The NATO Space Approarch and its first Space Commercial Strategy

Translated by Giulia Maffeis

Similarly to the domains of air and sea, space is considered a “global common,” an area not owned by any single nation but whose control is crucial for national security and civil purposes (Posen B. R., 2003). Presently, global commons such as cyber and space are contested by many parties including China, Russia, and even non-state actors. Both are minimally regulated by international norms, thus increasing the risk of conflicts due to wrong perceptions. For this reason, NATO, with its cooperative nature, could be decisive in addressing threats to transatlantic security by playing a key role in deterrence through improving vulnerabilities of shared space assets and strengthening existing regulations (Odgaard, 2022).

Allies adopted NATO's first space policy in 2019, followed by the establishment of NATO's Space Center at Allied Air Command in Ramstein in 2021, and the NATO Space Centre of Excellence in Toulouse, France. NATO has deemed space as a fifth operational domain, making it subject to the activation of Article 5 in the case of "attacks to, from, or within space.” Additionally, following Russia’s anti-satellite missile test in November 2021, which created orbital debris with significant risks to Allies’ space assets, the new Strategic Concept of 2022 committed the Alliance to “enhance its capability [...] to prevent, detect, and respond to the full spectrum of threats, considering that adversaries are investing in technologies that could degrade our space capabilities” (NATO, 2024).

NATO's space approach 

Since 2019, NATO's space approach aims to integrate space concepts into its three “core tasks”: collective defense, crisis management, and cooperative security, to improve situational awareness, decision-making, readiness, and interoperability among allies' space assets, on which NATO continues to rely since the Alliance does not intend to deploy its own space resources. Space offers strategic advantages in:

• Collective defense, deterrence, and resilience: NATO has a commitment to developing a common conceptualization of space as a force multiplier in all operational domains, including nuclear deterrence, also enhancing space resilience to support allies' space systems.
• Intelligence capabilities: Various sensors and systems are used to collect data supporting various space and military operations in other domains. ISR is detected, analyzed, and transmitted to help military commands provide guidance for operation planning or warnings about adversaries’ offensive capabilities.
• Space support to operations: Space is crucial during conflict to ensure military operation success, secure communication systems, precise navigation systems, and monitoring. NATO operations are governed by three documents: Allied Joint Publication (AJP) 3.3 for Air and Space Operations; the Bi-Strategic Command Functional Planning Guide; and ACT DIR 75-2-N for Joint Functional Area Training Guide (Tombarge, 2014). The Maine space activities include:
  
• Space Situational Awareness: Allied forces are working on a Strategic Space Situational Awareness System (3SAS) at NATO headquarters (Hitchens, 2024) to monitor space activities, weather conditions, adversary movements, and space debris to detect, assess, warn, and exploit threats, providing real-time information and allowing commanders to decide when and where NATO’s Response Force or artillery should be deployed. SSA is based on the integration of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) from orbiting satellites.
2. Space support: concerns activities aimed at supporting space-lift operations to position satellites and necessary tools for their repair or reconfiguration.
3. Counter-space operations: Offensive and defensive operations are aimed at neutralizing adversaries’ space capabilities through deception, denial, degradation, or destruction of their space assets, relying on SSA and timely command and control (Curtis E. Lemay Center for Doctrine Development and Education, 2021).

NATO’s First Commercial Space Strategy

NATO constantly wants to strengthen cooperation within the space industry and commercial sector with initiatives like the NATO Industrial Advisory Group and partnerships with private parties. The importance of commercial space products became particularly important during the war in Ukraine, where they were targeted by Russian cyber-attacks. Due to their placement in low Earth orbit, they can provide crucial support in emergencies. In February 2022, Ukrainian officials requested American aerospace company SpaceX to activate its Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine to restore communication networks and internet access crucial for drone operations and humanitarian purposes. Starlink is relatively more resilient since any attack must be highly precise to target its small antennas, and the network is fragmented into many individual parts.

At the Washington summit in July 2024, NATO announced its first commercial space strategy intended to integrate commercial space technologies into military operations for observation, communication, and Situational Domain Awareness, essential for coordination, command, control, and cybersecurity.

“The commercial sector will leverage its speed and innovation to provide a strategic advantage during joint and combined operations in peacetime, competition, crisis, conflict, and post-conflict [...]”

At the moment, there are about 7,560 active satellites, of which 5,184 are owned by the United States and only 580 are military (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2023). The majority of these are commercial satellites in low Earth orbit, owned by member states and primarily used for communications. Therefore, exploiting commercial resources is crucial (World Population Review, 2023) as NATO can only access national communication satellites of allies, not having its own.

The commercial space strategy marks a crucial transition toward a more flexible and resilient NATO, which, through joint industrial development, will be able to accelerate the development and dissemination of new technologies, offering financial protection to commercial enterprises. Companies capable of providing interfunctional capabilities, such as rapid prototyping, artificial intelligence, data management, simulation, etc., are those most likely to be considered for integration into operations and exercises based on four criteria: Operational utility, Feasibility, Resilience, Speed of deployment (U.S. Space Force, 2024) (Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs, 2024).