The great powers rivalry is now unstoppable

It was only in 2018 that the United States changed its national defence strategy and announced to the world that China and Russia were now seen as the crucial threats to the security interests of the US, pushing Islamic terrorism, counter-insurgency and asymetric warfare down the list of priorities. After nearly two decades of war in Afghanistan and seemingly never-ending fighting in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen etc, the great powers rivalry was back in business a la Cold War. Since then the rivalry has become a daily race for the US to keep one step ahead of both Beijing and Moscow, technologically. The revelation by the US Space Command commander this week that Russia has carried out an anti-satellite weapons test in space has shown that under Putin the Russians seem to have found enough money to fund some exotic Star Wars weaponry to put at risk America's global network of military communications, reconnaissance and spy satellites. They began this sort of research back in the 1980s after Ronald Reagan announced his Strategic Defence Initiative - his appeal to American scientists to come up with a space-based shield to protect the US from a massed Russian nuclear attack. When SDI fell by the way side, Moscow breathed a sigh of relief and stopped their own programmes which they could never afford anyway. Now, even though the Russian economy is hardly thriving, Putin has revived the 1980s programmes, and anti-satellite weapon systems, both ground-based and space-based, seem to be the favoured way forward. It's obvious why. Russia has no chance of matching America's firepower - land, air or sea - so the next best thing is to target the one thing that all the wonderful US firepower relies on. That is military satellites that provide navigation and data links to pretty well everything in the US warfighting armoury. China is doing the same. China and Russia are also developing and deploying hypersonic missiles that are too fast and too manoeuvrable for the US to react to in time. The Pentagon, as a result, has gone into mass-poducing hypersonic missiles and researching the best way to defend against Russia's and China's hypersonic weapons. And so it goes on. Bigger and better and faster. It's the new Cold War and a new arms race in space. Does this world never learn?