Jeffrey Gossel, the senior intelligence engineer at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center’s Space and Missile Analysis Group, has said that officials need to pay more attention to the space-based surveillance assets of adversarial nations, Space News reported Wednesday.
Speaking at a recent Mitchell Institute event, Gossel noted that U.S. policymakers are much too preoccupied with armaments that competitor countries like Russia or China could use to shoot down American satellites.
Gossel pointed out that “it’s not those weapons that are as important as what our enemies have on orbit,†noting that such spacecraft already allow potential opponents to monitor U.S. activities and develop possible countermeasures.
Gossel proposed that the U.S. learn all it can about these information-gathering satellites and sensors to develop strategies that would render them ineffective.
“From an intelligence perspective we have to concentrate more on those things, not on the guns they’re shooting,†Gossel said.
