It’s 2030, and American special operators are on a secret mission in Eastern Europe
and things are about to go very wrong.
All of a sudden, the team’s GPS systems go offline.
They find that they can’t communicate with home base, which means they have no air support
at all.
But it’s about to get even worse.
The operators soon discover that it’s not just their GPS that’s not working, it’s
the satellites themselves.
It’s as if they’ve just disappeared.
In fact, they have, because the systems they relied on were just blown out of orbit by
the Russians’ new satellite killing missile system, the S-550.
But how likely is this scenario?
Will the S-550 really pose such a serious problem to U.S. and NATO forces the way Russia
is claiming it will?
On November 9th, 2021, Russia announced the development of its S-550 air defense system,
and a little over a month later, according to its military sources, Russia successfully
tested this system.
The S-550 has its basis in the S-500 Prometheus, another new defensive missile system tasked
with shooting down enemy ballistic missiles and aircraft.
Supposedly, that includes the United States’ fifth generation fighters, the F-22 and F-35,
and its upcoming B-21 Raider bomber.
The S-550 would complement the S-500 by covering a different kind of mission, an arguably even
more sensitive one.
While the S-500 is designed to track and destroy targets in the skies, the S-550 system is
designed to reach targets even higher up.
Its mission is specifically to defend Russia against objects in space, and the Russian
news agency RIA Novosti has claimed that the S-550 would have ranges “an order of magnitude
higher than the American THAAD and Aegis missile defense systems with their SM-3 Block II B
missiles.”
According to the Polish Warsaw Institute, a think tank which monitors the Russian military,
the S-550 will be tasked with intercepting incoming ICBMs and knocking out enemy satellites,
and supposedly, the S-550 is even capable of hitting hypersonic targets tens of thousands
of kilometers high.
The supposed introduction of the S-550 into active service in late 2021 came after a series
of reportedly successful tests.
One of these tests included the shooting down of Cosmos-1408, a defunct Soviet satellite
that had still been in orbit.
But according to Russian media, the S-550 wasn’t made to blow up other country’s
satellites at all.
TASS, a Russian news agency, quotes one of its defense experts as saying that the missile’s
true purpose is to physically destroy the warhead of its target missile, preventing
a nuclear blast.
That defense expert, Dmitry Litovkin, also noted that this principle would be in contrast
to earlier, Soviet-era anti-ballistic missile systems, which were designed to intercept
incoming ICBMs with a counter nuclear blast.
The new S-550 would instead work as a purely “kinetic intercept,” meaning that it would
have to be far more precise, and although there would still be radiation from the fragments
of a busted nuclear warhead, it would be far less destructive than an actual nuclear explosion.
Although both the United States and Russia possess anti-ICBM defense systems that have
this capability, the missiles that they currently employ are not mobile.
Instead, they exist in stationary silos, which are easy to target in a first strike, especially
with satellite precision.
Because the S-550 is mobile, it will be far harder to target and easier to hide.
While, it would be wise to be skeptical about the validity of its claims, the S-550’s
presence is a sign that the Russian military establishment is keen to develop space defense
and anti-satellite capabilities, and that’s something the United States will need to take
seriously, because its premier position in world politics is very much dependent on its
GPS satellites.
But what is the American GPS system, and why is it so important?
America’s GPS consists of a 24-satellite system across six orbital planes.
There are a minimum of four satellites in each orbital plane.
Ever since Operation Desert Storm against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991, the United
States has used the GPS system to devastating effect, giving it a distinct edge in military
operations.
GPS served as an advantageous navigational aid in the otherwise uniform sands of the
Arabian Desert during the Gulf War.
The conflict also saw the first use of GPS-guided JDAM bombs, about 5,500 in total, or approximately
25% of the amount of munitions dropped in the conflict.
The spectacular success of Desert Storm proved the concept, and since then, the GPS system
has embedded itself at the heart of the United States military.
It is the cornerstone of navigation for the Air Force and Navy, and is critical to command
and control systems.
Through the use of GPS, commanders know the most precise place to send supplies.
Soldiers and marines know exactly where they should be and when.
Many of the United States military’s weapons also rely on the GPS system, and not just
the famous JDAM bombs.
Precision-guided artillery like the 155-millimeter M982 Excalibur artillery shell is a GPS-guided
munition that gives the U.S. Army and Marines the ability to put deadly accurate precision
artillery strikes on targets up to 25 miles away with minimal risk of friendly fire or
collateral damage.
A GPS-guided mortar round, the 120-millimeter Roll Control Guided Mortar, is also under
development, suggesting that U.S. military doctrine will further emphasize precision-guided
artillery in the future.
In the absence of the GPS satellite system; none of these weapons will work, and American
and allied forces could take a nasty surprise on the battlefield should they suffer the
sudden loss of such capability.
However, the GPS system’s importance has extended beyond military affairs since it
came online in the 1990s.
Like many technologies before it, the GPS system moved from the military to civilian
spheres and has since become an indispensable part of the U.S. economy and everyday life
for Americans.
And it isn’t just the military that a satellite killing system like the S-550 could wreak
havoc on.
The importance of the GPS satellite system to everyday life extends far beyond its use
as a navigational aid in all modern cars.
The satellites are used in such diverse fields as civil aviation, banking and financial markets,
power grids, agriculture, and communications to name a few, and their loss would cause
significant damage to the U.S. economy and potentially create social unrest.
The United States has recently invested in a more modern GPS constellation, with improved
resistance against jamming and other forms of electronic warfare.
However, that ability would be of little use if the satellites get knocked out of the sky
by a missile barrage.
The damage to both America’s war fighting capability and the home front would be significant
should the GPS satellites go down, which is why America’s military observers are closely
watching the development of systems like the S-550.
The reported anti-ICBM component of the S-550 would be of equal concern to the United States.
For decades, the knowledge and doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, has
prevented the use of nuclear weapons and great power confrontation in general.
A missile system that would be capable of reliably shooting down ICBMs and then hiding
from retaliation would naturally poke holes in MAD, providing more opportunities for Russia
to behave badly on the international stage.
Vladimir Putin has not been hesitant to use nuclear threats during the war in Ukraine,
even if only vaguely, and such saber rattling would naturally grow with a reliable mobile
anti-ICBM system.
And the prospect of a system like the S-550 only gets scarier in others’ hands.
Russia has a history of selling or threatening to sell its missile systems abroad.
Prior to its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia threatened to sell some of its
more established missile defense systems to allied countries, including Belarus, whose
territory it used to attack the Ukrainian capital Kyiv during the opening phase of the
war.
Vladimir Putin also reportedly discussed the S-550 and the related S-500 during his December
2021 trip to India, a country that has had a longstanding missile defense relationship
with Russia.
In particular, India struck a deal with Russia in 2018 for the S-400 missile system, which
has prompted talks of sanctions from the otherwise friendly United States.
The United States has also threatened to sanction NATO ally Turkey for its use of the same system.
If the S-550 is as capable as the Russians claim it is, sales of the system to other
countries could further threaten American satellites or undermine nuclear deterrence.
That Russia has many relationships to use as a basis for sales abroad also must be a
point of concern for American policymakers.
The S-550’s arrival shows that the ability to both attack and defend satellites will
be a critical part of warfare in the future.
Without satellite surveillance, communication, and coordinates for precision weapons, modern
armies will operate blindly and dumbly, with a significant risk for chaos on the home front
as the communication and navigational systems that modern life depends upon suddenly goes
out.
Meanwhile, the end of the importance of traditional ballistic missiles will put further emphasis
on the development of hypersonic glide vehicles that are far more difficult to shoot down.
If the S-550 is as effective as Russia claims, it will add further incentive for countries
to develop hypersonic glide vehicles that have a more unpredictable flight path which
will help them to evade missile defense systems.
This is a race that the United States currently lags in, which would again give it reason
to be wary of Russia’s new satellite killing missile system, if it works as advertised.
While many details on the S-550 remain unclear, given Russia’s track record, such claims
must be taken with several grains of salt.
What is clear is that the entrance of this missile system is a sign that Vladimir Putin
is serious about his emphasis on new satellite-killing missile weapons, and that the age of satellite
surveillance and precision will increasingly come under threat by next-generation missile
systems.
And if nothing else, the S-550 missile system is interesting for what it means rather than
what it is currently capable of doing.
It lets us peer into the future of deterrence, warfare, and international relations.
Space will be a premier field of power projection and diplomatic brinksmanship in the second
quarter of the 21st century, and the ability to project power in the final frontier will
be a key component of hard power.
The arrival of the satellite-killing S-550 shows that the new space race has already
begun.