Musk's Starlink became an important means for the United States to intervene in Ukraine, and China's major breakthrough in microwave weapons could effectively deal with the Us satellite constellation and drones.
In recent years, overseas media have become interested in academic papers published by China, because in these papers, some clues to the development of new military equipment can often be found. Many media have specifically looked for someone to flip through CNKI. No, the editors of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post have made new discoveries: China has made new progress in microwave directed energy weapons. Directed energy weapons, abbreviated as DEW, include both electromagnetic radiation weapons and laser weapons. Last week, Li Shifeng, a scientist at the China Academy of Engineering Physics, revealed in a paper published in the domestic academic journal Strong Lasers and Particle Beams that his team has developed a powerful microwave device capable of generating short pulses of 501 megawatts in the Ka-band, more than all previously publicly reported in the world. And this power is not the limit, they reached 735MW of power in the simulation. The Ka-band refers to the microwave band from 26.5 to 40 GHz, which is widely used in satellite and military communications. Ka-band systems use narrower beams to achieve high capacity density and are more immune to interference, providing high uplink and downlink data rates for satellites such as military intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as other satellite applications. Space tests around the world have shown that the Ka-band transmits high-speed data even in bad weather conditions. SpaceX's "Starlink" satellite of the United States uses the Ka band to interact with ground stations. The U.S. Army plans to equip the latest combat drones to use the Ka-band for communication by 2027, and to upgrade General Atomics' MQ-1C UAV to have Ka-band satellite communication capabilities. The Ka-band is also widely used in communications satellites launched by the mainland in recent years. It can be said that if the US military establishes a 7-by-24-hour satellite communication network covering the world, like space X "Starlink", the US military can sit at home and remotely control drones flying anywhere in the world. Satellite communication equipment in the Ka-band is therefore extremely important. During last month's Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Starlink urgently donated a large number of Starlink ground stations to Ukraine to ensure that Russia could not cut off Ukraine's network connection. It can be said that it has provided a solid guarantee for Ukraine's information warfare. China's new technology can break the superiority of the US military. The hard destruction of satellites by missiles will produce a large amount of debris, causing unpredictable consequences, so the use of missile anti-satellites is increasingly opposed by the world, and the application of microwave directed energy weapons is even more precious in this context.
U.S. Navy researchers proposed a device called the Relativistic Speed Regulator Amplifier (RKA) in the late 1980s as the structure of choice for high-frequency microwave amplifiers. But for years, the transmit power of the Ka-band has been difficult to increase. According to Li Shifeng in the paper, although the China Academy of Engineering Physics has achieved a power of 2.2GW in the x-band, due to the complexity of the millimeter wave band, its power in the Ka-band only reaches 775kw, a difference of nearly 3,000 times. An increase in frequency often leads to a sharp decrease in efficiency and stability. His team improved the structure of the rka so that each physical process in the device can be measured and fine-tuned independently. In one test, the new version of the device produced 501 megawatts of power. A south China Morning Post interview with a scientist in Beijing who studies high-speed satellite communication technology said the device could become a high-power microwave weapon. The microwave power of this machine is 1 billion times higher than that used in most communications equipment, which is really incredible. At this power, it can not only interfere with the enemy's communications, but may even burn the enemy's microwave communication equipment. For example, the anti-hypersonic weapon satellite network being deployed by the US Missile Defense Agency, the number of which has reached more than 1,000, is very uneconomical to hard kill with missiles, but it can be irradiated with high-power microwave pulses to disable satellites in pieces. Very good value for money. Of course, Chinese scientists are not only developing offensive means, but also defensive means. The South China Morning Post also reported that scientists at the China Institute for Space Systems Research also claimed to have invented a new technology that could protect satellites from high-powered microwave weapons last month. The technology has passed ground tests, and some of it is currently being used by some of China's most important satellites.
We need to note that the United States is also acting in this area. The first equipment received by the US Space Force after its establishment was several sets of satellite jamming ground stations, but the transmission power is unknown, and it is estimated that it is not as large as the equipment that Chinese scientists are developing. It can only interfere and cannot kill. But in any case, sino-US competition in this field will increase the possibility of future battlefield situations. In the future, both satellite constellations and drones may face the threat of high-energy microwave weapons. Fortunately, China is ahead of the curve, and what needs to be worried about now are the countries that are fanning the flames around the world.