Space as the Fourth Frontier

The strategic competition between South Asian countries and the broader Indo-Pacific region has been a battle fought on three known fronts: land, air and sea. They are now facing a fourth front as well, above them.

Outer space, once under the cooperative idealism of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, has become a battlefield; India is readying itself for the worst contingency that it does not admit it is preparing for: a war in orbit.

This is not a simple technological change, but a deliberate, purposeful shift. It is the natural progression of competition over land to another area where satellites are the sole source of communication, navigation, and intelligence, which is now critical.

This is particularly true of India’s own path. Direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) test Mission Shakti was successfully carried out on 27 March 2019 by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) using the Prithvi Delivery Vehicle Mark-II (PDV-II) interceptor, a part of the country’s ballistic missile defence programme, to destroy the defunct Microsat-R in the lower Earth orbit at about 300 km altitude.

It was the first test to demonstrate a kinetic kill capability against an orbiting satellite for the fourth country after the United States, Russia, and China. New Delhi has said that the test was defensive and technological and not a weaponisation attempt and has since institutionalised the capability with the Defence Space Agency and an emerging Defence Space Research Organisation that are responsible for developing systems to counterspace and space support for defence forces.

However, India’s declared restraint does not sit well with its actions in multilateral fora. Resolutions were passed by the UN General Assembly in November 2022 (Resolution 77/41) that requested a moratorium on direct-ascent ASAT missile tests, passing 155 votes to 9, with India joining China and Russia in voting against the resolution.

The same government announcing it’s trying to come up with what the Conference on Disarmament calls a “legally binding” document to stop an arms race in outer space refused to back the more limited, actionable goal of banning additional tests that create space debris.

This isn’t a uniquely Indian phenomenon, however, as Washington’s track record in arms control has been just as selective, and it reflects a structural element in the new space order: the ability to build up a “counterspace” capability side by side with a simple statement of “non-weaponisation.”

To understand the Indian buildup, it helps to view it in the context of neighbouring countries. In January 2007, Fengyun-1C, the Chinese weather satellite, was destroyed in a direct-ascent ASAT test that created more than 2,700 tracked debris pieces, the largest manmade debris event in spaceflight history.

A similar capability was exhibited in November 2021, when Russia destroyed its previous defunct Cosmos-1408 at 480 kilometres, forcing emergency shelter procedures for the International Space Station and China’s Tiangong space station as well, using astronauts from several nationalities.

In India, the increasing Indian Ocean network of the People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force’s reconnaissance and communications satellites and China’s proven counterspace capability are perceived as the immediate strategic impetus behind Mission Shakti and its institutional consequences, a security dilemma played out in a space where response time is measured in minutes, instead of days.

Pakistan’s role in this triangle is relatively small but active. But Islamabad’s space programme, carried out by the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission is still predominantly civilian and rather under-funded compared to its two bigger neighbours, with SIPRI’s 2026 Yearbook reporting Pakistan’s military spending in 2025 at just about a tenth of India’s, which was 92.1 billion dollars, the fifth largest in the world.

Pakistan has not tested or even claimed an ASAT capability, and its national image remains unchanged, with outer space still being perceived as being for satellite communication and remote sensing and not for the purposes of warfare.

However, the strategic importance of the asymmetry cannot be overstated; as India’s space-based precision-strike and surveillance capabilities come to fruition and Pakistan’s calculations move towards asymmetric actions – denial, deception, and Chinese-provided space services – over matching India platform for platform in orbit.

All these changes add up to a gradual and inexorable deterioration of the norm-building framework established by the Outer Space Treaty. Space debris does not observe the sovereignty of the state which produces it, with a deterrence test for India and China; every satellite operator, in and of itself, is exposed to this risk of collision.

Because no South Asian binding instrument exists, like the regional confidence-building regime for nuclear risk-reduction, apart from unilateral restraint, this remains the only means of stability in the domain — and as it has proven with nuclear reductions, it is a fragile source of stability in the presence of the relevant capability in more than one state.

Three implications follow. The first is that, even though the counterspace programme is presented as a defensive measure, it will continue to be interpreted as a intensifying up of an arms race by Pakistan and read as such by China, and thus will further reinforce the arms race dynamics that have been a hallmark of South Asian strategic action-reaction dynamics.

Second, its credibility as India’s proponent of a legally binding PAROS instrument will remain questionable until it is willing to put up with even non-binding, short-term limits such as the ASAT test moratorium.

Third and most importantly, the region needs a region-specific confidence-building mechanism, similar to the existing nuclear and missile CBMs between India and Pakistan, such as pre-notification of tests, data sharing of debris and mutual consent on no-test zones in the congested orbital bands. Without these measures, the fourth front will be a mere appendage of the land-based rivalry, not a force that multiplies it.