【By Wang Shipu, Observer Group Columnist】
The most important military news of this week is undoubtedly the United States' statements regarding our nuclear expansion issue and the "Star Shield" space-based strategic anti-missile capability. First, Lockheed Martin announced that it would complete the first demonstration of the space interception part of the "Star Shield" system before Trump's term ends in 2028. Then, Trump followed up on the trade war negotiation trend by urging China to join "nuclear talks".
October is the start of the U.S. fiscal year (FY), and all major U.S. defense companies take advantage of this to promote themselves through earnings calls, in order to gain more financing in a complex and changing financial market. Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin are no exception. Among them, Lockheed Martin's statement about the "Star Shield" system's space interceptor has attracted the most attention.
The PPT of Star Shield is also very "in line with its preferences," with this golden big cover making people think of many space opera science fiction works from Lockheed Martin
On October 20, Jim Taiclet, CEO of Lockheed Martin, spoke at the earnings call about the work related to the "Star Shield" missile defense system, saying that the company's goal is to conduct an orbital intercept test for at least one space-based anti-missile design no later than 2028.
This is the first time the U.S. has mentioned a timeline for the "Star Shield" program. The Pentagon has kept the specific development details of "Star Shield" secret, but people generally speculate that "Star Shield" will be a comprehensive project with a very broad concept, including space interceptors targeting traditional ballistic targets, as well as a series of products such as atmospheric early warning detection and interception systems. Among these "Star Shield" subsystems, the one that the outside world is most concerned about is the space interception system.
Space interception systems have long been seen as a taboo that could disrupt world peace, but in this era of "disorder and chaos", American officials have long stopped being shy about expressing their desire to develop space military capabilities, especially the wish for space militarization. General Chance Saltzman, the head of space operations of the U.S. Space Force, said in March during an online live interview with Defense One that the U.S. military not only wants space-based intercept missiles, but also hopes they can intercept enemy missiles during the boost phase. The U.S. military's goal is for these interceptors to play a role far away from the U.S. mainland, so "they must be fast and accurate".
For all those who love peace, mutual assured destruction between superpowers has been the cornerstone of peace for 80 years after World War II, preventing another world war. However, the space-based missile defense system is obviously a harmful act that undermines the foundation of nuclear balance. Therefore, the "Star Shield" program is rightly called the "Star Wars 2.0" version. This is not a good term - there is nothing more like an arms race than developing technology to achieve absolute suppression of the enemy. If Lockheed Martin insists on manufacturing such weapons, then Trump's administration will likely scrap the 1967 Outer Space Treaty led by the U.S. This leads to inevitable global moral criticism against the "Star Shield" system.
But the current U.S. is not the same as the U.S. that could pursue absolute military superiority. If we interpret the nuclear weapon development trajectories of China, the U.S., and Russia in the 1930s, we might find that the U.S.'s choice on the "Star Shield" system is not an absolute pursuit of military hegemony by a superpower, but rather a forced response to the current status of nuclear weapon development between China and the U.S.
Nuclear weapons are the cornerstone of great powers, but maintaining this cornerstone relies on continuous R&D and investment, not on historical inertia. In this regard, the U.S. is currently facing a certain degree of nuclear weapon increment crisis. This crisis comes from the highly anticipated LGM-35 "Sentinel" program.
Currently, the "Sentinel" program is still in the stage of being completely restructured, mainly because the U.S. military finally admitted in August 2025 that the new LGM-35 series missiles cannot be deployed in the old Minuteman missile silos; if the U.S. wants to deploy the new land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, it must build new silos. This decision has almost rendered the project's achievements over the past few years meaningless. The deployment date of "Sentinel" has been implicitly delayed to the mid-2030s.
Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman, which is responsible for executing the "Sentinel" missile program, basically confirmed this week that the "Sentinel" program will have significant changes. During the earnings call, when talking about the impact of the "Sentinel" (Sentinel) intercontinental ballistic missile program restructuring on Northrop Grumman, Northrop Grumman's president Kathy Warden explained: "The content of this restructuring includes reaching an agreement with the U.S. Air Force on the new project baseline. Recent decisions, such as building new launch silos, have had a 'positive impact' on cost and schedule. The goal of this restructuring is to accelerate the project and clarify the production schedule."
If we translate this sentence from American jargon into plain language, it means "The U.S. Air Force expects to decide this year whether to build new missile silos and modify the already obsolete 'Sentinel' missile schedule." Whether the U.S. can complete hundreds of super-reinforced missile launch silos in a timely manner is a matter worth doubting.
Under the constraints of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, a large portion of the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile numbers are filled by land-based missiles in silos. Of the 700 nuclear delivery vehicles that the U.S. military maintains on a regular basis, 400 are the Minuteman III series ballistic missiles. With the delay of the "Sentinel" program until after 2035, the U.S. military will face a dilemma of not only being unable to expand its nuclear delivery vehicles, but also struggling to maintain the existing scale for 15 years.
At the same time, the nuclear delivery vehicles on both sides of the Pacific are facing a literal "decline and rise." Just at the beginning of this month, U.S. Air Force Chief Kenneth F. Wilsbach told Congress during a Senate nomination hearing that the U.S. Air Force has modified the statement that China will expand its nuclear arsenal to 1,000 warheads by 2030, officially acknowledging that China will reach the same nuclear scale as the U.S. and Russia by 2030 - 1,500 warheads.
Of course, after our grand National Day parade, this kind of "correcting reality" narrative doesn't mean much. As a military news professional, I tend to believe that the leaders of the Pentagon and the White House are not 4Chan netizens. These high-ranking officials should not engage in idealistic metaphysics on issues of national life and death. But the objective reality is that the Americans have initiated a great power competition, yet they are completely unable to cope with the vigorous efforts of the Pacific West in nuclear weapons.
For a decade, they have done nothing about the imminent facts, dealing with China's nuclear breakthroughs with a laissez-faire, even idealistic attitude. But the world is material, and the result is that China is freely expanding the quantity and quality of its nuclear delivery vehicles, while the U.S. still uses the old "Minuteman" series to hold the fort. In this century, no one predicted that the U.S. and China would reach nuclear parity in the mid-2020s, but this is the reality that Americans now have to face.
For the U.S. military, with the "Ohio"-class ballistic missile submarines having only one-third of them on duty for a long time, each submarine carrying only 12 warheads and 60 re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), the U.S. military's initial nuclear strike is even unable to cover China's vast land-based nuclear delivery vehicle forces, let alone the numerous mobile ballistic missiles distributed across various Chinese positions and the new maritime and aerial nuclear counterattack capabilities.
This rough calculation has not even considered China's anti-missile systems around the launch sites. Moreover, countries with tense relations with the U.S. are not just China. Obviously, the Americans dare not bet that the Russian Federation, which has 1,400 deployed nuclear weapons, will not take advantage of the U.S.-China nuclear war to attack the U.S. from the rear. This "three kingdoms" situation where 1+1>1 may be one of the reasons why the Trump administration keeps mentioning that China should join the nuclear agreement.
Under the overall restriction of nuclear weapon numbers, the "life-saving rope" nature of "Star Shield" becomes increasingly prominent. What the U.S. military is doing now is hoping to offset China's nuclear expansion through the space interception capability of "Star Shield", thereby allowing the U.S. military to continue maintaining its nuclear advantage against both China and Russia through the advantage of space-based missile defense. The U.S. military even openly admits this, Wilsbach bluntly said that China's "nuclear modernization and expansion will enhance its ability to target our mainland with long-range systems, which is the main reason the Trump administration invested in 'Star Shield'."
For Americans, "Star Shield" is at least a theoretically feasible method. The "Star Wars" plan of the Reagan era tried to solve the problem of intercepting high-speed intercontinental ballistic missiles in the atmosphere outside the Earth. This problem was initially solved with the development of GBI and other anti-satellite weapons in the new century. However, entering the 2020s, with the development of the times, both China and Russia have developed hypersonic weapons that glide in the atmosphere, making their missiles avoid the outer space interception range of the traditional U.S. missile defense system (such as GBI) - the hypersonic missiles of China and Russia will re-enter the atmosphere before the GBI reaches the interception orbit, entering a difficult-to-intercept hypersonic glide mode.
However, the Americans believe that the intercontinental missiles of China and Russia are vulnerable at least during the ascent boost phase - whether it is the "Avangard" intercontinental vehicle of Russia or a certain type of "strategic hypersonic" weapon of China, these weapons will at least go through a segment of ballistic flight. Therefore, theoretically, if the "Star Shield" space interceptors are deployed above the territory of China and Russia, they can intercept these missiles shortly after their launch through the space-based launch position.
Of course, theory is always beautiful. Space-based missile defense requires deploying a large number of anti-missile satellites in low orbit, which need to "follow one after another" over the possible launch sites of the enemy; when one anti-missile satellite leaves the effective interception position, another satellite follows up. This means that if a usable anti-missile system is to be truly established, the U.S. military needs to deploy a large number of interception system platforms in low orbit. Even monitoring fixed launch silo positions would require nearly five digits of anti-missile interception satellites, but considering that China and Russia have hundreds of mobile intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, the number of satellites required for "Star Shield" would be extremely exaggerated.
In an analysis conducted earlier this year by the American Physical Society (APS) on the technical feasibility of the "Star Shield" system, it was estimated that: "We estimate that a constellation of approximately 16,000 space interceptors would be needed to try to counter a rapid salvo of 10 solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles like North Korea's Hwasong-18." This is only for a preliminary nuclear-armed country with a relatively small number of ballistic missiles and a narrow territory, North Korea. It should be noted that the length of the Korean Peninsula is 3,000 kilometers, and the distance from Taiyuan to Kurle is already over 3,000 kilometers. This exponential amplification would make the final number of satellites deployed a literal astronomical figure.
Of course, if the U.S. puts forward the spirit of "The Wandering Earth," such an exaggerated number of interceptors can technically be achieved under the current development of space technology. With the emergence of heavy-lift rockets like "Heavy Falcon" and "Starship," which significantly reduce the cost of space launches, and with technological advances that allow anti-missile satellites carrying multiple KKV kill vehicles to control their size, weight, and cost, it is theoretically possible that "Star Shield" could realize some of the ideas of the "Star Wars" plan. But as Xi Yaze said, if the U.S. military really has the "Yu Gong" spirit to overcome difficulties, the U.S. government wouldn't shut down, and U.S. soldiers wouldn't have to take out loans to pay their salaries.
Overall, the "Star Shield" project so far seems more like a technological gamble or a political bargaining chip. In the Nixon era, the U.S. military once tried to formulate a large-scale anti-missile development plan to deal with the increasing number of Soviet rocket forces. But a technical witness's statement left a deep impression on both the military at that time and the author today. This technical witness said: "Human history has always been full of useless Maginot Lines."
Perhaps in the future, SpaceX or Lockheed Martin will carry out technological iterations, allowing the size, weight, and cost of anti-missile satellites carrying kinetic kill vehicles (KKVs) to be controlled, while using Starship technology to reduce the cost of space launches to the extreme. But what will China's missiles look like then? Will the "Space Star Shield" costing thousands or even tens of billions of dollars become as ineffective as the Maginot Line against the lightning attack? No serious leader would bet the fate of the nation on such things.
After discussing the technological gamble, let's talk about the political bargaining chip.
For the loud-mouthed Trump, the "Star Shield" project is more like his usual "virtual card" negotiation tactic, used as a card in the future nuclear game among China, the U.S., and Russia. I believe that during Trump's term, he will definitely propose stopping the development of the "Star Shield" system as a condition to get us to stop developing nuclear weapons or even cut back on nuclear weapons. But historical experience tells us two things: first, naval treaties are always reached when all participants can no longer compete, and as the world's largest industrial country, we are far from that point; second, all imperialism is a paper tiger.
Regarding this last point, so far, apart from the CEO of Lockheed Martin, no one has endorsed the orbital test of the space interceptor. A source who participated in the "Star Shield" industry meeting told the "War Zone" website: "If you want to test a space-based interceptor, you don't necessarily have to launch it into orbit and test it in space. You can launch the kill vehicle into suborbital space with lower launch costs, which is much faster."
After all, once the Pandora's box of space militarization is opened, the originator will bear the eternal blame of ending humanity's access to the stars. For a presidential administration that is eager for fame and constantly thinks about the Nobel Prize, this is not something acceptable. Besides, the core of the U.S. space capability - Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, is a capitalist whose capital flow partly depends on the electric cars from Shanghai factories. And the cost of space launches that he is proud of is by no means unattainable for China, but rather already surpasses it.
At least even Musk acknowledges that China has already built rockets comparable to the Falcon 9 on the way. Social media
In summary, the U.S. national strategy is to maintain global hegemonism, and the cornerstone of global hegemonism is the U.S. "one superpower beats two strong" absolute nuclear advantage. However, when this former "calm and confident" superpower has now reached a point where it cannot achieve nuclear parity and is "hurriedly" developing the "Star Shield" system. Whether it will eventually "fall flat" depends on how the U.S. handles its affairs.
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