What Space Capabilities Do NATO Nations Have? The Alliance Wants to Know

NATO is asking all 32 of its member nations to detail their space capabilities so it can better plan for future operations, the first U.S. Space Force general officer assigned to the alliance said Oct. 10.

Additionally, NATO is also working on a commercial space strategy of its own after the Pentagon and Space Force released their versions earlier this year, and the alliance may even one day get space assets of its own, suggested Maj. Gen. Devin R. Pepper, deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and policy at NATO Allied Command Transformation, during a livestreamed discussion at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

NATO first declared space an operational domain in 2019, then published an “overarching” space policy in January 2022, expressing its intent to integrate space into its core functions and facilitate interoperability among allies rather than having assets directly owned by the alliance.

For the most part, however, the alliance has leaned on American space assets, Pepper said. That won’t work for much longer.

“When it comes to the space domain, we cannot perform our operations or the protect and defend mission of the domain without our allies,” he said, noting his prior experience as deputy commander of Space Operations Command and as the commander of the Space Force’s Buckley Garrison, where allied nations contributed valuable personnel.

Yet to effectively integrate all 32 nations, NATO must have a clearer understanding of what everyone can offer, Pepper said, which part of the alliance’s “defense planning process.”

“Right now … we only have qualitative requirements that we assign to the nation,” Pepper said. “So please deliver us EMS capability or SATCOM or ISR. We have not gotten to the point where we have assigned quantitative targets to the nation. So in other words, until we know exactly what a nation has that they can offer, we can’t task them to provide it yet. So we’re working through that right now.”

It’s a bureaucratic process that takes time. A survey has gone out to every NATO nation, but Pepper indicated some said they had not received it. The hope is to get responses back by the end of the month, allowing Pepper’s team to work on assigning quantitative targets of space capabilities for each country to provide to NATO, which then must be approved at the headquarters level. Pepper said the goal is to make progress on that front within the next 12 months.

“From a U.S. perspective, NATO relies upon all of our military SATCOM capability and our ISR capability. Those are things that we contribute right now, today, from an exercise perspective,” Pepper said. “But there may be some other capability that another nation has that we are unaware of, that we have not directed them to provide that capability to NATO.”

Having a clearer picture of everyone’s capabilities will also prevent unnecessary duplication, said Pepper, though there could be some advantages in having redundancy and resiliency.

NATO members such as the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Germany operate a relatively large number of satellites. But even smaller states like Luxembourg and Denmark have their own space assets, and as the cost of launch comes down, more countries have launched at least one satellite. In fact, all but a few NATO allies have already done so.

As long as NATO does not operate any space assets of its own, it will need to rely on a combination of member nations’ capabilities and commercial industry to enable the rest of its operations. A commercial space strategy will boost that process, but Pepper noted that some countries have already come together to wield commercial space through the Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space (APSS) program, which will create a “virtual constellation” using commercial data. APSS signed its first contract earlier this year with Planet Labs.

Yet as threats from both Russia and China grow, Pepper seemingly left the door open to NATO becoming a space player in its own right, much as the alliance owns aircraft like the E-3 AWACS and RQ-4 drone.

“The policy right now is that NATO will not operate any systems, any constellations, and that’s the policy right now,” said Pepper. “But that is not to say that will be the policy in the next 5-10 years. I mean, there could be an opportunity down the road where NATO would say, ‘Hey, we do need some organic space capability.’”