...Chinese, he believes, have clearly moved ahead of America in the military space race. One recent indication of that, he notes, was China's successful testing of a satellite-killing missile earlier this month.
Ooh, ahhh. Give me a moment to be impressed. ... * ... They ran one test, one. Against a weather satellite (think radar cross-section of a barn door) in a simple orbit. We've run what, a dozen or more tests against ballistic targets in transient arcing trajectories. Much more ah "challenging" targets for a number of technical reasons. Sure, the Chinese effort was a good one, and an apparently successful test. But that doesn't even put them in the same league with our anti-sat anti-missile technology. Heck, our THAAD, PAC-3, and SM-3 systems are deployable - we can send them just about anyplace in the world, not just out of a research facility.
Do the Chinese have their own GPS constellation? Their own redundant secure comm set in geo? Can they run multi-spectral surveillance on anyplace in the world within a few hours? I don't think so.
I appreciate that fear of the Chinese bypassing us in military/space technology would probably mean additional funding but... But I just can't go along with the unfounded hysteria and crisis-mode thinking. Yes the Chinese are a threat. Yes they are a growing threat. So yes lets invest the resources to stay out in front and minimize the threat. But spare me the BS.
"weather satellite (think radar cross-section of a barn door)"
Not that I disagree with your overall point, but any solar-powered satellite is going to have that kind of cross-section. And thanks to the enviros, we haven't launched a nuke-powered one in quite some time (I think).
After a brief investigation, I now see that as of 2005 we might be trying out some movable radar suppression shields for our spy satellites.