict. In contrast, the USA has spent so much money on very lucrative but useless weapons systems, that to restart a full-scaled ASAT program will take a lot of time (even if Trump has already declared that he wants to build “space forces” – check out this excellent commentary by Philip Giraldi on this topic), probably decades.

Modern weapon system developments have a huge “inertia”: they are hard to start, hard to develop and hard to stop once started.  This is especially true for a profoundly corrupt and delusional Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) like the US one (see my review of Andrei Martyanov’s excellent book on this topic here).  Considering the current crisis of the AngloZionist Empire and the trade/sanctions war Trump is currently waging on most of the planet, the chances of the US force planners correcting their past mistakes and adequately reacting to the new reality is probably very close to zero.  Trump’s attempt to develop space forces is therefore yet another case of too little, too late.  The gap between the advertised and the actual US military capabilities will only get bigger in the foreseeable future.

The Saker