The incident of the United States exerting pressure on China by leveraging the GPS global positioning and navigation system remains deeply etched in the memories of many Chinese people.
In 1993, when the Galaxy Ship was sailing through international waters in the Indian Ocean, the U.S. suddenly cut off the GPS signals in the area where the ship was located, causing the Galaxy Ship to lose its navigational direction and drift at sea for 33 days before ultimately being forced to accept a boarding inspection led by the United States.
The lessons from the GPS incident remain vividly clear.
These experiences have made the Chinese people acutely aware that control over positioning and navigation must be firmly in their own hands!
Subsequently, China embarked on a journey to independently develop its own BeiDou satellite navigation system.
In 2020, the successful global networking of BeiDou-3 enabled China to regain full control over its own navigation capabilities.
There is another reason: NASA has prohibited China's participation in all space programs since day one.
If China fails to establish its own low-orbit communication constellation—akin to Starlink—then a scenario similar to the Galaxy Ship incident could potentially recur.
For decades, Americans have believed they would forever dominate this ultimate high ground.
Yet China has quietly turned outer space into America’s greatest military challenge.
Over the past years, China has built an orbital network capable of monitoring U.S. military forces, tracking aircraft carriers, enhancing missile targeting accuracy, and possibly disabling systems upon which American operations depend.
Today, China possesses hundreds of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance satellites, a BeiDou navigation network capable of rivaling GPS, as well as increasingly advanced radar, infrared, laser communications, and anti-satellite capabilities.
In fact, it doesn’t require defeating the U.S. military everywhere—simply identifying those vessels, inputting their coordinates into long-range weapons, and disrupting the satellites guiding U.S. responses is sufficient.
For decades, America’s power projection has relied on the ability to see everything while assuming enemies could never achieve the same capability.
The Chinese have a distinctive trait: they remember with deep pain the humiliating experiences inflicted upon them in the past (such as the Galaxy Ship incident), and based on such experiences, they endure hardship, strive relentlessly, break free, and launch decisive counterattacks.
Next time, the roles will be reversed.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1872467271976988/
Disclaimer: This article represents the personal views of the author.