When Troy Meink, the chief of the U.S. Space Force, announces, for no obvious reason, the United States “now has on-orbit space-control weapons,” people naturally assume something is up. Why is Meink admitting the truth now? He’s even boasting about it.

It can’t be to frighten the Chinese or the Russians, because they have long been watching U.S. military activities in space. They regularly monitor the flights of the semi-secret X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, the re-usable uncrewed spaceplane the U.S. Space Force launches from Florida but sometimes lands at Vandenberg, Calif. (eight missions so far).

The Chinese can’t complain, because they have their own secret spaceplane, and sometimes they even play silly buggers in orbit with their American and British counterparts. (Silly buggers is the old naval game of high speed manoeuvres of warships in formation, a frequent cause of collisions.)

Reuters reported a year ago on a joint U.S.-British operation in which the U.S. Space Force, working from a base in Colorado, directed an American military satellite to swoop in close to a British satellite just as China’s Shiyan 12-01 satellite........

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