Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said the deployment was aimed at deterring America’s adversaries
The US has for the first time acknowledged that it has weapons in space amid ongoing tensions with Russia and China.
US Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink revealed the deployment on Monday during the opening of the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor in Maryland.
“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenge of evolving threats wherever they exist,” Meink said in a keynote address.
“This is why the Space Force now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” he said, without elaborating. “It’s important from a deterrence perspective,” he added.
During a question-and-answer session, Meink declined to go into detail, stressing that the phrasing of his remarks was “very well thought out.”
“It is critically important that we maintain our dominance, not only in the air but in space,” he said, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine.
The Washington Post quoted a US official as saying that the technology mentioned by Meink could include the ability to “take out” an enemy satellite if it were being used to target American troops or a US satellite.
There is no international ban on deploying weapons in space, provided they are not weapons of mass destruction.
US President Donald Trump established the Space Force in 2019 during his first term in office, describing space as “the world’s newest warfighting domain.” Last year, he unveiled plans for Golden Dome, a multilayered missile-defense system designed to protect the entire United States which includes space-based interceptors.
The project echoes the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), dubbed Star Wars, launched by US President Ronald Reagan at the height of the Cold War in 1983. Reagan’s ambitious program was later scaled back and ultimately abandoned without its proposed space-based weapons being deployed.
In March, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov condemned what he described as “the militarization of space” and argued that the Golden Dome “poses a significant threat to strategic stability.”
Since the 2000s, the US, China, India and Russia have tested anti-satellite weapons. In November 2021, the Russian military successfully destroyed a decommissioned Soviet-era spy satellite. The Russian Foreign Ministry said at the time that the operation was conducted in strict accordance with international law and was not directed against any particular country.
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