The War Above The War

Like in Hormuz, Iran's strategy in space is creating leverage.

Wars in space were supposed to begin with lasers and explosions. China’s 2007 anti-satellite test — a missile climbing to 850 kilometers and reducing a weather satellite to roughly 3,000 pieces of trackable debris — conditioned a generation of defense planners to think in terms of missiles striking targets in orbit. Shrapnel would then spread silently through space, tearing into everything in its way, creating even more shrapnel endlessly into the stars. Ad Infinitum Astra.

That model obscures what’s actually happening right now: a quieter, harder to detect, less sexy electronic disruption of space signals governments, militaries, and companies depend on.

Here’s an example of what war in space could look like on the ground. One minute you’re leading a unit of soldiers to an enemy hideout; their location is based on intercepted communications; on your remote controller screen, you follow your drone to the target. The drone also acts as a scout, looking for ambushes, tripwires, camera and radio signals etc. Suddenly, the controller screen goes dark. You stop. Your unit stops behind you. Which way was it headed? How much further to the target? Where is my effing drone?? Your soldiers aren’t in motion, they’re static behind enemy lines, that’s very, very bad. They’re waiting for your decision. “Everything OK?” HQ asks in your earphone on an encrypted channel. Suddenly the drone screen comes back to life. Same picture as before. Must have been a software glitch or reset. “ALL OK HQ. PROCEEDING AS PLANNED”. The drone continues to lead the way to the target, now just 2 blocks away.

Meanwhile at the enemy hideout, phones start buzzing with SMS notifications, waking up sleeping fighters. ALERT: ENEMY ADVANCING TO YOUR LOCATION. 2 MINUTES. 12 MEN. IN 3 SQUADS. 1 DOG. HACKED DRONE LEADING THEM RIGHT TO YOU.

That kind of scenario —where the signals soldiers rely on for directions, intelligence, and communications are silently disrupted without anyone knowing—points to the emerging asymmetry between space-powered modern armies like Israel and the US, and countries like Iran.

The Secure World Foundation’s 2026 Global Counterspace Capabilities report — an open-source inventory of who is building what in “counterspace” warfare—opens a window into how satellite battles are actually shaping up. Nobody is firing missiles at enemy satellites (as of this writing). Instead, there’s increased jamming, spoofing, and electronic interference with the links that connect space to Earth. The war above the war is a war over signals, and it’s unclear how much longer the US and Israel will continue to dominate this ‘space’.

According to to the report, the US, Israel, and Iran are fighting in space through entirely different instruments.

The United States fields the world’s most advanced network for tracking objects in orbit.

Israel has launched a Space Directorate Unit within the IDF, demonstrated the ability to intercept ballistic missiles above the atmosphere, and shown confirmed use of signal-jamming and electronic interference. Israel is not building the architecture like the US, but it is stress-testing it under live fire.

The report says Iran is unlikely to have weapons capable of reaching and physically destroying a satellite. But it doesn’t need to. In the ability to jam and interfere with signals, Iran “has demonstrated an electronic warfare capability to persistently interfere with the broadcast of commercial satellite signals and Starlink ground terminals.” If it cannot reach the satellite, it can cut the connection.

The temptation is to read this as a confirmation of Iranian weakness. That reading is almost certainly wrong. Iran has found the approach that extracts maximum leverage from minimum capability, and the strong side is structurally more exposed to it than the weak side.

The asymmetry runs as follows: The United States and Israel have built their military advantage on precision — real-time targeting, satellite-assisted navigation, networked command, continuous communication between sensors and weapons. The whole architecture of modern high-tech warfare depends on the signal working correctly, every time, without interruption, under pressure. The more thoroughly a military has integrated space-dependent systems into its operations, the more any degradation of those links matters. Iran does not need to destroy the system to affect it. It needs to make commanders doubt the system at critical moments.

In the worst case, a sufficiently severe act of interference during a high-stakes engagement crosses a threshold. A spoofed navigation signal causes a missile battery to fail. A communications blackout during a critical commando mission costs lives. Nothing actually explodes in orbit. The war above the war simply becomes the ambient condition of all conflict in the region — a permanent contest over whether the signal can be trusted.

Iran’s strategy is, in its perverse way, the most rational military doctrine available to a mid-tier power facing a technically superior adversary. It has chosen to compete on decision certainty: to inject doubt into the reliability of precision systems at the exact moment they are required—degrading targeting feeds by seconds, corrupting navigation signals by meters, introducing latency into command links just long enough to force hesitation—so that weapons, sensors, and decision-makers remain intact but no longer fully trusted under combat conditions.

The Islamic Republic may be losing most of the conventional engagements. It has found a way to keep contesting the one thing the strong side cannot afford to be uncertain about. That is a more sophisticated strategy than its public image suggests, and a more durable one than its adversaries (AKA us) have fully reckoned with.