By Tom Hicks | September 16, 2026
Editorial Note
There are stories where the headline sounds like somebody skipped a few chapters of reality. This is one of them. The United States has publicly acknowledged that it has operational weapons in orbit, China responded by warning America to stop preparing for war in space, and Russia would also prefer everyone to knock it off. Meanwhile, China and Russia have spent years developing their own ways to screw with satellites, and the U.S. military just finished an exercise designed to practice maneuver warfare in orbit.
So apparently we’re doing this.
WE HAVE WEAPONS IN SPACE NOW
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said Monday that the U.S. Space Force has what he called “on-orbit space control weapons” capable of defending American forces against hostile action. That sentence matters because this wasn’t somebody leaking a classified memo or a defense analyst connecting dots. It was the secretary overseeing the Air Force and Space Force publicly saying the weapons exist. Associated Press
Meink didn’t say what the weapons are, how many exist, when they became operational or exactly what they’re capable of doing. He later made clear that the vagueness was intentional, because the announcement itself is part of the deterrence strategy. Tell your adversaries you’ve got something in the garage, then leave the door closed so they have to wonder whether it’s a baseball bat or a fucking tank. Reuters
Militaries have depended on space for decades. Satellites guide weapons, move communications, watch adversaries, provide navigation and help make modern warfare possible. Acknowledging operational weapons in orbit, however, takes the conversation somewhere else. Everybody may have been staring at this line and shuffling toward it for years, but somebody has now looked down and acknowledged that we’ve crossed it.
Your subscription helps fund reporting, research, publishing, new features, and the continued growth of every Tom Hicks Media publication.
CHINA WOULD LIKE AMERICA TO PLEASE PUT THE GUN DOWN
Beijing didn’t exactly send a fruit basket. Chinese officials said China opposes turning outer space into a war zone and urged the United States to stop expanding its military buildup there. China says it remains committed to peaceful uses of space and opposes an arms race.
That’s a perfectly reasonable position. It’s also a little like the guy sitting beside you at the bar with brass knuckles sticking out of his pocket complaining that somebody else brought a knife.
The U.S. Space Force says China has been aggressively expanding both its space and counterspace capabilities. The People’s Liberation Army considers space central to future warfare and has developed capabilities designed to disrupt or degrade an opponent’s ability to use it. China also operates a large and rapidly expanding satellite network supporting surveillance, targeting, and military operations. U.S. Space Force
That doesn’t make China’s warning meaningless. Quite the opposite. It explains why the situation is getting dangerous, because everybody gets to point across the room and say the other guy made them do it.
WE’RE ALREADY PRACTICING THE FIGHT
Here’s the part that makes the timing especially interesting. During the first week of September, U.S. Space Command conducted Apollo Maneuvers 2026, its first live-fly exercise built around dynamic operations in a contested space environment. Satellites maneuvered across low, medium, and geosynchronous Earth orbit while military planners worked on doctrine for operating during competition and conflict. U.S. Space Command
Strip away the Pentagon vocabulary, and you get something that sounds like science fiction written after three bourbons: orbital dogfighting.
Spacecraft maneuver for position and advantage while trying to protect themselves, threaten another spacecraft, or prevent an adversary from doing the same thing. The exercise didn’t mean American satellites were firing phasers at Chinese satellites above Cleveland. It did mean the military is openly practicing how spacecraft would maneuver when space becomes contested. Space.com
Then, less than two weeks later, the United States publicly tells the world it has operational weapons up there. You don’t need a corkboard and red string to see where this road is headed.
THE PROBLEM ISN’T STAR WARS
It’s tempting to picture all of this as Star Wars with better accounting. The real danger is considerably less cinematic, because modern civilization leans on satellites so heavily that most of us barely notice them anymore.
GPS doesn’t merely tell you whether to turn left at Walgreens. Satellite systems support transportation, communications, weather forecasting, financial timing, emergency response, and huge portions of military command and intelligence. Knock enough of that infrastructure sideways, and the problem doesn’t stay 22,000 miles above your head.
It comes home.
That’s one reason an orbital arms race is especially ugly. A weapon doesn’t necessarily have to blow a satellite into a thousand pieces to be effective. Space systems can potentially be jammed, blinded, electronically disrupted, cyberattacked or physically interfered with. Once countries start building more ways to attack satellites, everybody has another reason to build more ways to defend them, which gives everybody another reason to build something capable of defeating those defenses.
Congratulations. We’ve reinvented the arms race with worse parking.
AND THERE’S ANOTHER PROBLEM UP THERE
Space is already crowded, and destroying satellites kinetically can create debris traveling at enormous speeds. Those fragments don’t politely check the flag painted on the next satellite before hitting it. They can threaten military satellites, civilian satellites, commercial spacecraft, and human spaceflight alike.
That’s why the difference between having a capability and using it matters so much. An attack intended to take out one adversary’s military asset could leave debris hanging around long after the generals have gone home, creating problems for people who had nothing to do with the fight.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits placing nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit, but it doesn’t impose a blanket prohibition on conventional weapons in space. Technology has spent nearly sixty years sprinting through a legal doorway written when Lyndon Johnson was president, and The Graduate hadn’t even reached theaters yet.
We wrote rules for one version of space. Then we built another one.
EVERYBODY’S DEFENDING THEMSELVES. FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS.
The United States says its weapons are there to defend American forces against hostile adversaries. China says its growing capabilities are necessary for its security. Russia has its own military space programs while simultaneously calling for space to remain free of weapons. Nobody ever announces an arms race by saying, “We’re starting an arms race Tuesday.”
Everybody says they’re responding to somebody else, because that’s how these things work. One country develops a capability because another country might develop it. The second country points to the first country’s capability as proof that it needs one of its own. Pretty soon everybody is standing in a room covered in gasoline explaining why they’re the responsible one holding the matches.
The U.S. may have perfectly legitimate reasons to protect its satellites. China and Russia have demonstrated enough counterspace capability that pretending otherwise would be irresponsible. But acknowledging American weapons in orbit tells the world something else, too.
The theoretical debate is over. The weapons aren’t coming.
They’re already there.
And the world’s major powers are now figuring out how to fight around them.
FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR
The claim: Democrats “lost” 360,000 migrant children who were then trafficked.
Bullshit.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the Republican midterm convention that Democrats had “lost” 360,000 children, suggesting they had fallen into trafficking. The number traces back to a 2024 Department of Homeland Security inspector general report, but the report didn’t say 360,000 children disappeared or were trafficked. It found that ICE hadn’t issued notices to appear in immigration court to hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors, leaving the agency without reliable information about their status and location.
That’s a legitimate government failure worth investigating. Turning it into 360,000 trafficked children is taking the facts out behind the barn and beating the shit out of them. FactCheck.org
The claim: Warnings about serious AI risks are a “hoax” and a “sick conspiracy.”
Bullshit.
Donald Trump dismissed growing warnings about artificial-intelligence safety as a “hoax” and part of a “sick conspiracy” against AI and data centers. The people raising those alarms aren’t a collection of Facebook uncles who watched The Terminator after eating an edible. They include researchers and executives working at the companies developing frontier AI, some of whom are asking for independent testing and stronger safeguards precisely because nobody can guarantee where increasingly capable systems lead.
You can argue about how large the risk is or what government should do about it. Declaring the risk itself a hoax because you don’t like the conversation is how bullshit puts on a necktie and calls itself policy. Reuters
The claim: American children are “the sickest children in the history of the world.”
Bullshit.
Kennedy also told the convention that America’s children are the sickest in human history. Whatever legitimate arguments Kennedy wants to make about chronic disease, nutrition or childhood health disappear underneath a claim that spectacularly wrong. Historically, enormous numbers of children died before reaching adulthood, and even today most countries have higher childhood mortality rates than the United States.
We can have a serious conversation about making American kids healthier without pretending a child growing up in 2026 has worse health prospects than one born before antibiotics, vaccines and indoor plumbing. FactCheck.org
The claim: Grindr crashed in Dallas because Republicans at the convention overwhelmed it.
Bullshit. But this one has a hell of a backstory.
Reports that Grindr went down during the Republican convention in Dallas spread like wildfire, helped considerably by the fact that everybody had heard this joke before. Downdetector did show a burst of problem reports, but Grindr says there was no convention-related outage, and its own status page recorded none. The same legend followed the 2024 Republican convention in Milwaukee, where users reported problems, and the jokes practically wrote themselves. Grindr says there wasn’t a confirmed convention-related crash there either. Lead Stories Grindr
Everybody keeps falling for it because there’s a real story underneath the bullshit. Grindr activity around the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland jumped 66%. Before Democrats hurt themselves laughing, however, activity around their convention in Philadelphia that year reportedly jumped 148(%.
Apparently bipartisan cooperation isn’t completely dead after all.
Bullshit doesn’t become true just because it’s funny.
Bullshit travels fast. Off Script will keep checking the odometer.
ELSEWHERE AROUND TOM HICKS MEDIA
Blind Spot
The Sunday deep dive for stories that need more room than the daily news cycle is willing to give them.
Lotus Purrspective
The world according to a tuxedo cat who remains deeply suspicious of nearly everything her human does.
Tom’s Number Ones
Six charts. One date. Music history without pretending every old song was a masterpiece.
Panic Room Sports
Smart football coverage with attitude. Everyone reacts. We’ll check the tape first.
Rabbit Ears Classic TV
Television history from back when changing the channel required physical effort.
The Backlot Ghost
Movie history, strange casting turns, forgotten stories and the stuff happening just outside the frame.
BUY ME A CUP OF TEA
Off Script doesn’t have a corporate newsroom, billionaire owner or somebody upstairs worrying whether an advertiser gets pissed off. If you enjoy the work and want to help keep it going, you can Buy Me a Cup of Tea.
ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO
If putting weapons in orbit makes America safer today but encourages China and Russia to put more of their own weapons there tomorrow, are we actually safer?
#OffScript #SpaceForce #SpaceWeapons #China #NationalSecurity #USPolitics #IndependentJournalism