China’s latest high-power microwave (HPM) breakthrough, a powerful truck-mountable system described by Chinese researchers and Chinese media as a potential counter to Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations such as Starlink, signals a shift toward non-kinetic weapons designed to paralyze satellites, command networks, and modern warfare itself.
This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that Chinese researchers have developed what they claim is the world’s first HPM weapon compact driver. This device can generate 20 gigawatts of energy for up to 60 seconds.
They believe this breakthrough could pose a threat to large Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, like SpaceX’s Starlink. The team published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Chinese High Power Laser and Particle Beams.
The device, known as the TPG1000Cs and developed at the Northwest Institute of Nuclear Technology in Xi’an, weighs about five tons, measures roughly four meters, and is designed for deployment on trucks, ships, aircraft or potentially in space, marking a sharp leap from earlier, bulkier systems that could operate only for a few seconds.
Researchers led by Wang Gang wrote that the system could deliver as many as 3,000 high-energy pulses in a single session and has already accumulated more than 200,000 test pulses, indicating stable performance.
Chinese experts estimate that outputs above 1 gigawatt could disrupt or damage low-orbit satellites, which China has warned pose national security risks. At the same time, SpaceX’s move to lower Starlink’s orbital altitude may increase vulnerability to ground-based directed-energy weapons.
The team said design changes—including lighter alloys, modified insulation paths, and a compact energy-storage geometry—enabled sustained power levels, underscoring China’s push to develop cost-effective counters to satellite networks.
HPM weapons disable electronics by forcing intense radiofrequency (RF) energy into systems through antennas, cables, and openings, inducing destructive voltage and current surges that disrupt or permanently damage components rather than simply heating them.
China’s TPG1000Cs may improve on earlier Hurricane-series HPM weapons, which were mainly for short-range drone defense at 2-3 kilometers, as some sources claim, using vehicle-mounted arrays for quick, cost-effective responses.
These earlier models had limited reach, power, and mission scope, making them unsuitable for attacking distant or hardened targets. In contrast, TPG1000Cs offer higher power and sustained energy, surpassing previous systems’ limits in duration, intensity, and reach.
With significantly increased power, China’s new HPM weapon could play a significant role in a Taiwan campaign. As noted by Tin Pak and Yu-cheng Chen in a May 2025 Jamestown article, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would employ HPM weapons as first-wave, non-kinetic strike tools to disable specific high-value electronic targets rather than for general disruption.
Pak and Chen mention that HPM strikes could be directed against command centers, radar installations, missile-defense systems, power grids, and communications networks, to collapse Taiwan’s command and control, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) architecture and prevent coordinated resistance.
Furthermore, they say such HPM attacks would be synchronized with cyber operations to compound effects on digital networks and infrastructure. They add that HPMs could be delivered from ground platforms, ships, or potentially missile-borne systems, and used defensively for anti-access missions against aircraft, missiles, and drone swarms, thereby shaping the battlespace before and during conventional operations.
Delving into China’s doctrine and operational concepts behind its HPM weapons, Official Chinese and PLA sources state that modern electromagnetic combat has shifted from “equipment vs. equipment” to “system versus system,” aiming to disable enemy command, ISR, and information systems through integrated soft- and hard-kill means, including directed-energy options such as HPMs and laser systems.
They also place HPMs within electromagnetic space operations as part of cross-domain, system-of-systems warfare, emphasizing distributed, precision energy to disrupt key information nodes and support multi-domain, joint effects.
Furthermore, Joel Wuthnow elaborates in a January 2025 briefing for the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) that PLA analysts describe system destruction warfare as an operational concept in which an enemy’s critical networks are systematically neutralized, preventing it from functioning and collapsing its will to fight.
Enabling China’s systems destruction warfare concept is its multi-domain precision warfare (MDPW) concept, a theory of victory and target logic that an April 2025 US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) report describes as the PLA’s core operational concept for modern war, designed to enable “systems confrontation” by integrating operations across land, sea, air, space, cyber, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the cognitive domain.
The report states that the concept aims to fuse information across services and domains to identify enemy vulnerabilities and deliver precise lethal and non-lethal effects on critical nodes such as command, ISR, fire control, and support structures.
It says MDPW emphasizes joint multi-domain integration, information dominance, and intelligentized warfare to compress the battlespace, disrupt enemy decision-making, and paralyze the adversary’s operational system rather than defeating forces platform by platform.
Still, the US and its allies have the means to mitigate the threat posed by China’s HPM weapons. For instance, Mary Burkey notes in a June 2025 report for the Center for Global Security Research that quantum sensing mitigates the effects of electronic attack by removing dependence on external RF signals such as GPS, which are vulnerable to jamming, spoofing, and, by extension, HPM disruption.
Burkey explains that quantum inertial sensors, atomic clocks, magnetometers, and gravimeters provide internal, self-contained positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) that continues to function during GPS denial and electronic warfare, because these systems do not rely on received signals and are therefore immune to such attacks.
She emphasizes that the main source of resilience lies in signal-independent navigation rather than in hardening receivers against electronic attacks.
In addition, the US and its allies must also refine their concept of space deterrence. Kevin Pollpeter and other writers mention in a May 2025 China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI) report that space deterrence is fragile and increasingly challenging because the domain is offense-dominant, norms are weak, intentions are ambiguous, and many counterspace attacks can be non-kinetic and hard to attribute.
Pollpeter and others stress that space deterrence hinges on how weapons differ in reversibility and escalation risk, noting that some non-kinetic attacks—such as HPMs—may be irreversible and thus more escalatory. They stress that resilience, redundancy, and space domain awareness matter more than trying to deter all attacks outright.
Furthermore, Stephen Flanagan and other writers note in an August 2023 RAND report that deterring directed-energy attacks on US and allied space systems depends less on matching such weapons and more on shaping adversary perceptions through denial, resilience, and punishment frameworks.
Flanagan and others propose three deterrence postures—denial-dominant, mixed, and offense-dominant—all of which emphasize resilience, redundancy, reconstitution, space situational awareness and allied cooperation to convince an adversary that attacks will not yield decisive advantage, while retaining options for cross-domain retaliation to impose costs if deterrence fails.
Probably breaks after 1 use, like all Ch tat
Only if it’s made in India.