The US military has confirmed for the first time it has deployed weapons in Earth’s orbit, triggering concerns of a global arms race and the militarisation of outer space.
Speaking at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference on 14 September 2026, the US secretary of the air force, Troy Meink, said Washington had active “on-orbit, space-control” weapons in place to ensure the US is “ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist”.
While Meink did not elaborate on the weapons’ capabilities or when they were placed into orbit, a US Space Force spokesperson said that “space control encapsulates the mission areas required to contest and control the space domain – employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities through disruption, degradation and even destruction, if necessary”.
“These capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes at the direction of combatant commands,” they said.
The Trump administration has previously said space-based capabilities – and particularly interceptor missiles – are a crucial part of its planned “Golden Dome” defence system to protect the US from missiles and other airborne threats.
In December 2025, Trump also issued an executive order outlining his approach to “ensuring American space superiority”, in which “national security” concerns feature prominently.
While Meink confirmed during his speech that space-based interceptor missiles are now “flight-ready”, the nature of the orbital weapons deployed are currently unclear, with analysts speculating it could include anything from signal jammers and electromagnetic pulses to lasers or nuclear missile payloads.
Commenting on the development, Chris Cole, director of Drone Wars UK – a body set up in 2010 to undertake research and advocacy work around drones and other military technologies – told Computer Weekly that while this is “something many have long suspected”, the US’s admission is “extremely worrying”.
“This is a huge and dangerous step along the path to certain states dominating and controlling near-Earth orbit,” he said. “The militarisation of space puts us all in great danger.
“Space should be a realm for exploration and inspiration, a place for humans to grow further in knowledge and wisdom. Instead, certain individuals and corporations see space merely as an asset to be exploited and abused. This will not end well.”
Potential AI integration
Although it is unclear whether the weapons in question will use artificial intelligence (AI) in any capacity, Space Force previously announced a “three-pronged push for AI dominance” in March 2026 to systemically integrate a variety of automated technologies into its operations.
Bartley Stewart, Space Systems Command’s data and AI officer, said at the time that AI is the key to mastering a critical triad for decision-makers: reducing the time it takes to make decisions, lowering the cognitive load on the decision-maker, and increasing the certainty of the data that informs decision-making.
“If we can improve any of those three factors by teaming humans with AI, then we improve decision quality,” he said. “This leads to an asymmetric decision advantage.”
However, Computer Weekly has previously heard that the integration of AI technologies into the military apparatus – whether in weapon systems or decision-making processes – raises a number of concerns.
This includes the mismatched cognition speeds between humans and machines, which creates an “intractable” tension between speed and control; and the problem of automation bias, whereby humans are more likely to trust computer outputs because there is a misplaced sense the results are inherently objective.
Use of AI throughout the military can also potentially lower the threshold of resorting to violence in the first place, due to a mixture of convenience, dehumanisation (the flattening of human beings and complex realities into data points), and the risks of its use asymmetrically falling on those at its receiving end.
Speaking during a Congressional hearing on the human rights implications of military AI in September 2026, Anna Mysyshyn, a Ukrainian AI governance researcher, told lawmakers that giving a “human-in-the-loop” final approval over an AI-assisted decision “alone does not demonstrate the control”.
Questioning whether a person supervising multiple AI-enabled systems could recognise an incorrect recommendation or intervene fast enough before harm occurs, she highlighted how the use of AI in Ukraine has compressed the decision-making process from hours to minutes.
She added that, in many scenarios, this means a human making the final decision may not necessarily have the information, time or ability to challenge the system’s recommendation before action is taken.
Elke Schwarz, a professor of political theory at Queen Mary University who specialises in the ethics and politics of new military technologies, similarly told Computer Weekly the “human factor” in military AI is crucial, noting “the current trend in discourse is to stress the importance of human oversight for such systems without giving sufficient regard to what that can mean in practice”.
She added there is also very little consideration of “what the intractable human limitations are that make oversight or control impossible or, if these problems are not seen as being intractable, how humans might be better trained to meet the demands of an accelerated system”.
A space-based arms race
While the nature of the US’s orbital weapons is currently unclear, space security experts say the move could accelerate a space-based arms race, regardless of what has actually been deployed.
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, for example, said that even if the announcement only referred to radio jamming equipment, the move would represent an escalation of military activity in space by prompting adversaries like Russia or China to “respond in kind” with their own weapon deployments.
“The US sees conflict in space as something that is conceptually normalised, whereas 20 years ago it was ‘no, we will never want to do that’,” he said.
“I think this is wrong. I also think it is still not too late to change course on this. To work mainly with China, because they are the real competitors in space now. I hope the US establishment takes a step back and rethinks some of this.”
Victoria Samson, the Secure World Foundation’s chief director of space security and stability, shared a similar sentiment. “The US also now has to accept the Chinese and Russians doing/saying the same,” she said. “I don’t think that this is going to be in the interest of US national security.”
However, she also highlighted that other senior US military figures have previously raised concerns about the proliferation of space debris resulting from the use of kinetic weapons, leading her to speculate that the weapons would be either a signal jamming or electronic warfare platform.
Although an international treaty banned weapons of mass destruction from being placed in orbit in 1967 – following the US testing of a high-altitude thermonuclear weapon above the Pacific Ocean in 1962 – the text does not include a general prohibition on placing conventional weapons in Earth orbit.
Responding to the US announcement, China’s foreign ministry said Washington was “preparing for war in outer space”, and warned against turning space “into a battlefield, as well as an arms race there”.
A spokesperson added: “We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also told reporters that Russia believes “space must be free of any weapon” and called for “the complete demilitarisation of space”.
