Mission Shakti: How India’s 2019 anti-sat missile test in space caught US off guard

A retired US Air Force and intelligence officer has recently revealed that India’s anti-satellite missile test (ASAT) in space in 2019 caught the American security agencies completely off guard and made them look for any threat to their space assets.Former National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) officer David Grusch, on the Joe Rogan podcast show recently, recalled the moment India conducted the ASAT on March 27, 2019, saying, “It is a crazy story... There was an unexpected Indian missile test that hit one of their own defunct weather satellites in 2019. And they didn’t tell us.”India had then issued a NOTAM (notice to airmen) off the Odisha coast, meaning the US was aware that a missile would be tested. However, it never anticipated it would be an ASAT missile. Grusch, who was then on duty at the NRO operations centre, recounted the frantic scenes at his office after the test.