Page 44 – Defense Daily

SecNav Phelan: Navy Change Is Coming, Considers Warfare Like A Business

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – In his first public address after becoming Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan on Wednesday said “change is coming” as he plans to focus on increasing shipbuilding, working with industry to reform processes and challenge the parts of Navy culture that lead to delivery delays and readiness problems.

“I tend to like very complex problems, but now on the 14th day of the job, I can tell you I underestimated just how complex, as everyone in the room knows, leading the Department of the Navy is anything but easy. But I didn’t come here for easy. I came here to solve problems,” Phelan said here during the annual 2025 Sea–Air-Space expo.

Phelan reiterated some of the key points of this Senate confirmation hearing testimony, that in the coming weeks “I will review our acquisition systems and identify how we can streamline and reform them. I will work across the department and especially with industry, to find solutions. We will restore and maintain operational readiness and fiscal responsibility” (Defense Daily, Feb. 27).

This will require changing the worst rigid parts of Navy bureaucratic culture, the secretary said.

He argued that while the Navy has good options and assets, “we’re at a point where it needs a greater sense of urgency to address its problems. Our success and rigid adherence to the old way of doing things have led to complacency, bureaucracy and in some cases, suboptimal policy. This has slowed us down, and this puts our Sailors and Marines at risk, and that is not right. We’ve been mired in bureaucratic inertia, budgetary gridlock in Congress, chronic shortfall in ship building investment.”

Phelan said his three primary focuses are readiness via strengthening shipbuilding and the maritime industrial base; “fostering adaptive accountable warfighting culture;” and ensuring the health, welfare and training of our people, our Sailors, Marines and their families.

He specifically pinned shipbuilding delivery problems on some factors previously called out by other former Navy officials: underinvestment in workforce and manufacturing capacity, “gold-plated requirements,” a bureaucratic decision-making that led to cost overruns, very late deliveries and delayed maintenance.

Phelan underscored his industry collaboration mindset that fixing these problems requires not just a government approach but also public-private partnerships, “with one plus one equals three. You will be moving to a philosophy of more shared risk with industry.”

He said to avoid past program mistakes, the Navy will work closely with the shipbuilding industry to calculate risk more effectively to ensure every dollar spent on defense has “tangible, measurable results.”

“ If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” he continued.

Phelan has no military or government experience but comes from a business career as a financier. He was also a large donor to the Trump 2024 campaign.

Phelan said this also translates into reassessing how the Navy evaluates and manages risk at every stage of the shipbuilding process by working closely with industry.

“Collaboration with industry is essential to drive the improvements we need. I look forward to building a new and more open relationship with our maritime industry. Together, we will build relationships, we will build trust, transparency and mutual understanding.”

Phelan argued that ultimately more collaborative relationships with industry will help the Navy set more realistic schedules, develop better forecasting tools, and ensure resources are allocated more efficiently.

“Our goal is to accelerate the shipbuilding process without compromising quality or capability.”

On changing culture, Phelan admitted reforming entrenched organizations is never easy, but necessary when dealing with warfare. He said the Navy and Marine Corps has to “ relentlessly improve” how it trains, fights and leads and personnel should challenge themselves to push past what is familiar and comfortable.

“Growth comes from questioning the status quo for being willing to look critically at how we operate and asking if there’s a better, more efficient, more effective way to achieve our objectives. My goal is to streamline decision making by trusting our people, by giving our leaders the ability to act to take intelligent, calculated risks and keep us moving forward.”

The Secretary also said President Trump has told him he wants to focus on revitalizing naval shipbuilding

“He’s stated to me many times: shipbuilding, shipbuilding, shipbuilding. Get those ships out of the maintenance yards and fix the damn rust.”

Phelan said Trump’s mandate is to enhance the Navy’s strength to assure sea dominance so they must ensure every decision made in ship construction ,maintenance and upgrades will keep them ahead of adversaries.

“We will set realistic, achievable schedules, and we will commit to them. We will eliminate the waste and inefficiencies that drain resources without delivering results. We will demand accountability for the shipbuilding enterprise, because every dollar, every day and every decision counts.”

At the end of his remarks Phelan reiterated he intends to bring a ‘huge focus” to the department’s procurement acquisition strategy to ensure an appropriate risk-adjusted rate of return on investments and that “in many ways, warfare is like a business. Our military must operate at optimal efficiency, maximizing its resources to ensure that every American tax dollar spent delivers results that strengthen our defense.”

He closed by saying he sees his role as “to harness that talent by challenging the status quo in implementing decisions that ensure our military remains the most powerful and lethal fighting force in the world. Change is coming, and my responsibility is to make sure that we have the right people in the right seats in the right platforms. There’ll be a new level of accountability and performance based on merit. I welcome those who welcome change and are prepared to do extra.”

Mission Analysis For Golden Dome Will Lay Foundation For Programs, Budget, Space Chief Says

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Even though a reference architecture and implementation plan for a future homeland missile defense protection shield were due in late March, the mission analysis phase is ongoing and “we’re nowhere near ready,” the chief of the U.S. Space Force said on Wednesday.

The planning includes an understanding of resource needs, existing programs, systems that are in development, and systems that need to be developed, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told reporters. These elements are necessary to understand costs, and planners are in the “middle” of this process and outcomes are “way pre-decisional,” he said.

Ground-based Midcourse Defense System Ground Based Interceptor

(Photo: Defense Department)

The homeland defense system, directed by President Donald Trump on Jan. 27, seeks a Golden Dome for America that “protects against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.”

Golden Dome will not be a system or a single contract but “system of systems that has to work together,” Saltzman said during a media roundtable. “There are sensors currently in development that will play a role in homeland missile defense and there are systems like space-based interceptors called out in the executive order that are not in development.”

To a certain degree, Golden Dome is expected to leverage existing missile defense systems and sensors, many of which were developed independent of each other. Space Force officials have been saying that connecting these legacy capabilities and new systems will be critical to creating a Golden Dome that can rapidly sense and defeat advanced missile threats.

Saltzman acknowledged that Golden Dome planners are on a tight timeline, with results expected in two to four years.

Planning includes outreach to industry. The Missile Defense Agency is hosting an unclassified summit later this month to inform the private sector of the agency’s and the Space Force’s roles in the new missile defense initiative, and to gather ideas from industry on how to confront the challenge (Defense Daily, March 31).

MDA, shortly after Trump’s executive order, released an information request seeking industry input on Golden Dome solutions (Defense Daily, Feb. 3).

The mission analysis phase includes the results of the “robust discussion” with industry to “see what’s in the art of the possible,” and assess the maturity of different technologies, Saltzman said.

“I believe what’s going to go back to the White House is a large discussion of that,” Saltzman said. “Here are the systems that have basically been identified. Here are the programs that we have to invest in. And here are some rough orders of magnitude in terms of cost.”

Once the White House digests the analysis, Saltzman expects further guidance, describing it as an “iterative process” with the first step the mission analysis.

The president’s executive order also calls for accelerating the deployment of the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) layer. A single HBTSS prototype spacecraft was launched by MDA in early 2024 and results have been positive (Defense Daily, April 4).

Developed by L3Harris Technologies [LHX], HBTSS is designed for “birth-to-death” tracking of missile threats, and to provide fire control data to missile interceptors.

Ed Zoiss, president of L3Harris’ Space and Airborne Systems segment, said that the data gathered from HBTSS is “compelling.” In a media roundtable on the company’s capabilities for Golden Dome, Zoiss said “the sensor has proven itself out, and we need to start full-rate production.” He noted that L3Harris is operating the spacecraft for MDA.

Zoiss also highlighted that for the Space Development Agency’s current mix of missile tracking satellites in the planned relatively small Tranche 1 and 2 constellations, the satellites that L3Harris is providing are “copies of HBTSS.”

LRDR to Enter Operational Test This Summer

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) plans to conduct operational testing of the Lockheed Martin [LMT] Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) this summer and quickly move it to Space Force for fielding, an MDA official said on Wednesday.

MDA “is highly linked with the Space Force for space domain awareness,” Maj. Gen. Jason Cothern, MDA’s deputy director and program executive officer for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, told the Space Symposium in Colorado. “Obviously, we have sensors that bring capabilities to bear in that regime, not the least of which is our Long-Range Discrimination Radar, which we’re excited to enter operational soak and operational test period later this summer with the idea of transitioning those operations to the United States Space Force later this summer.”

Pictured is Missile Defense Agency (MDA) Deputy Director Maj. Gen. Jason Cothern (MDA Photo)

“We also look forward to collaboration on space-based interceptors,” he said. “As we’ve seen from the executive order, that will absolutely be a focus, as we move forward.”

On Jan. 27, President Trump signed an executive order for DoD to develop an “Iron Dome for America”–since renamed Golden Dome, a massive, likely multi-billion dollar project that will utilize space-based interceptors (Defense Daily, Jan. 27).

The executive order called for DoD to submit “a reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements, and an implementation plan” for Golden Dome by the end of last month.

MDA received LRDR, based at Clear Space Force Station, Alaska, nearly a year ago (Defense Daily, Apr. 22, 2024).

At the time, Lockheed Martin said that LRDR had started collecting space domain awareness data for the Space Force. The S-band radar is to be able to search and track multiple small objects, including ballistic missiles at long ranges, and distinguish lethal objects such as warhead from decoys.

Lockheed Martin said that it designed LRDR with an open systems architecture to permit new radar features to support hypersonic defense.

Wittman: Navy Must Decide If Frigate Should Be Fixed Or Scrapped

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – Lawmakers on Wednesday questioned the Navy’s decisions on how it builds and maintains ships, with a top member of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) questioning if the Constellation

-class frigate program should just be scrapped given design delays.

“I think what we have to look at is making sure that we are very mindful of lessons of the past. Look at [Littoral Combat Ship] and what that turned into be two hull forms and all of a sudden, retiring a lot of those early…Constellation is another question. we are at a tipping point with Constellation,” Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), vice chairman of HASC, said here during the 2025 annual Sea-Air-Space expo.

Figure 2, illustration of FFG-62 design changes from the Fincatnieri FREMM parent design. (Image: GAO)

Wittman reiterated the Navy started by adapting the French/Italian FREMM frigate concept, with plans to maintain 85 percent of the original design but it was reversed to being 15 percent original design and about 85 percent add-on changes so it is over time and over budget.

“I am fully in favor of having a frigate class of ships. The question is, are we at a point where we either quickly recover and get back on track with this? Get back to schedule, get back to budget, I don’t know that you can make up the schedule – Or do you say I think we’re too far off with this, we go in a different direction,” Wittman said.

Wittman argued the Navy has to make that decision now and they cannot push it off into the future. “The same question that should have been asked with LCS years ago.”

Fincantieri Marinette Marine won the initial $795 million frigate contract in 2020 (Defense Daily, Oct. 8, 2020).

Last year the Navy admitted the frigate is running up to three years late due to slow design completion and workforce issues (Defense Daily, April 3, 2024).

In February, former Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition Nickolas Guertin said part of the frigate problem is it was more difficult to modify the FREMM parent design than the Navy had planned and they needed to do more modeling and prototyping work upfront (Defense Daily, Feb. 20).

Rep. Trent Kelly (R-Miss.), chairman of the HASC Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee, agreed with Wittman’s sentiment.

He argued the Navy is generally better off executing a new ship with 85 percent of the capability it ideally wants rather than getting closer to 100 percent a decade past its plan or zero percent as older ships get too old to work properly or are retired.

“What we have to do is get a good idea, do it quickly, and then we have to invest in that and build it. And understand if you need something to fill that capability gap, you can build something to bridge that capability gap or either you can accept the risk of having 85 percent but you understand that risk, but still, that 85 percent is better than zero percent.”

Kelly emphasized the Navy “just have to really get just more agile” and when a ship is decided they cannot allow too many changes that drive up cost, time and might even lead to a product not being produced.

Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) concurred on the problems with the Constellation-class.

“I think my colleagues did a good job of mentioning that the consistency and planning is very frustrating, we keep changing our minds. You know, the LCS is a good example for the Constellation frigate class.”

U.S. OKs Potential $1 Billion AMRAAM Missile Deal With Australia

The State Department has approved a potential arms deal with Australia worth just over $1 billion for Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM).

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) notified Congress on Wednesday of the new foreign military sale.

RTX’s AMRAAM air-to-air missile. (Photo: RTX)

Under the deal, Australia would buy up to 200 of RTX’s [RTX] AIM-120C-8 AMRAAMs and up to 200 AIM-120D-3 AMRAAMs.

The FMS case also includes AMRAAM containers and support equipment, spare parts, weapons system support, software and U.S. government and contractor engineering, technical and logistics support services.

“It is vital to the U.S. national interest to assist our ally in developing and maintaining a strong and ready self-defense capability,” the DSCA said in a statement. “The proposed sale will improve Australia’s capability to meet current and future threats by protecting and increasing aircraft survivability.”

HASC Chair Says ‘Accelerate AUKUS’ To Deter China, North Korea

In opening remarks at a hearing Wednesday on military posture in the Indo-Pacific region, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said to “accelerate AUKUS” to strengthen deterrence against China and North Korea.

“China now has the world’s largest Navy—and a shipbuilding capacity over 200 times greater than our own,” Rogers, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said in his remarks. “It’s rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal and is expected to double its warheads by 2030; and China leads the world in hypersonic missile systems; China’s growing defense budget shows it isn’t slowing down.”

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee

To deter China, “we must also accelerate AUKUS, especially efforts to field cutting-edge, interoperable systems,” Rogers said. “And we need more co-production, co-development, and co-sustainment with our regional allies and partners.”

AUKUS is the trilateral agreement among Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. with goals to strengthen deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. plans to sell Australia three to five used and new Virginia-class submarines in the 2030s., and after that Australia plans to build its own subs in the following decade.

The Department of Defense in 2023 said China is expanding its land-, sea-, and air-based nuclear delivery platforms and investing in further expanding its nuclear forces.

“In return for supporting Putin’s war machine, China is receiving advanced submarine, missile, and nuclear technology,” Rogers continued.

DoD estimates that Beijing had 500 operational nuclear warheads as of May 2023 and was on track to have over 1,000 operational warheads by 2030. These would be deployed by 2035, the Pentagon said.

“I see a lot of intelligence at a classified level, and I’ve never seen anything that tells me they [China] intend to stop at parity. Why would they?” Lt. Gen. Andrew Gebara, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff of strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, told a working group in September.

Rogers also brought up North Korea as a “growing threat,” adding its president Kim Jong Un tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile in October that could “strike the U.S. homeland while carrying multiple nuclear warheads.”

“I’m concerned these advances will accelerate as Kim strengthens his ties with Putin,” Rogers said. “Especially given North Korea has supplied Russia with millions of shells and thousands of troops—Putin owes him.”

HASC Chair Intends To Include ‘Robust Levels’ Of Weapons Aid For Taiwan In Next NDAA

The chair of the House Armed Services Committee said Wednesday he intends to authorize weapons aid for Taiwan at “robust levels” again in the next defense policy bill.

After the inclusion of the Taiwan Security Cooperation Initiative in the most recent National Defense Authorization Act, which supported $300 million in new security assistance for the island, HASC Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said the U.S. must still work to “deliver weapons and training to Taiwan faster.”

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) at the conclusion of the House Armed Services Committee’s markup of the FY ’24 NDAA. Photo: screenshot of livestream.

“Our job is to make sure [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] knows a cross-Strait invasion would be too costly—and ultimately futile,” Rogers said during a hearing.

Rogers during the hearing asked Navy Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, for his perspective on how the U.S. can accelerate delivery of weapons to improve Taiwan’s self defense and bolster deterrent capability against China’s “perceived opportunities.”

“The key is to eliminate and remove, in some cases, bureaucratic limitations in order to do so. Liberalizing the supply bases, certifying supply bases, a steady flow of funds in order to fund those capabilities and downstream long-lead item matters would greatly enhance our ability to produce at speed [for Taiwan],” Paparo said.

The State Department this past October approved nearly $2 billion in potential weapons deals with Taiwan, to include the sale of several National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) and AN/TPS-77 and AN/TPS-78 long-range radar systems (Defense Daily, Oct. 28 2024).

Prior to the approval of those two Foreign Military Sales cases, the Biden administration announced the authorization of a $567 million security assistance package for Taiwan with weapons to be pulled from current Pentagon inventories using the Presidential Drawdown Authority (Defense Daily, Oct. 3 2024).

Space Force’s International Strategy Promises Tighter Integration With Allies And Partners, Saltzman Says

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman on Wednesday introduced the Space Force’s first international strategy, a roadmap to tighten coordination and collaboration with allies and partners.

Enhancing the partnerships toward a “common vision” will entail working together across an array of efforts, Saltzman said at the annual Space Symposium here.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman. Photo: U.S. Space Force

“We’re going to embed more of our allies and partners into our force design from the beginning,” Saltzman said in a morning keynote. “That means integrating across policies and training. That means driving adoption of common international standards and aligning strategies to them. That also means expanding joint exercises, exchanging personnel and deliberately increasing, the way we leverage ally and partner capabilities.”

A key player in the development of the International Partnership Strategy is Air Marshal Paul Godfrey, who is Saltzman’s assistant space chief for future concepts and partnerships. Godfrey, an officer in the Royal Air Force, was first commander of Britain’s Space Command.

Despite the increased friction the Trump administration is causing with allies and partners globally due to tariffs, tepid support for NATO, and worse so for Ukraine in its war against Russia, both Saltzman and Godfrey told reporters that at the military-to-military level, “it’s business as usual.”

In a media roundtable Saltzman, Godfrey outlined three key areas of focus moving forward with the strategy, including force design, force development, and force employment, all of which intersect with “every single part of the Space Force,” and other parts of the Defense Department, intelligence community, and U.S. Space Command.

The Space Force is developing an implementation plan for the strategy over the next six to nine months that will lay out the tasks, and “implied tasks,” and understanding them, Godfrey said.

“And it’s embedding that golden thread of partner integration through the processes that the Space Force have pulled together over the last five years,” he said.

One way Saltzman believes that integration can be enhanced is by adding unclassified war games to the current classified exercises the Space Force conducts with its international partners. A challenge with classified events is that when the Space Force and its partners go back to their home countries, everyone has a difficult time explaining the results to their “ministries” and “our budget people because it’s classified,” he said.

Plans for an unclassified war game are in the “early stages” but the fact that a lot of the on-orbit threats have been declassified bolsters the changes for such an event, Saltzman said. This would give participants “kind of the narrative to go back and make the case to their respective governments in a way that they may not be able to if it’s classified.”

Multinational cooperation is nothing new for the Space Force. The service manages the Combined Space Operations (CSpO) initiative, which is where it works with representatives from nine other nations on responsible space behavior.

Operations are with partner nations are also a focus for the U.S.

On Tuesday, U.S. Space Command Commander Gen. Stephen Whiting told the symposium that over the last year his command has been “working to operationalize our relationships in space with our most capable allies.” For example, he announced that the U.S. and France recently conducted the “first ever bilateral rendezvous and proximity operation to demonstrate combined capabilities in space in the vicinity of a strategic competitor spacecraft.”

Saltzman said there are “tremendous benefits” when the Space Force can train and practice with its partners, adding that “they learned a lot of lessons because the communication has to work, the planning efforts have to be joint.”

The Space Symposium is a key event for the Space Force, in part because of the attendance by international officers, Saltzman said. The nation’s top space officer said he has had “really good key leader engagements with a number of countries” and on Thursday is hosting space chiefs from 20 countries and a NATO representative to discuss different topics, including the new partnership strategy.”

The CSpO members will meet on Friday to discuss plans for the year, he said.

The International Partnership Strategy is expected to be publicly released in about a week, Saltzman said.

Space Force Looking to Promote CIC Data Sharing with NRO

The U.S. Space Force is looking to increase data sharing among the service’s Commercial Integration Cell (CIC) and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) commercial contractors. The number of companies in the CIC has increased to 17 from 10 two and a half years ago.

Those companies include SpaceX, Maxar Technologies, Eutelsat Communications S.A.‘s Eutelsat America Corp., EchoStar Corp.‘s [SATS] Hughes Network Systems, Viasat Inc. [VSAT] and Viasat-owned Inmarsat, Intelsat Ltd.’s Intelsat General Communications, Iridium Communications Inc. [IRDM], SES Space & Defense, XTAR LLC, Kratos [KTOS], BlackSky, ICEYE, LeoLabs, Telesat, Hawkeye 360 and ExoAnalytic.

The U.S. Space Force said that collaboration among the service and two companies in its Commercial Integration Cell–SpaceX and Maxar Technologies–aided in the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster carrying two WorldView Legion satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., on May 2, 2024 (U.S. Space Force Photo)

“As we look at some of the conflicts that are going on in the world, we can share Top Secret information with those commercial entities, and they can provide us information too, and then we can spread that out among all those 17 companies,” Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess, U.S. Space Command’s Combined Joint Force Space Component Commander at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., told the Space Symposium in Colorado on Wednesday.

“We’re also working to increase that with our NRO commercial companies so that we’re also providing that information as well,” he said. “We need that [space domain awareness data from commercial companies] on a daily basis.”

By 2027, Space Command, the Air Force, Space Force, Missile Defense Agency, and the NRO are to integrate their modernization efforts to speed command and control and targeting (Defense Daily, Apr. 8).

NATO Works to Expand and Direct Multinational Space Capabilities

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.— NATO leaders are working toward the concept of getting all nations in the alliance to work together to protect the space domain and advance defense and deterrence objectives in space.

Tom Goffus, the assistant secretary for General Operations of NATO, said during a panel at Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Tuesday that a lesson NATO learned from Russia’s attack on Ukraine is that space — including commercial space — is a key battlefield.

From left: Air Marshal John Stringer, Royal Air Force; Maj. Gen. Philippe Adam, French Space Command; and Maj. Gen. Wolfgang Ohl, German Federal Ministry of Defence. Photo: Space Foundation

“We know the very first attack by Russia was a cyber attack on Ukraine’s ability to use space,” Goffus said, citing the

attack on the KA-SAT network. “So a key NATO lesson is the need for space capabilities for all 32 allies.”

Some NATO member countries have already invested in space, he noted, because over the last five years, the acceleration and proliferation of commercial space and technology “broke the belief that space is too expensive, too exquisite and too classified.”

Six NATO allies have already stood up space commands.

“As we raise the space IQ of allies, they are recognizing that in space, Chinese military assets are a closer and more dangerous threat to their national security, prosperity and well-being than in any other domain,” Goffus said.

“‘America First’ does not need to mean America alone,” he said, and the combined economic and military might of 32 allies will make NATO a major space player. “It’s real, it’s important, and it’s happening.”

It’s about credibility, said Air Marshal John Stringer of the Royal Air Force, who serves as deputy commander of NATO’s Allied Air Command. “Credibility means you have capabilities [that] are demonstrable whether it’s necessary to use them or not,” he said. “That is no different in the space domain. We need to be thinking about what response options therefore look like, not that you are going to do them, but that your adversary knows that they are a possibility.”

It’s critical to bring together forces and capabilities now, according to Maj. Gen. Wolfgang Ohl, deputy director and general for Military Strategy and Operations, German Federal Ministry of Defence. “We are under attack,” he said. “We see that every day. We are under attack in space, out of space, and innerspace. So we have to do something. And here comes NATO into the game. We have to synchronize what we are striving for in space.”

Stringer added a bit of real-world reality to the discussion. “I would just highlight NATO quite rightly as a defensive alliance that will never have a first-mover advantage,” he said. “So that rapidity of response via the orchestration of a variety of effects with other nations, faster than your opponent, and the ability to generate, sustain and ideally increase momentum, is essential.”

Space operations in the future will be quite different, since it has a lot to do with how we imagine the war of tomorrow, according to Maj. Gen. Philippe Adam, space commander, Air and Space Force, French Space Command. “But the way that space is now playing a critical factor in what we want to do in terms of initial operations is primarily important, and has to be realized within the Space Command,” he said. “We are not fighting space for space. We are fighting in space for the world. But also we have to be concerned that we provide the best support we can from space.”

Goffus said one of the takeaways from a recent NATO exercise is that rules of engagement are needed for space, like all other domains. “It’s not a settled question at this point. But I think allies are where they need to be, in terms of thinking about it,” he said.

“NATO is in a constant process of revising our space domain plans, and it includes supporting where the five different NATO recognized operational domains intersect. The reason is that space can support land, or land can support space, and that it’s a multi-dimensional, dynamic and fluid environment,” Goffus said. “So we’re going to have to get after this intellectually to be able to handle the dynamics to bring something together on multi domain operations that’s very operational. I think it’s very clear that space is going to be at the heart of multi-domain operations.”

Stringer commented on the importance of the commercial sector, with NATO drawing from the “greatest possible range of vendors. It’s innovation, but it’s also choice, options, competition, and vibrancy in the market. On one side, we want to encourage that vibrancy. But on the other side for us as NATO, making sure that our processes are as nimble as they need to be. Nobody wants to wait 18 months to be paid.”

“Traditionally you needed really big budgets to buy big things in NATO,” Stringer said. “But I do think space offers an opportunity for nations with smaller budgets to really contribute, and to focus capability to the benefit of all members of the alliance, with that sense of being an important ally contributing to the deterrence and defense mission, which I think resonates strongly across all nations.”