Peaceful Use Under Pressure: The Grey-Zone War for Satellites and the Law Struggling to Keep Up
Jamming, spoofing and cyber intrusions are quietly turning orbit into contested territory, and exposing how poorly a treaty framework written in 1967 governs threats that leave no wreckage.
In the early hours of 24 February 2022, before the first Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine, a different kind of attack was already underway; in space, or rather through it. A cyber operation crippled tens of thousands of Viasat satellite modems across Europe, cutting communications for Ukrainian forces and, as collateral damage, knocking thousands of wind turbines offline in Germany. There was no missile, no debris field, no fireball. To most of the world, nothing visible happened at all.
That is precisely the point. The competition for space is no longer a matter of anti-satellite missiles and Cold War imagery. It is being waged, every day, through interference that is invisible, reversible and, most importantly, deniable. And the international legal order that is supposed to govern outer space was not built for it.
The threats that leave no trace
When we imagine an attack on a satellite, we tend to picture a kinetic strike: a missile that destroys a spacecraft and scatters debris across an orbit. These weapons exist, and tests of them are rightly condemned. But they are the exception, not the rule. The real contest is non-kinetic. and it is already routine.
Three categories matter. Jamming floods a frequency with noise, drowning out a legitimate signal. Spoofing goes further, transmitting a false signal that deceives the receiver into accepting counterfeit data, a ship or aircraft can be made to believe it is somewhere it is not. Meaconing, a more sophisticated variant, intercepts and rebroadcasts a genuine navigation signal with a delay, corrupting position and timing without the target realizing it. Layered on top are cyber operations against the ground stations, data links and software that make a satellite useful in the first place.
None of these leaves wreckage. Most are temporary and geographically contained. Many are difficult to attribute to a specific actor with confidence. That combination; low visibility, deniability, reversibility, is exactly what makes them attractive instruments of grey-zone competition. They deliver strategic effect while staying beneath the threshold that would trigger a clear legal or military response.
The scale is no longer speculative. In March 2025, in a rare joint statement, the International Telecommunication Union, the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Maritime Organization warned with "grave concern" of a surge in jamming and spoofing of satellite navigation systems, cautioning that interference now endangers civil aviation and maritime safety far beyond any immediate conflict zone. From the Baltic to the Eastern Mediterranean to the Middle East, the interference has become a persistent feature of the strategic landscape rather than an occasional anomaly.
Why the stakes are civilisational, not niche
It is tempting to file all of this under "specialist military affairs." That would be a mistake. Satellites are the invisible substrate of modern life. Global navigation systems do not just guide aircraft and ships; they provide the precise timing that synchronises financial transactions, power grids and telecommunications networks. Earth observation underpins disaster response and agriculture. Satellite communications carry everything from banking to battlefield command.
This is why orbit has become a theatre of great-power competition between the United States, China and Russia, and why the line between civilian and military space has all but dissolved. A single constellation can serve commercial customers and armed forces at once, as Starlink's role in Ukraine made vivid. When more than ten thousand active satellites now share increasingly crowded orbits, the dual-use character of nearly every asset turns interference into a tool that can be aimed at soldiers and civilians in the same stroke.
The direction of travel is unmistakable. In December 2025, a United States executive order on "ensuring American space superiority" directed agencies to detect and counter threats to national space infrastructure; the language of dominance, not stewardship. Space is being reframed, in doctrine and in budgets, as a domain to be contested and controlled.
A 1967 framework meeting a 21st-century problem
Here is where the law enters, and struggles. The cornerstone of space governance remains the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Its guiding idea is the "peaceful use" of outer space, and it commands that space be explored and used for the benefit of all. But its concrete prohibitions were designed for a different threat. Article IV bans placing weapons of mass destruction in orbit and militarising celestial bodies; it says little about the electromagnetic and cyber interference that dominates today. Article IX asks states to act with "due regard" for others and to avoid "harmful interference", but it offers no definition, no threshold, and no enforcement mechanism worthy of the name. The ITU's Radio Regulations prohibit harmful interference to radio services, yet they were conceived to manage accidental technical conflicts between operators, not deliberate acts of statecraft.
The result is a persistent ambiguity, and it is worth being precise about its nature. Is this a normative gap, a genuine absence of rules, or an applicative dysfunction, where rules exist but fail in practice because they cannot be interpreted, attributed or enforced against the threats now in play? The distinction matters enormously. If the problem is a gap, the answer is new law. If the problem is application, then no new treaty text will help until states resolve the harder questions of attribution, verification and political will. My own reading is that the peaceful-use principle is not silent on non-kinetic threats so much as under-applied to them: the principle is capacious enough to reach electronic and cyber interference, but states have little incentive to interpret it that way when ambiguity serves them.
The honest counterpoint: is new law even the answer?
It would be easy to conclude that the solution is a comprehensive treaty banning non-kinetic attacks. It would also be naive. The history of space arms control is largely a history of deadlock. Negotiations on preventing an arms race in outer space have been stalled at the Conference on Disarmament for decades. The European Union's proposed International Code of Conduct for outer space activities collapsed in 2015. The draft treaty long promoted by Russia and China has been widely criticised as conveniently silent on the very ground-based capabilities those states possess. States that benefit from the grey zone have shown no appetite to legislate themselves out of it.
That is why the centre of gravity has shifted from binding treaties toward norms of responsible behaviour; an approach advanced through recent UN processes and forums such as the United Kingdom–led initiative on reducing space threats. The logic is pragmatic: if you cannot agree on what weapons to ban, agree instead on what conduct is irresponsible. Critics counter, fairly, that norms are non-binding, hard to verify, and easiest to ignore precisely by the actors most willing to exploit the domain. A norm without attribution is an appeal to conscience, and conscience has never disabled a jammer.
Both objections are right, which is the uncomfortable truth. Neither a grand treaty nor a soft norm, on its own, is adequate to a threat that is technical, deniable and constant.
What "peaceful" will come to mean
The war for satellites is already here; it simply does not look like war. Its weapons are signals and code, its effects are felt on the ground more than in orbit, and its legality lives in a grey zone that suits those who operate there. The peaceful-use principle is not dead, but it is being quietly hollowed out by practice; reinterpreted, in effect, by whoever jams first and denies second.
The likeliest path forward is neither a new treaty nor a triumph of norms, but a slow contest over interpretation: over whether "harmful interference" and "due regard" can be given real content, over whether attribution can be made credible enough to carry consequences, and over whether "peaceful" retains any meaning at all when the most consequential attacks are the ones no one can see. For a domain the entire planet now depends on, that is not an abstract legal question. It is one of the defining governance challenges of the decade, and it is being decided, signal by signal, while most of the world looks the other way.
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