It Is Time You Get To Know Kalina

For decades, the nation’s brilliant strategists, like the late Andy Marshall, worried deeply about the potential consequences of a deployment of the ultimate threat to U.S. superiority in space. While these hypotheses have never been acknowledged in any unclassified publication, there have been rumors of them whirling around the Pentagon for years.

When we think about the ultimate space weapon and who might have it, anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles are a typical topic of interest. A country’s ability to shoot down their own satellites is technologically impressive and makes for great headlines. But anti-satellite missiles are not much of a national security threat. More than anything, ASAT weapons demonstrate a country’s emerging ability to defend itself against incoming ballistic missile threats. What really keeps our space leaders up at night, however, is not a traditional missile or ballistic weapon, but a laser.

The Space Review recently revealed a new imminent threat, which Russia has developed to complement its current space surveillance complex. Known as Kalina, this new capability is an ominous laser weapon straight out of Ian Fleming’s twisted imagination. There’s plenty in the report that describes Kalina as a threat unique in modern great power competition and, with its ability to thwart our missile warning system, more consequential than the emergence of a new generation of hypersonic missiles.

Kalina is the third laser system developed as part of Russia’s Krona space surveillance complex. This makes clear to U.S. decisionmakers that Russia places a great deal of importance on denying its enemies the opportunity to image its territory from space. Accurate and adaptive state-of-the-art optics enable Kalina to detect and characterize satellites on orbit with such exquisite pointing accuracy that it can then “dazzle” the focal plane of any electro-optical satellite system.

Operating at the speed of light, Kalina will be able to instantaneously render our most important space systems inoperable. It will require neither conventional reloading nor extensive supply chains like conventional kinetic weapons or missiles. It will likely be able to deliver unattributable and scalable effects, from temporary blindness to permanent inoperability, low earth orbit all the way to geostationary. With no fragmentation, plume, or contrail, a Kalina strike will be completely deniable when confronted because attribution will be nearly impossible, presenting diplomatic challenges akin to cyberattacks.

If Kalina were to blind any of our systems, even temporarily, the next logical evolution that concerns our military technology strategists is a much higher power laser system – something similar to the Pentagon’s Airborne Laser program. Before its retirement during the Obama administration, it demonstrated the ability to completely destroy a target in flight. Russia currently wields a similar capability, called the A-60, and will likely use it against U.S. space assets.

This emerging threat is likely not new (the earliest record of similar technology was found in a 2002 Russian Ph.D. dissertation), but it is news to the public. The laser dazzler design and architecture are not cheap nor as easy to build or buy as the GPS jammers. Thanks to Russia and China, the technology has now become open source.

If this does not underpin a need for a dramatic pivot to a multi-orbit, highly resilient, hybrid space architecture – nothing will. To address this imminent threat, the U.S. must invest in commercially derived satellite constellations at scale, and fully implement the “commercial first” policy shift, which NASA set in motion over 15 years ago.

Until then, our best solution to ensure continuity of national security missions is to rapidly accelerate Space Force efforts towards a hybrid space architecture that builds resiliency by leveraging next-generation, compact satellite systems. Commercially manufactured satellites and services can provide low-cost resiliency never before available by enabling the ability to hide in plain sight and eliminating the consequences of single points of failure that Kalina exposes and will most certainly exploit when the time comes.

By quickly building low-cost constellations, the U.S. will be able to collect better intelligence on Kalina, the broader surveillance complex, and more details on how it (and its likely duplicates) are being built. Low-cost constellations will enable a layered resilience to operate through the contested space domain where our systems could otherwise be easily held at risk. If we continue to field exquisite satellites or “big juicy targets,” we will put these systems – and the billions spent developing them – at risk, given the evolving threat landscape and new capabilities like Kalina. Anything less than a hard pivot from our current course will make us fall behind, and it will be at least a decade before we can finally field a countermeasure.

It appears this next generation of counterspace weapons will be operational in the next few years. Even more frightening is that Russia and its allies will be incentivized to use it for lack of consequences. We must meet this challenge today with the unique American advantages of a robust commercial economy, as well as ample investment capital – not wait until our orbiting satellites are turned to stone.