The Israeli Defence Minister stood in a briefing with military reporters on Monday and set out an ambition plainly. Israel Katz said the goal he and the prime minister had agreed was for the country to become the one state on earth able to attack from orbit. "As of today, no country has the ability to mount attacks in space," he said. "We must be the leading country in the world with this capability." He named lasers as the specific aim, the previous week having already committed Israel to leading the world in space attack.
The claim that anchors all of this is false. Four states have already destroyed satellites with kinetic anti-satellite weapons, China in 2007, the United States in 2008, India in 2019, Russia in 2021, each test scattering debris into orbits that now threaten everything else up there.
