I'm also alarmed by this. I wouldn't want Star Wars (neither Lucas's nor Reagan's) to become our future.
If that's the case, and it's just replacing existing satellites, they're still tracked accurately under that convention. Not that the USAF would say either way unless pressed by national powers, as the ambiguity helps their mission. It also helps internet blow-hards that like to take relatively small amounts of information and construct narratives they can lambast. It's entirely possible the USAF deployed new satellites, or replaced some satellites, or did nothing like that and the messaging is posturing or disinformation.
If it was doing stuff with satellites, I'm actually more interested in how it got inventory to do so over a two year time span. Did it drop to lower altitudes to refuel and get more satellites to deploy/replace/upgrade?
1) CubeSats can be very tiny, and perhaps it was only releasing babysats for part of the mission, or at long intervals
2) surely we'd have noticed if there was a space fuel depot,
2b) if there was, why would it need to find it at a lower altitude?
> 2b) if there was, why would it need to find it at a lower altitude?
Well, it's a space plane, so I was thinking of a more exotic variation of conventional air refueling, but upon further thought that seems very unlikely as if it was that easy to get from land to the refueling point and from the refueling point to space, we'd see that as the usual way to get to orbit instead of rockets (or rocket attached ships). I don't spend a lot of time thinking about rocketry and orbit unless in a discussion about it, so this wasn't immediately obvious to me initially.
That said, it's possible that some satellites actually contained extra fuel for future use when deployed, either in them or as a separate attached payload. In that case, there wouldn't be one large space fuel depot, but possibly many small ones.
So it makes me wonder why they chose to announce it rather than keeping it vague and spooky, which is a different kind of international posturing.
It's definitely a bad thing to have satellites up there that no one knows are there (because of collision risks, etc.), and the US not registering theirs opens the door for other nations/entities to see what we're doing and choose to do the same, which would be bad for everyone.