STRATEGYPAGE on satellite vulnerability:

September 25, 2004: Does the U.S. Air Force have adequate defenses for American space satellites? So far they do, but there’s some doubt that this will be the case in the future. The United States armed forces are more dependant on space based systems (for communication, navigation and reconnaissance) than any other country. This, naturally, makes the several hundred military and commercial satellites, that provide these services, a target for anyone planning to take on American troops. So far, there has been only one attempt to attack these space based capabilities. This happened during the 2003 Iraq war, where the Iraqis turned on some GPS jammers they had purchased from a Russian firm. The American air force had a weapon ready for this; smart bombs that homed in on GPS jammer signals. The Russian jammers were quickly destroyed and the war went on without any other attacks on American satellite capabilities.

But in the meantime there have been other successful attacks on commercial satellite systems.

Saddam had thoughts of sticking SAM missiles on top of SCUDs, but never did it. (This isn’t as dumb as it sounds — the U.S. experimented with, I believe, sidewinders on top of Pershings and discovered that it made a not-too-bad expedient antisatellite weapon).

UPDATE: Several readers want to know more, and one suggests that it may have been a Sparrow, not a Sidewinder, which is possible. I recall reading about this in one of Paul Stares’ books, either The Militarization of Space: U.S. Policy 1945-84 or Space and National Security. But they’re both at my office, so I can’t look for more details.