The United States has friends and allies throughout the Asia-Pacific. Some of our most important bilateral relations are in the Pacific, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and others. Our ties with these nations are based on shared economic interests, often shared values, as well, but each has important military and security dimensions.
Each military aspect of these relationships has maintained regional peace and stability over the past several decades and also helped promote economic and political development in the region.
China's rapid and comprehensive military modernization challenges, I think, affect this very stable status quo. If nations come to doubt the U.S. abilities to fulfill its various treaty and legal obligations, regional actors could increasingly turn their intentions inward or engage in a kind of arms race that we don't really want to see. Some evidence suggests that the latter is actually underway.
Fundamentally, this does relate to space, which is what we're going to talk about here today. The U.S. relies so heavily on space assets to carry out all of its military missions, particularly in distant theaters like the Pacific. Communications, reconnaissance and a host of other types of capabilities require satellite platforms and other types of space inputs.
Defense planners view space itself increasingly as another domain of warfare just as they do land, air, sea and cyberspace. Satellites are now facing a range of potentially devastating threats, mostly from China's very sophisticated anti-satellite weapons programs and other means of interfering with space assets. They present the first-ever real challenge to the U.S. ability to use space since the Soviet Union.
China is also beginning to effectively leverage its own space assets to enhance their own military capabilities, including precision strike weapons and other types of weaponry and capabilities that the U.S. has always had dominance in.
I look forward to hearing more details about these developments today, and I'm confident that the witnesses can help the Commission inform Congress about how we can meet these challenges.
