There are a few technical reasons I don’t see this as a real threat:
1. There isn’t a particular part of the constellation that passes over China. There are probably a few launch groups that never or rarely pass over China, but a majority do. An adversary would have to destroy or disable a few thousand satellites.
2. Anti-satellite weapons aren’t nearly plentiful enough and given the ground support required, I’d be surprised if launching more than a few per day is feasible. A counterattack would come too quickly.
3. Precise positions don’t help that much. Even knowing a satellite position to ~2m still requires some active tracking on the interceptor. It’s not much benefit over knowing the position to 1km.
4. The debris created would be catastrophic and likely to damage the ISS even at Starlink’s low altitude.
All of the first three apply to GPS as well even though it’s only ~32 satellites.
1. There isn’t a particular part of the constellation that passes over China. There are probably a few launch groups that never or rarely pass over China, but a majority do. An adversary would have to destroy or disable a few thousand satellites.
2. Anti-satellite weapons aren’t nearly plentiful enough and given the ground support required, I’d be surprised if launching more than a few per day is feasible. A counterattack would come too quickly.
3. Precise positions don’t help that much. Even knowing a satellite position to ~2m still requires some active tracking on the interceptor. It’s not much benefit over knowing the position to 1km.
4. The debris created would be catastrophic and likely to damage the ISS even at Starlink’s low altitude.
All of the first three apply to GPS as well even though it’s only ~32 satellites.