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According to NASA: If the debris is <600km the orbit decays within a few years. >800k can take centuries and geostationary objects on the high end (~36000km) can take thousands of years.

Most of the debris is in LEO so it could take decades to centuries for the debris to clear out

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So the killer move would be to launch a fleet of sats above the debris field, and then launch self-destructive sats into the persisting space dense enough to make launch and persistence in that field hard.

Take command of the high space and make the low ground indefensible.

Just read a fiction book that had this as the premise in a war between china and the USA. China took the high orbits and blasted the low. Personally I thought it was a a very interesting twist!

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