Episode 33: NATO Investing in Space capabilities to Enhance Multi-Domain Operations, Establish Deterrence

The Elara Edge: International Insights Edition

Intro/Outro: Scott King (SK)

Host: Brad Head, Managing Director of International Partnerships, Elara Nova (BH) 

SME: Air Marshall Sir Johnny Stringer, Deputy Commander of NATO Allied Air Command (JS) 

00:02 – 00:57 

(SK): Welcome to “The Elara Edge.” I’m your host, Scott King, and we have a new special edition series to present to you today: “The Elara Edge: International Insights Edition,” where the leading figures in international security share their insights and perspectives directly with you, our listeners.  

Brad Head, Managing Director of International Partnerships at Elara Nova, will be your host today. And joining Brad as our inaugural guest is Air Marshall Sir Johnny Stringer, who at the time of this recording was retiring out of his role as the Deputy Commander of Allied Air Command at NATO. 

Together, they’ll be discussing NATO’s evolving approach to space since the military alliance first declared it an operational domain in 2019, as well as how commercial space providers should be considering opportunities to support NATO in its space warfighting efforts.  

With that, thank you for joining us and onto the show…

00:58 – 01:22 

(BH): Welcome to The Elara Edge International Insight Edition. I’m Brad Head, Managing Director of International Partnerships at Elara Nova, where we specialize in strategic advisory for space, aeronautics and mission systems. Today, I’m honored to speak with Air Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, the deputy commander for NATO’s Air Command, which includes command of NATO Space. Sir Johnny has been in his role since August 2022 and has served as acting commander since May.  

Sir Johnny, it’s great to have you on.  

01:23 – 01:24 

(JS): Great to be here, Brad. Thanks. 

01:25 – 01:34  

(BH): All right, Sir. 

Let’s start back at the beginning. Take me back to the Watford Grammar School where you went to school. What was it about the Royal Air Force that captured young Johnny Stringer’s imagination?  

01:35 – 02:43 

(JS): Yeah, I think, I think I just always have been interested in aircraft. I mean, I probably built an unhealthy number of Airfix models as a kid. I mean, I was lucky enough my elder brother was about five years ahead of me. He went into the Air Force and I go to see a bunch of things, which he was doing before I had to kind of make any substantial calls. 

So I got a bit of a privileged ringside seat. I was able to go flying with a family friend on a couple of occasions. Once in a Chipmunk which was [fabulous] and it just kind of really struck me as something exciting and interesting and different. 

And then I joined the Air Cadets when I was in school, which again gave me another set of insights into the Air Force. And when it came to the sixth form, sort of the last two years of school, school and off to university, I applied for sponsorship from the Air Force, and I was lucky enough to get it. 

So I landed a flying scholarship for 30 hours, and then applied for sponsorship at University of the Air Force, as well. So I went on to university in 1987 as an RAF University Cadet at the hallowed rank of Acting Pilot Officer. But that was it. 

02:44 – 03:04 

(BH): Very cool. So it sounds like you’ve had a pretty remarkable career. Looking through your resume, you flew the Jaguars over Yugoslavia, the no fly zone in northern Iraq, you commanded a Squadron. You flew the Spitfire during the Battle of Britain Memorial flight. When you look back on your career… Was there a moment that stands out to you as kind of one of your key moments in your career? 

03:05 – 05:15 

(JS): I think you’re right. I have been really fortunate, I think. And there is kind of a series of moments, really, maybe that’s the kind of thing you come back to. I mean, I always say you never stop learning, and every day is a school day. And I’m aged nudging 56. I still think that is entirely true. 

I was lucky enough to fly with and learn from some exceptional people. Jaguar Force is particularly dear to my heart because you had to work very hard to get every last ounce out of an aircraft that was great fun and very challenging to fly. But at the end of the day, a Typhoon Eurofighter had two and a half times the thrust, a much bigger wing, a radar, a whole bunch of other things. 

But then [sic] was where I did just shy of 2000 hours. I met my wife there, kids were born there. And it was a great example, I think, of excellence in the Force, but one that didn’t shout about it. And anybody who ran any risk of getting above themselves really was politely but quite quickly brought back down to Earth. 

So I learned a lot in those times and then, back to being fortunate, maybe even privileged of flying Spitfires and Hurricanes, which really resonated [with] my first degree was History. My background was single seat fighters. And then to get a chance to fly what our predecessors, our forebearers had done during World War II, and most obviously, of course, the Battle of Britain was phenomenal. 

I mean, really very, very sobering and quite moving. And, but don’t get me wrong, I will [also] say a great challenge and fantastic fun. I was just playing down to 100ft, doing a lot of work-up for display season. And with less than six hours on a Hurricane. So it was great. 

Very well supervised, folks, by the way. But it was immense fun. So all the way through not just my flying career but in staff, you learn all along the way, and I think anybody who doesn’t think that is kind of in denial, really. You learn automatically about leadership and approaches to problems and sort of approaches to people and those are some things you just cannot teach. You just have to develop through doing. 

05:16 – 05:54 

(BH): Very cool. Yeah, it sounds similar to an answer that I’ve heard from many people throughout my career that squadron command is the pinnacle of your life because that’s where you’re closest tied to the mission and the people that are doing that mission. 

And then the farther along it goes, sometimes the more disconnected you get from that kind of tangible, everyday interaction. All right, so from here, let’s kind of fast forward to August of 2022. So you stepped in to become the Deputy Commander of Allied Air Command there at Ramstein and so you’ve come from a career of primarily national service in the RAF. 

And now you get into a leadership role in a multinational alliance. So I guess what surprised you most about that transition? And then kind of the role that you find yourself in now? 

05:55 – 09:00 

(JS): Yeah, I don’t know if I’d quite use that term, but what I would do – back to people you learn from. So at that stage, NATO was 30 nations. 

We are now obviously at 32 with the accession of Finland and Sweden during the time I’ve been out here. But learning from people, and I do mean this. I was privileged to be the UK Air Component Commander in the Middle East in October 2016 until October 2017. It was a period where we were conducting ops to retake Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria and a whole bunch of other [sic]. 

And who was my CFAC, my three star American Air Component Commander? “Cobra” Harrigian. And Cobra had just handed over to Scorch Hecker, here at Ramstein. And the reason I mention Cobra is every day I got a masterclass in how you run a coalition. And at that stage, I think it was 17 or 18 nations’ air forces within the overall Operation Inherent Resolve coalition. 

 And as I said, I just learned a whole load about the realities of coalitions and how you manage and bring nations along with you. The good and the difficult and the bad and the ugly. And I recognized at the time, and I reflected on that in August 2022, how much I’ve stored away from that year. 

But then, of course, being what was I at that stage? 52. I’ve done a bunch of non-Air Force jobs. In fact, from leaving Squadron Command, I’ve spent, no, even the frontline before going back to Squadron Command. I’ve spent almost twice as much in joint and international appointments as I have in core Air Force ones. So I’ve been very lucky to have been engaged with, exposed to, nations [and the] realities working and the rest of it.  

I think the bit which I would say, just broadly on things, which has always kind of been a thing I aim to subscribe to is it’s very easy when you are confronted with big alliances, lots of nations, and the rest of it, to drive for consensus in all things. 

And at one level, of course you would. But really consensus, if you’re not careful, becomes the lowest common denominator, the thing which everybody will accept and you’ll never get to move things along. So as my team will know, I routinely say, ‘Look, guys, we may lose arguments because of positions, which we just can’t influence elsewhere or dynamics which were not cited on. 

But we’re never going to lose an argument on multi-core analysis because at some point, it’s almost certain that you’ll come back to a discussion or a decision. So let’s just make sure that we are as objective and rational as we can be because context and circumstances change. And what we want to do is make sure that the position we set out was not swayed by anything but was the most objective advice we could provide.

09:01 – 09:20 

(BH): Well, as you’ve kind of taken on that role. I’ve seen you speak in different forums and you’ve written a little bit about this, and you’ve talked about two “long shadows” that still haunt NATO’s military. And I wonder if you could kind of recount that metaphor for us today and kind of explain what that means to you and why specifically use the phrase ‘Shadows?’

09:21 – 12:12 

(JS): Shadows is a metaphor that’s been used in many areas over things. And I think the reason it kind of appeals to me: long speaks for duration – back to that the moment – and shadow, of course, is the area that’s denying light being let in or indeed it’s the shade that’s been set by something that you may have done for many years, both of which I think are true here.  

And so for me the first long shadow started in 1990 with we’ve won the Cold War. And, it is no surprise, is it? In fact, it was a conscious decision in so many nations to go “Fantastic liberal democracy has triumphed. It’s the peace dividend all round. I don’t need to invest in defense in the way I did.” And that leads to, in a way, a second long shadow: not quite as long as 32 years, from 1990 to February 2022 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  

But the second [shadow] is what was 15 to 20 years long. And that was counterinsurgency operations done at range against a particular type of threat, vicious but limited. For the air component in particular, no real threat, putting more threat to your operations on the ground than to you in the air because you were fighting people who had little or no counter air capability, if I can call it that. 

Your biggest threats were running out of fuel or oil, and we benefited from an almost all-seeing permanent ISR stare. Sure, we never had enough of it, but we were not contested. We weren’t fighting for spectrum dominance. Electronic warfare didn’t really happen and we got very comfortable in the way of fighting that was also expeditionary. 

And importantly for us, that means a long way away from home bases. There were spikes of deployment activity, and you came back to a safe home environment where you reset for the next go. And so that era of the two parts here: one ‘hey peace dividend, [we] don’t need to spend on things we did before.’ 

And the second of discretionary niche type operations at range, really got a bit of a rude wake up call in 2022, except, of course, it’s not just 2022, is it? It was 2014 in Crimea and it’s 2008 with Georgia before that. So I think it was a kind of natural human instinct to go elevate it to the grand strategic.  

When it was being thrown in doubt by what our adversaries or competitors were doing, we applied a lot of optimism bias because it didn’t suit the happy picture, we told ourselves. And really, we are coming out of those two positions, I think, Brad.  

12:13 – 12:31 

(BH): One thing that I think about sometimes is that, you know, for over 30 years, NATO conducted operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places in full view of our potential adversaries who were watching and studying and learning how we do things. 

So what does it mean strategically when you’re facing peer competitors who had three decades to study your playbook?

12:32 – 14:37 

(JS): Yeah. So kind of 2 or 3 things here. I think the second offset strategy – this isn’t an exhaustive list, but this is the era of first era stealth technology, precision munitions, the real exploitation of space-based capabilities, and systems miniaturization. 

Back to space: precision navigation, Satcom, ISR I mean, the whole lot. And of course the first time people really saw it was 1991. But the reality is you could almost date the kickoff to part one of that with the first use of the Paveway 1 in Vietnam in 1968. So that combination of technology, thinking, tactics, training and then overall theory of victory was phenomenal in 1991, but it looked remarkably the same in 2021. 

We’ve taken it, polished, honed it. But the fundamental tenets of it were the same. But at the same time, we had conceptually as well as physically dis-invested in many areas, some of them very key. And I would say that amongst that list, for me, top of the tree is integrated air and missile defense. 

That’s why there is so much focus on that now. Linking to your point, which is, our adversaries and competitors saw that model first shown to the world in 1991 and actively sought to not only neuter it, but to turn some of our approaches to warfare almost against us and we sat there and went, “Eh, it will be all right, because, you know, as I said, liberal democracy has triumphed.” 

Well, no, it hasn’t. So, we have to now re-configure ourselves against that reality. And again, I hate to say it, we have enjoyed an unnaturally long period of relative peace in Europe and elsewhere and if we want that to maintain, then best we prepare – sadly, for war. Once again, the Romans had it right.

14:38 – 15:01 

(BH): So, I think if we flip that around a little bit in the last three years, we’ve had an opportunity to watch Russia, in particular in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Neither side has seemed to have achieved air superiority and it’s kind of bogged down. You said if either side had this, war would still not be happening. 

So how out of the long shadows that you’ve described in NATO, keep us unprepared for what we’re seeing right now, today, play out in Ukraine and Russia? 

15:02 – 17:56 

(JS): So back to 1991. And that was on one level, it was a recognition of that air superiority. But also, by the way, space superiority, ‘Who was threatening our space-based systems in 1991?’ 

We’re going to be fundamental to allowing all of the components to exploit the freedom of access and freedom of maneuver that air superiority was providing and space-based systems. And that’s one of the key things which our opponents have sought to neutralize in the decades that followed. There is a reason why one of our key missions is what we would call counter anti-access and area denial.  

And this is not solely to free up maneuver, and access for the air component. It’s to ensure freedom of access and freedom of maneuver for everybody. So, air superiority continues to underpin joint operations. It is the way that you prevail. It is also, frankly, the thing which our adversaries look at and I think worry the most about when they look at, in this case, NATO capability and Western air power and what it provides. 

But you have to fight for it literally and metaphorically. The metaphorical is you need to keep investing in back to those five T’s I set out from the U.S. experience after Vietnam and underpinning the second offset strategy, you got to make sure that your thinking allied to I mean, frankly, probably the fastest and most concurrent series of technological advances that I think any of us have seen. How that all comes together. How that with imagination and will applied to it, starts offering different ways in warfare to you, combine not just a single domain. 

Then how do you practice for it? And I’m sure we’ll come on to it. But of course, one of the things is you don’t show in the real world what you might have to do – for real in the future. So that places, by the way, a real premium on synthetics. And then how does that map to a theory of victory?  

Now, of course, in NATO a theory of victory for a defensive alliance sounds a rather strange phrase. Actually. It’s your theory of victory. And I know I’ve said this before, but I truly believe it – you need to build forces that can demonstrably win. And if you’ve done that, you will get deterrence as a byproduct. If you try to build forces that deter you already, I think, intellectually not in the right place. 

17:57 – 18:16 

(BH): That’s a great distinction. So you threw out a phrase there, and I want to pull on that thread for a second. You didn’t say it exactly, but “multi-domain operations” is a word we hear thrown around a lot in NATO discussions these days.  

Can you kind of unpack that for the audience? What are multi-domain operations and how is that different from the way we thought about things previously? 

18:17 – 21:27 

(JS): Yeah, and it’s a really fair question. So when I was setting out on my frontline career, certainly in the first few years, you would have seen the move to the discussion of and this is a great non-word my apologies, but discussion of joint-ery and the fact that we were going to bring air, land and maritime and it would have been seen in these three domains: air, land and maritime, together. 

And of course, you kind of go, ‘Well, you saw a lot of that in World War Two. You probably saw bits of that beforehand, [but any] bits in there might have been a couple of domains.  

So we did get pretty good. We actually designed things like staff colleges around being joint and everybody came together. For the UK, it was a [sic]. But I think we always knew that it was actually done really well. 

It was considerably more than just three military domains. But even with the recognition of space and cyber as being domains in their own right by nations or NATO – take your pick. There was something far more than that. And I think multi-domain operations, if we are really true to the term, have to include all instruments of national or for an alliance like NATO: alliance power. 

So how do you, for example, fuse intelligence agencies with more traditional military means, with non-military means in the domains. Commercial space, a great example but not the only one. With in protracted campaigns, things like economic warfare, not just traditional military warfare. I mean, how do you fuse that all together, whether it is for specific operations or how it underpins a means of campaigning? 

And again, I think back to some of the stuff which we did, led by the air component in the AOR in Iraq and Syria when I was out there. A lot of what we’re talking about now, we did. But we did it as a kind of episodic thing for certain events. 

And I think if you’re really serious about multi-domain or all-domain operations, it’s a default. It’s not the thing you do occasionally and you do a kind of lower level of activity at all other times. But then it places a real premium I think on two things. So the first is: what does your command and control look like that fuzes all of this together? And that is way more than just tactical C2 in the moment. It’s even how do you share information and data of different classifications across different agencies in different nations? Always a challenge.  

The second one, perhaps, which is the less obvious, which is how do you educate your commanders and your staff to flourish, to really excel in this space? Because if you don’t do those two things, you can buy as much flashy equipment as you like, but it’s not going to perform as you need it to.  

21:28 – 22:42 

(BH): That’s great. I know command and control in particular is one that, in my career, we struggled with, I know JADC2 and ABMS are some of those initiatives that the US Air Force and the US joint force have tried to get after that command and control and all that information and connecting that down to a commander, who’s got to make decisions and it’s been a challenge to build the systems that enable that and I assume NATO struggles with some of the same things. 

Okay, so with that set as a broad context, I’d like to drill down. Our audience is primarily a space audience. So focused on just space for just a second and I’ll start with a little bit of a story. 

Two years ago, in October of 2023, I was on a trip with a couple of, a handful of colleagues from the US space enterprise, including Deanna Ryals, who you know well. We were at Allied Command Operations on the first day of STEADFAST DEFENDER and General Cavoli, who was the SACEUR at that time, during the first commanders update briefing the first afternoon of the exercise. 

Said at one point, ‘Hey, where’s my lead space guy?’ There’s an army lieutenant colonel there, who kind of raised his hand sheepishly and said, ‘Sir, I think that might be me.’ And he said, ‘Okay, cool. How much space stuff do I have?’ And so the guy said he thought about it for a minute and he said, ‘Sir, you don’t have any space stuff. The nations retain everything they’ve got. They might make it available to you on the day, if you ask nicely and they don’t have anything else going on.’  

So how much of that has changed since that conversation two years ago?  

22:43 – 26:52 

(JS): Yeah. So in a way, one – an interesting conversation because NATO as NATO doesn’t own fighters, destroyers, main battle tanks and a bunch of other stuff. But by what its members provide to the alliance, it has access to a load of stuff. 

And you could go down the route of chasing satellites with a NATO sticker on the side. By the way, we used to have a few satellites that were NATO-funded and owned. 

And rockets. Now I don’t have rockets either, have I? But just look at my routes now to put payloads on orbit. And by the way, look at the cost, compared it per kilo compared to where it was even ten years ago. But the cost of physical ownership of the stuff really doesn’t worry me. The assured access to the capabilities I need definitely does. 

So, okay, am I going to be able to get stuff from nations’ brackets and what can I get from nations or multinationals or alliances or the other, that’s commercial, and also provides what I need. And this is not, by the way, something that’s come out to the field since you had that chat two years ago. But the commercial driver in space has been there for decades. We all know that.  

Back to 1991, look how much satellite communications was being born by commercial bearers even then. So there’s a bunch of things which had been absolutely underpinned by the commercial space contribution. I think, what is changing, I’m not going to say has changed. 

What is changing from even two years ago, you are getting an increasingly better educated middle and more senior echelon, across the Alliance and therefore, of course, in nations. About not just reliance on space. I mean, that’s one thing, but the opportunities and how you can get the capabilities that you need. You don’t need to have, for example, unless frankly, you’ve got the need and/or the resources to do it – very expensive national-only military systems. 

Some nations do for a bunch of reasons, but a number of spacefaring nations don’t need to be in that place. And in fact, some of the more imaginative ones don’t have anything there at all. But boy, are they very good at leveraging other options. So the continuing indeed probably slightly exponential rise in the importance of and provision of service from commercial is really, really important. 

The second one, I think we’ve probably been less successful at squaring. And again, it may not be the most obvious thing to focus on which is even the youngest – air power – of the three traditional domains, is now about 110 years old in military air power terms, you could argue a bit longer ago if you go to balloons, but that’s a lot of time to develop capacity in numbers. 

The Royal Air Force was at something like 1.3 million people at the end of World War II in it, we’re about 32,000 or so now. But the point is, we’ve had decades to devote to develop people and capacity in structures, space is still quite juvenile in this regard across a bunch of nations. So the one thing which I think we’ve probably not seen as much change as we would have liked in two years, although the arrows are going in the right direction, would be on our space cadre. 

Our workforce, who are either in the early stages of or are developing nicely in their space component or space domain careers, because you can have as much stuff as you like. Again, if you haven’t got the means to exploit it, you’re not going to get the maximum return. So for me, the workforce is really important. Exploit commercial and get everybody on the same rising tide as well, because all of the NATO nations are or can play in this area.

26:53 – 28:38 

(BH): And it’s interesting, you see nations like, I know Romania, has a couple microsats up monitoring the Black Sea. And then you see even nontraditional space players are now starting to get involved in the space game. I think that that gets back to the point you alluded to earlier, where commercial space, the price of launch has come down and the proliferation of commercial providers doing a variety of things that has made it more accessible, I guess, something to think about is. 

NATO didn’t actually declare space an operational domain until 2019. Can you kind of help us think through like, what was it that got them to a point in 2019 that they thought, ‘Okay, now is the time to declare that.’ And then kind of a second part of that question, when I look at the space domain, it seems complicated because the systems tend to be very classified. 

I know on the US side it’s hard to talk about sometimes. Even within the service, across mission areas, there’s classification issues. It seems to me that the space domain is kind of at this inflection point where it could go the way of nuclear or it could go the way of cyber, in the NATO construct. And what I mean by that is, NATO is a nuclear alliance. 

They’ve got an HLG, you know, a high level group and a nuclear planning group, and there’s a handful of nations that have nuclear weapons. There’s some others that operate nuclear weapons. But the entire alliance is a nuclear alliance and has coherent conversations about the translation from conventional to nuclear.  

And I would contrast that with the cyber domain, which is the other kind of newer domain. It was a little bit older than the space domain, and in here, we see this conversation where, where we say, ‘Okay, I’m not going to tell you what I can do, just ask me for an effect. And if you want the power to go off in that building from 10 to 2 on Tuesday,’ I may be able to do that or whatever the ask may be. But we really don’t talk about it.  

And so, kind of how did we get to where we’re at on declaring space an operational domain and as we look forward, do you see it going kind of the way of going nuclear or the way of cyber, where we’re going to have a fulsome conversation and be able to talk about space coherently at the alliance level?

28:39 – 30:06 

(JS): Yeah. So this is my assessment but I think it was probably two things. The first was 2019 is also about the same time, as you see the emergence of a revised family of plans in NATO. So deterrence and defense of the Euro-Atlantic area, the DDA family of plans, so that was genuinely a really important moment for the Alliance.  

And of course, it did pre-date Ukraine. So there were people who were looking at the direction of travel, and going, ‘The trend lines here are not good.’ But our approach to planning and plans is fundamentally different. So I think that’s one key driver. The second is it was just becoming increasingly counterfactual, wasn’t it? 

You could not [put] a hand on the heart and say, ‘Space is not an operational domain.’ When you saw the number of nations who were getting into the space game, the expansion of military, the rapid expansion of commercial, the fact that it absolutely underpinned our way in warfare from a very basic tactical level. We come back to a classic: ‘Imagine a day without space.’  

But to then say, ‘Hey, but it’s not a domain, would have been, frankly, unsustainable.’ For fans of old Kings, this is Canute and his throne. That the waves of the tides have already gone well past him, so I think it was an overdue recognition. Now, of course, the challenge is what do you do with that statement?

30:07 – 30:34 

(BH): All right. So, to drill down a couple levels of detail. You’ve got the NATO Space Center there, that’s working on a couple of different products that are going to help flesh out: how do you operationalize that domain? The first one is the Mission Essential Task List, and the second is a campaign plan. So if we can kind of talk through those a little bit. 

So start with the Mission Essential Task List or METAL. What’s the process? What’s it designed to achieve? And kind of on a foundational level, is this an attempt to answer the question: how much space stuff do we need as an alliance?

30:35 – 33:08 

(JS): So METALs as a concept has been around for some time. I think in a way, the Mission Essential Task List approach is a way of basically applying some rigor to what is it that we actually need to do? So rather than the whimsical, ‘Hey it would be quite nice to do this or it’d be quite nice to do that.’ It’s very much context threat based, mission based, right? Included in the title.   

To discharge what we have been asked to do implied, as well as specified tasks. How do we aggregate that down to each individual task that supports what the component needs to do? And I think we were somewhere around 350 or so METALs for the NATO space component. And by the way, some of these are really, not binary, but singular. So some of these are very, very specific tasks.  

But if you have properly unpacked your mission right down to the essential tasks to discharge it, you’ve now got the right framework to go, ‘All right, structurally and in process and in capability. What do I now need to deliver those METALs? But it doesn’t stop there. How do I now take that? 

And of course NATO is not unique in this. How do I now take that to inform policy discussions about what it is that I need to do as a component, because on one level, it is defining what it is that you need to do and helping you do it better. On another, it is also providing the provenance when you go in to say, ‘Hey, here are my three priorities as the Space Component Commander.’ And by the way, I can track these all the way back to a set of METALs. 

That when I aggregate into some functional areas, they tell me what I need to do. So it may sound very kind of angel on pinheads, boffins discussion, but actually it is absolutely about framing how we do our task. And it has been really, really helpful for us because you can trace back why you are making bids for more workforce, why you can set out the expanded mission set and the requirements that go with it, and how you then have, as should rightly be the case in an alliance of 32 that is a defensive alliance. How you then have what are some quite challenging policy discussions? 

33:09 – 33:47 

(BH): That sounds like a bottoms up approach to operationally defining your requirements that you then get to communicate out to the 32 nations and say, ‘Hey, we collectively need to have this much of these sorts of capabilities to come together in a coherent way so that we can execute the space mission that we know we’re going to have to be able to execute in the next fight.  

Let’s pivot a little bit to the campaign plan. So, to me, this seems to be where the strategy meets execution. So if a METAL tells you what you need to do, a campaign plan. Well, I guess I’ll ask you, but I think a campaign tells you how and and kind of when you’re going to build the capability to do that. 

So if you could walk me through the thinking on what does the space campaign look like as you guys are developing that now? 

33:48 – 37:44 

(JS): You’re absolutely right. Strategies are great, but at some point you’ve got to implement them. So the campaign plan seeks to bring together not only a number of lines of work which are underway, but also some stuff we know we’re going to have to do. And I’ll come back to the three priorities in a moment. The other point I’d make is we are kind of on the cusp of phase three and phase four, just getting into phase four of the five phase space domain implementation plan. 

But that was derived in the late teens. And the context – back to just how rapidly some things are changing in the space domain. The real world has left some of that behind. So one of the things that the campaign plan also does is go, ‘Okay, how do we bridge from what was an effective implementation plan but has now been overtaken by events into something that is anticipating to the best extent we can future requirements whilst rooted – back to METALs – rooted in the mission requirements of now.  

Who are the stakeholders in that? How do we bring everything together? And how do we make sure that that is properly scored against all of what military folk would call the lines of development, things like infrastructure, training, organization, doctrine, what NATO would call DOTMILPF-I or the British because they’re just being difficult would call tepid oil. 

But the campaign plan really sets a chart out for us. It does it against three key areas. There’s other stuff, of course, but those three are: to establish what we’re terming unified space C2. The second is enhancing our capabilities on space domain awareness, but also space-based ISR. Which we’ve recently picked up the responsibility for, for NATO. And then the third area is how we embrace and develop the ability to deliver combat space effects.  

And that is probably the most obvious one, which is a very live policy area of discussion in NATO at the moment. But as I said, back to my Conute example, the reality is not only do individual nations in NATO have some long-established combat space effect capability, you can now contract for it commercially, from some providers. 

So, not only are you in denial, you’re just completely counterfactual. If you think somehow NATO can stay out of that bit, because the first two are softer and we’re kind of more happy with them. I’m sorry. The world and indeed, the space domain is just not like that.  

One of the things, and to be honest, it’s probably overdue. But one of the things we’ve done this year is formalize a meeting of the key folk in the space component here at Ramstein, at HQ NATO and Allied Command Transformation, a couple of others and bring them together, around twice a year. 

We’ve actually had three meetings this year, and we’ve had three because we’ve really wanted to put the burners on for the space campaign plan. And that will be, I think, one of the sort of really good, high level entities that ensures that we are staying true to not only the priorities we’ve identified, but the means of implementing them. 

Because, as I said, some of this stuff is always challenging, as it should be in NATO, because you’re going to have to get agreement at the 32, i.e. you’re going to have to get all 32 nations to agree to some of it.  

However, you also want to be able to inform national space capability activity and also commercial. So there’s a load of goodness out of this and having that better kind of small ‘g’ governance over it I think was probably overdue.  

37:45 – 38:28 

(BH): There was a summit in The Hague got together and amongst other things, committed to spending 5% of their GDP on defense. 

3.5% of that in the kind of the way that it has historically been talked about it at the 2% level if we track back to the Whales summit in 2014. It seems like that creates an opportunity as nations are going to invest significantly as the space domain is unfolding and you keep referencing the commercial. 

I think that’s absolutely a key player in a lot of this conversation. And so as we think about that, is NATO in a position to clearly articulate to the nations and their industries out there that are listening to this, as they think about what are the capabilities that they need to fill? What are the priorities that they should be getting after? And how they kind of connect all those dots together that you just mentioned?

38:29 – 40:45 

(JS): Yeah, I think the scorecards are a bit uneven. I think there’s been some really good progress in some areas. I think the alliance’s persistent surveillance in space as a concept is a good thing. And I think, again, we are going to really learn through doing, certainly in the next 12 months or so. I think, elsewhere, if I’m being honest, we have probably been a bit slow, or indeed there are bits which have been missing. 

So most obviously the NDP piece of the NATO Defense Planning process has not paid the attention to space that it should have done. And we’re actually going to address that in the imminent refresh cycle that repeats on this 4 or 5 year look in step one. The other thing is to come up with the space [sic] so that nations can actually commit against. 

So all those things which, if we were discussing it in another domain, would be the bread and butter, but again, probably a little bit of a hangover from only really agreeing that it was an operational domain in 2019. It’s just, which I know sounds poorly, doesn’t it? Six years later and we’re still playing catch up. But the point is, I think there is now a real sense of need as well as urgency. 

And for the commercial sector, I think there’s probably a few things that stand out. The first few nations have a shedload of spending power and they’re either going to do that individually and, or they’re going to do it through NATO. That creates a fantastic environment to both develop, sell and compete in. 

And I think space may well be one of the most vibrant, commercial-public alliance ecosystems that we’ll find. And I think you only have to look at, for example, back to space domain awareness. Look how many commercial companies are playing in this area. And, there are so many providing some really good, niche stuff that when you fuse it all together, it provides a really helpful suite of capability. 

So there’s kind of a great opportunity, alongside that requirement. And I’ve always thought that space is arguably the dual-use domain. So why don’t we just really exploit that for the benefit of everybody?  

40:46 – 41:13 

(BH): No, I think that’s right. And I think in the US context, we see in the Joint Commercial Office under Barb Golf, the building a commercial space domain awareness, which could be the core of a NATO space domain awareness picture that nations then layer on some sovereign national capabilities that kind of get to the exquisite, niche capabilities that you need above and beyond that core space picture that you’d want. 

Rather than having 32 nations develop their own space picture, we just got the core of a commercial picture that we augment with national sovereign systems. 

41:14 – 41:47 

(JS): I think what Barb and the team have done with the JCO is phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. And if you want to advert for back again to imagination and will and innovation applied to a core area, the JCO is a fantastic example. And again, with how it’s mechanized or operationalized the space ops center here at Ramstein contributes to one of the three sequential eight hour watches in any 24 hour period. So JCO is really impressive.  

41:48 – 42:35 

(BH): Going back to the list that you expounded on during the talk about the campaign plan. I think you said something to the effect of, ‘We need to embrace and develop combat space.’ And so a couple thoughts here I’d like to get your kind of reaction on. So I was at a conference earlier this year in Toulouse, France at the NATO Space Center of Excellence. 

And one of the allied space leaders said something to the effect of ‘you may not be interested in offensive space, but offensive space is interested in you.’ So I wonder if you could kind of unpack that and here I’d also like to kind of pull in China. We haven’t talked about China. We’ve talked a lot about the European threat. 

But it seems to me that space is in the area because it’s global and astrographic, where I’ve heard some Allied leaders say that this is the one area where we can have a coherent conversation about the challenges that that China poses to us militarily and in other ways. So if you could kind of reflect on that kind of offensive space?  

42:36 – 44:51 

(JS): I would probably, for reasons you’ll understand. I mean, I won’t get drawn too much into nations other than to note that, of course, there are a bunch of vocab out there who I think we could accurately start now saying as being at least competitive. And therefore, you know, we need to be very much aware of what they are doing and what they are investing in. 

One of the things I always say when they visit the space ops center is compare and contrast for the want of a better phrase, the orbital track graphic of Russian systems with the orbital tracks of Chinese ones. So in terms of the national strategic investment in the space domain by China being no doubt, as to what it looks like and it is multifaceted. 

 I think there is also something that is absolutely true in what you said. Any sense that you can delineate space as a domain is, I think, for the birds because, it’s all around us. And in terms of what it can actually provide, how it underpins normal life let alone military capability and operations. 

And I think the quote from Toulouse and I was there as well. It is a truism. It comes back to my main point. It doesn’t matter whether you kind of feel uneasy about this or it feels a bit aggressive and not like, you know, and can’t we keep space as some sort of sanctity area?  

 The decision has already been made for us. And therefore to be in denial to that would be analogous for example, in the air domain to go, ‘Hey, they put a lot of offensive capability but I’d really rather not go there myself, in which case you just going to be walked over.’  

By the way, and really important for NATO is back to something I was chatting about, you know, earlier that you don’t build forces to deter you build forces to win. And therefore you have got to in all five domains as recognized by NATO. You’ve got to show that you mean business. And then if anybody threatens you there, they are going to come off significantly worse and therefore building the capabilities you need to assure your deterrence is really important and space to me is no different than the other domains.

44:52 – 45:35 

(BH): Yeah, I totally agree with that. So, I’m looking at the time and realizing that we’re running close here. And so I want to kind of give you a chance to kind of wrap up with any final thoughts. I’ve got a laundry list of other questions, and if we had more time, I’d love for you to go through them all. But I know you got, you’ve got to wrap up your job, exercises going on and household goods and making the transition back to the UK. 

So I’ll ask one kind of follow up question and kind of give you a chance to [provide] any last thoughts. But, as you look out over the next 3 to 5 years, I mean, so it was declared an operational domain in 2019, and you’ve been with it since 2022, in your NATO capacity kind of helping guide and shape the space domain as you look out over the next three years, you know, where do you hope things are going? Where do we need to go? What are the priorities that we need to prioritize as we look forward over the next period of time? 

45:36 – 47:15 

(JS): You can always come up with an interesting shopping list, but I think by and large it comes down to two things. The first is we have to up the pace at which we’re developing our people. 

That’s nations so that their own space cadre is developed, but that selfishly also means that they can put more people into the NATO space enterprise, because we’re going to need them and we need to be imaginative in how we do that. And that includes, for example, working out what our overall space education and training capability is in the nations. 

Base-lining what a foundational series of courses looked like and then ensuring that every course, no matter where it is, is 100% filled because it can be multinational, because we’re educating and training to a set of standards. Loads behind that. But if you just took workforce numbers as number one. 

And then the second is we need to make sure that as we continually refine the family of plans, the space capabilities that we are putting into those plans are assured to SACEUR. So he knows that he’s going to get what we promised him on the ten. I’m actually quite confident in that space because, again, where a number of them are being commercially driven, there is a logic and motive there anyway, but some of the other stuff will remain largely, if not exclusively, a military space requirement. We need to make sure the nations are funding that adequately. 

So that as I said, you know, SACEUR knows that when he’s calling for forces, he’s going to get them. So those are kind of the two for me, Brad. 

47:16 – 47:34 

(BH): Thank you very much for that, Sir. That’s a great way to end the conversation. Again, I wish we could keep talking for a while, but I know you got bigger and better things to go do. 

So I appreciate you taking time with us today. Again, this has been Air Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, the Deputy Commander of NATO’s Air Command. And Sir, we wish you all the best as you make the transition back to the UK and whatever comes next for you. 

47:35 – 47:37 

(JS): Thanks, Brad. First beer on me.  

47:38 – 48:23 

(SK): This has been the inaugural episode of “The Elara Edge: International Insights Edition,” a special edition series of “The Elara Edge” podcast. As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova is the trusted guiding partner that builds tailored teams to illuminate unseen opportunities and deliver impact across every domain.   

With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in national security.  

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. This episode was edited and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.

The Universal Need for Space Expertise: A Global Strategic Imperative

Nations Worldwide Position for Leadership in the $1.8 Trillion Space Economy

As the space economy approaches a projected $1.8 trillion valuation by 2035, nations across every continent are accelerating efforts to develop indigenous space capabilities. Motivations differ by region, from national security imperatives in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, to economic diversification in the Middle East, to humanitarian priorities in the Global South, yet one challenge is universal: the shortage of specialized space expertise.

“Whether examining developments in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, or across Africa and South America, there is widespread recognition that nations must develop indigenous space capabilities,” notes Brad Head, Managing Director of International Partnerships at Elara Nova. “However, most countries lack the expertise to make this transition. Like any emerging technology sector, they face the challenge of building from zero to operational capability, then scaling sustainably.”

Indo-Pacific: Addressing the Pacing Challenge

The Indo-Pacific remains the primary theater of space-based strategic competition, where China’s rapid military space development poses the most pressing operational challenge to U.S. and allied systems. This pacing threat demands immediate, coordinated responses from regional partners.

Australia and New Zealand represent the most advanced partnership model in the region. Combining strategic geography, robust commercial space sectors and proven willingness to provide access and basing rights, they are well-positioned as operational contributors in contested environments.

Japan and South Korea face more immediate operational requirements. With forward-positioned U.S. Space Force headquarters in both countries, collaboration extends to space situational awareness, precision navigation and timing, and missile warning and tracking. Both nations also seek to expand sovereign space industries, creating opportunities for technology partnerships that reinforce regional resilience.

Europe: Advanced Force-Providing Partners

Europe represents the foundation of allied space cooperation, where NATO’s most capable partners are building sophisticated space forces that will operate alongside U.S. capabilities. NATO’s 2019 declaration of space as an operational domain created new requirements for coordinated capability development, and the Hague Summit’s commercial space strategy and increased defense investment pledges, signal clear intent.

European allies are uniquely positioned to act as force-providers, supported by advanced industrial bases, established procurement systems and experience deploying high-end capabilities in coalition environments. Complementarity between NATO’s defense-driven priorities and the European Union’s civil and commercial space programs creates a dual-track foundation for capability growth. Russia’s annexation of Crimea, destructive anti-satellite testing, and invasion of Ukraine have further underscored the urgency of collective defense measures.

Middle East: Diversification and Regional Security

The Middle East presents a dual dynamic: economic diversification initiatives that drive ambitious space investments and shared security concerns, particularly from Iranian missile threats, that demand operationally relevant capabilities.

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are investing heavily in space as part of broader economic transformation agendas. While often initiated as symbols of national ambition, these programs can be guided toward architectures that also strengthen regional security. Capability assessments focused on missile warning, tracking, and situational awareness can underpin cooperative space-based early warning systems and data-sharing arrangements.

Israel, already a regional leader in satellite programs, missile defense and intelligence-gathering, brings advanced capabilities that can be integrated into broader regional frameworks. Collaboration in next-generation satellites and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems, coupled with expanded data-sharing protocols, can enhance collective resilience against missile and cyber threats.

Central Asian states including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan represent another dimension of this theater. Seeking alternatives to Russian partnerships, these countries offer opportunities for democratic cooperation that counter authoritarian influence while building indigenous expertise.

Global South: Development Priorities in a Competitive Environment

For much of the Global South, space is viewed primarily through the lens of humanitarian assistance, disaster response, climate adaptation and connectivity rather than traditional security. These priorities create meaningful opportunities for democratic partnerships that provide both development benefits and strategic resilience.

African nations, in particular, emphasize environmental monitoring, agricultural optimization and disaster management. The newly established African Space Agency provides an institutional framework for cooperative capability development. Satellite communications also serve as a lifeline for education, healthcare and economic participation in regions historically marginalized from global connectivity.

From a strategic perspective, these partnerships also serve allied security interests.

“We have space domain awareness coverage gaps in the Southern Hemisphere,” Head notes. “Nations in these regions offer optimal geographic positions for monitoring emerging threats, while meeting their own development needs. Success in this competition will depend on demonstrating that democratic partnerships deliver more effective, transparent and mutually beneficial outcomes than authoritarian alternatives.”

The Spectrum of Space Cooperation

Across all regions, international space engagement follows what Head describes as a “spectrum of cooperation,” a progressive framework that accommodates varying levels of maturity:

Foundational Level: Space Situational Awareness sharing agreements with U.S. Space Command promote responsible space operations through bilateral partnerships.

Operational Level: Global Sentinel initiatives strengthen international partnerships through enhanced collaborative frameworks.

Training Level: Schriever Wargames enable joint exploration of emerging space challenges and cross-domain integration.

Strategic Level: The Combined Space Operations Initiative addresses space sustainability while developing counterspace capabilities.

Operational Integration: Operation Olympic Defender represents the highest cooperation level, integrating multinational spacepower for deterrence and defense.

This spectrum provides partners with flexible entry points while creating clear pathways for deeper engagement as capabilities, trust and strategic requirements evolve. The framework recognizes that effective space cooperation requires matching partnership levels to national capabilities and strategic priorities rather than imposing uniform approaches across diverse regional contexts.

Elara Nova’s Strategic Partnership Approach

As space becomes central to both national security and economic development, the need for specialized expertise presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Elara Nova addresses this through its Capabilities, Training, and Administration (CTA) framework, which is a methodology pioneered in the establishment of the U.S. Space Force and refined through successful international partnerships.

Capabilities Development begins with vendor-agnostic requirements analysis, ensuring optimal system architectures that balance sovereign control with commercial innovation.

Training Excellence develops indigenous expertise through a three-phase pipeline of education, mission-specific preparation and operational integration, employing train-the-trainer models for sustainability.

Administration Framework establishes governance structures, policy processes and resource management systems to ensure long-term institutional resilience.

“Elara Nova’s leadership helped establish both U.S. Space Force and Space Command while supporting commercial space sector growth,” Head explains. “Our CTA framework enables nations to navigate complex space challenges through expert partnership, building the capabilities, expertise and institutional foundations necessary for sustained space leadership rather than external dependence.”

In an era defined by great power competition and global economic transformation, success will depend on partnerships that combine technical expertise with institutional knowledge. Elara Nova stands ready to help nations translate ambition into capability, ensuring sovereign resilience while contributing to collective security and stability.

Elara Nova is a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space and aeronautics domain. Learn more at https://elaranova.com/. 

Classification Policy Changes to Strengthen Allied Space Partnerships

Combined Space Operations Initiative (CSpO) Spotlights Relevance of Classification in Joint Fight Operations

When Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks signed a memo to initiate changes in the Department of Defense’s (DOD) classification policy for space programs, the move marked a tangible moment in the push to adapt traditional classification policies for a modern space era. Historically, high classification thresholds for space-based capabilities were designed to protect Cold War-era secrets. But as the DOD has sought to extend Allied partnerships into the space domain through programs like the Combined Space Operations Initative (CSpO), classified designations such as Special Access Programs (SAP) and No Foreign Dissemination (NOFORN) can – at times – compromise their effectiveness.  

“Over-classification in space goes back to the roots of why we were doing military space in the first place: the Cold War,” said Lt Gen (Ret.) John Shaw, former Deputy Commander of United States Space Command and partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy. “Our space capabilities were closely guarded because they were strategic, cutting-edge technologies that were closely aligned with our nuclear capabilities. But now, we need to integrate those space capabilities into other warfighting domains, functions and forces.” 

The push for a modernized approach to space program classification comes as the domain has evolved through what General Shaw describes as the three ‘Space Ages.’ The First Space Age aligns directly with the Cold War era, when the space sector was largely driven by U.S. national security concerns and required restrictive classification policies.  

Then after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Second Space Age emerged as a benign space environment that enabled space-based capabilities like G.P.S. navigation and satellite communications to mature through civilian and commercial programs. But as General Shaw wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion editorial, space is no longer benign. 

“Around 2015, we transitioned into the Third Space Age as space became a warfighting domain,” Gen Shaw said. “The great miracle of the Second and Third Space Ages is that we are now so reliant on space that we need to integrate it with our joint warfighting and Allied forces. We now have an adversary going after our space-based capabilities, and that magnifies the urgency for Allied integration more than ever.” 

Adapting Classification Policy to the Modern Era

In order to effectively coordinate military operations across Allied forces, however, the DOD needs to be able to communicate with its international partners.  

“The United States can’t go it alone in the space domain,” said Lt Gen (Ret.) Nina Armagno, former Director of Staff for the United States Space Force and partner at Elara Nova. “We have to be able to share our capabilities with Allies to fight in an integrated manner, so we can keep up with Chinese and Russian space-based weapon systems. But that means our Allies need to understand these space systems as well, and that is the most compelling reason for updating classification policies.” 

According to General Armagno, classification designations are often assigned early in the acquisition process. But once a capability is designated with an SAP, NOFORN or other top-secret classification, that label often persists even as the technology matures into a fully-fledged weapons system or program of record. 

So while the memo re-writing the classification policy remains classified itself, the changes are expected to enable the DOD to intentionally and strategically reveal certain secrets that can be leveraged as an advantage – similar to weapon systems and military programs in other domains.  

“Some technologies should be highly-classified, but there are times when we want to deter our adversaries by letting them know we’ve developed a system,” Gen Armagno said. “The B-21 is an example where the technologies that make it special are highly-classified, but the fact a B-21 exists is unclassified. So sometimes we want to reveal certain capabilities, but the space community has struggled to strike this balance for a while.”  

While General Armagno has not seen the final structure of the classification framework, she was directly involved in developing the new policy in its early stages.  

“The framework was designed to break down systems, capabilities and technologies into categories of classification, including SAPs that we can intentionally share with Allies at a classified level,” Gen Armagno said. “Intentionally declassifying systems in order for our Allies to participate is important, but what’s equally important is bringing Allies directly into the fold and clearing them for higher classifications. This way, we can both protect the information and technologies that we think are worthy of protecting, but still share capabilities with our most trusted Allies.” 

Extending Allied Partnerships into Space

The modernized policy is expected to strengthen initiatives the United States has already undertaken to extend Allied partnerships into the space domain. In 2014, the DOD introduced the “Combined Space Operations Initiative,” an international forum designed to normalize the responsible use of space and ensure space sustainability as technologies advance in the military’s latest warfighting domain.  

Known as “CSpO,” the initiative has had early success as it has since released its Combined Space Operations Vision 2031 document and added more nations to its growing list of participants. The move to re-structure the classification policy, therefore, is seen as one that will capitalize on the momentum initiatives like CSpO have been building.  

“CSpO was a mechanism to bring Allied leaders together for a discussion about policy,” Gen Shaw said. “You can think of CSpO as a lobby to a large hotel. It marks the beginning of discussions with Allies. It is getting Allies in the door, having the discussion and proceeding to normalized operational orders, relationships, command and control and even integrated architectures.” 

Space-based architectures, much like the Space Development Agency’s (SDA) Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, are widely viewed as an increasingly critical component to modern-day military operations across all warfighting domains. At the international level, NATO recently announced a Space Branch in support of their own space-based efforts, like a remote-sensing constellation for intelligence, surveillance and reconniassaince (ISR).  

“The national security space architecture is going to be augmented with Allied capabilities, but not every country has to bring a satellite to a space communications architecture,” Gen Armagno said. “In space, you don’t have to follow the traditional example of an Allied partnership where a country contributes its own sovereign capability. For example, a NATO country could buy or contribute funds to purchasing a commercial space communications service. Ultimately, Allies are going to have to decide what they want to bring to the table so that we can operate together.” 

Considering that not every nation or Allied partner may be capable of providing their own assets to a space architecture, initiatives like CSpO are designed to directly facilitate innovative and collaborative solutions for Allied partners to leverage in response to space-based threats from Russia and China.  

Classification Policy and Commercial Space Partnerships

But as the global space economy emerges and nations cultivate their own space industries, so will an opportunity to collaborate with new commercial space partners.  

“It’s inevitable that we’re going to see growth of commercial space-oriented organizations in other Allied countries, as well,” Gen Shaw said. “In the same way that there are many aircraft-producing companies in other nations, there’s going to be an emergence of commercial space companies in other nations. We just haven’t gotten there as a global space economy yet, but we will.” 

Therefore, effective communication with commercial space partners will also be contingent on a modernized classification policy. 

“This new approach opens the door for commercial capabilities providing a space-based service,” Gen Armagno said. “Commercial companies are developing cutting-edge technologies outside of bureaucratic restraints, but the Pentagon must evaluate the risk-reward analysis of our classification policy in order to integrate those capabilities appropriately. The Pentagon has to consider the balance between protecting 20 year-old secrets or embracing the risk to bring on the highest-performing technology in the world, so our Joint Force can reap the benefits.” 

For maintaining the current classification policy, may in fact be counterintuitive to facilitating Joint Force success. 

“There are a lot of commercial companies producing cutting-edge space capabilities that may be more advanced than the more traditional ones that we’ve developed,” Gen Shaw said. “So we could make a mistake by classifying capabilities that the commercial industry might already be using. There’s going to be some cognitive dissonance there that may compromise our ability to integrate as effectively as we could.” 

Classification Policy Critical to Allied Success

The need to communicate effectively with Allied and commercial partners will only grow more critical as the DOD moves forward into the Third Space Age. 

“The right time was probably ten or 20 years ago,” Gen Shaw said. “But the urgency is greater now than ever before because the Joint Forces and the Allied Forces’ reliance on space is greater today than it was yesterday, and it will be greater tomorrow than it is today. So if we’re going to account for that in multi-domain joint warfighting, we have to be able to communicate and understand what’s possible to synchronize the interdependencies of all of our capabilities.” 

Elara Nova, too, recognizes the strategic relevance of classification policy and how it relates to Allied and commercial partnerships in the space domain. As such, the consulting firm is developing its own international portfolio to support these efforts through a variety of means.  

“Elara Nova was born for navigating these challenges,” Gen Armagno said. “The founders and partners at Elara Nova are the mentors and figures who stood up the Space Force. They’re trusted because they’re in it for the right reasons. They can conduct studies and assessments, write strategies and bring capabilities to bear for partner nations, while finding success in doing so.” 

Elara Nova is a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain. Learn more at https://elaranova.com/. 

Episode 15: Classification Policy Changes to Strengthen Allied Partnerships in Space

The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security

Host: Scott King 

SME: Lt Gen (Ret) Nina Armagno, partner at Elara Nova (NA); Lt Gen (Ret) John Shaw, partner at Elara Nova (JS)

00:02 – 01:45
When Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks signed a memo rewriting the Department of Defense classification policy for space programs, the move marked a turning point years in the making. Traditionally, space programs have been reserved at high classification levels, in large part to protect Cold War-era secrets. Then in the decades since the Soviet Union’s collapse, a benign space environment enabled civil, commercial, and military space capabilities to not only mature, but populate the orbits.   

But space is no longer a benign environment. Adversaries like China and Russia recognize the role space-based capabilities serve in Joint Force operations, and have developed their own military space assets to threaten the United States and its Allies. And in the absence of an international governing body for the space domain, the U.S. launched the Combined Space Operations Initiative – or (CSpO) – a multinational effort to preserve the responsible use of space, while deterring military conflict. 

But until now, traditional classification policies have prevented the DOD from sharing much of its space-based capabilities and information – with Allies and partners.   

Welcome to “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security.” I’m your host – Scott King. And we have two guests joining us today, to break down what this memo means, and how the DOD aims to strike a delicate balance between modernizing its classification policies, without revealing too much of its space-based secrets.  

Lieutenant General John Shaw is a partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy, and recently retired as the Deputy Commander of U.S. Space Command.  

General Shaw, welcome to the show! 

01:45 – 01:46
(JS): Good to be here, Scott.  

01:46 – 01:58
Good to have you here, Sir.  

And also joining us is retired Lieutenant General Nina Armagno, who recently served as the Director of Staff for the United States Space Force.   

Thank you, Ma’am, for taking the time to join us today.  

01:58 – 02:03
(NA): Thanks, Scott. And, I am really happy to be here as well.  

02:04 – 02:15
Great. Well, we have a pretty robust discussion ahead of us here today.  

But before we begin, can each of you explain the DOD’s historical approach to classification policies for space? And how that leads us to where we are today? 

02:16 – 03:19
(JS): A good place to start on understanding why we are struggling with what some would call over-classification in space today goes back to the roots of why we were doing military space in the first place. And it was during the Cold War and during the Cold War, or what I call the first Space Age. Our space capabilities were strategic in nature, and they were very closely aligned with our nuclear capabilities. 

One example is the National Reconnaissance Office and its satellites that gave us ability to see what the Soviet Union was doing and assess its military capability and strategic capability. And they were closely guarded at the time because they were cutting edge technology. In the journey we have taken since the end of the Cold War till now – that’s really the great miracle of the Second and Third Space Age, is that we now are so reliant on space everywhere in Joint Warfighting and our human society. 

And so how do you reconcile those two kinds of dynamics, right? The beginnings in the strategic arena where we were closely guarded secrets, and now the need to integrate with our Joint Warfighting Forces at every possible level.

03:20 – 04:59
(NA): Speaking of beginnings, I spent some time in the Pentagon, and I guess that’s an understatement. But I got to see the acquisition process, basically from its very beginnings with research and development and the technologies that are produced. They are very closely held secrets. So, you know, think about coming up with just the latest tech. So that gets classified, that gets developed into a concept. The concept gets developed into an acquisition program. That program stays classified at that level. The program becomes a system and the classification never changes. So, sometimes it’s not deliberate. Sometimes it’s very deliberate. The technologies should be highly classified.   

But there are some times when we do want our adversaries to know that we have developed a system because we want to deter them. And so we want to show them or reveal, not keep everything concealed, but reveal some capabilities. I can think of the B-21 as an example. The technologies that make the B-21 special are very highly-classified. But the fact of a B-21 is unclassified and there are pictures of the B-21. And so the space community has been struggling with this for awhile.   

There’s a culture that persists around classification and that might be the toughest nut to crack as DOD goes down this path of what to maintain as highly classified and what to intentionally declassify or reveal. 

05:00 – 05:10
So given this culture that’s persisted over time – how does the DOD and the Space Force go about striking this balance in deciding what to classify or unclassify? 

05:10 – 06:02
(JS): Yeah. Hey, Scott, let me say Nina’s absolutely right. When she talks about in order to have deterrence, your adversary has to know that you have something. And so even when the National Reconnaissance Office was a very closely guarded secret during the Cold War. The Soviets could see those satellites. In fact, it drove them nuts. To this day, I think Russia still hates those low-Earth orbit spy satellites because we see a lot of mischief going on and that was good. That was good because they knew that we were watching them and that it would be hard for them to surprise us. It would be hard for them to build up without us noticing it. And it would be harder for them to cheat on any kind of arms agreement. Not impossible, but much harder because we’re watching.  

So really the question becomes about ‘How much of your capability do you reveal and then what do you conceal in terms of your operational art?’ And it becomes a good discussion from there. 

06:03 – 06:35
(NA): Right. And it has to be considered and it has to be thought all the way through because if it’s just applied in a loose manner, we could actually stand to unintentionally reveal or unintentionally give away some technologies that we do want to protect as long as possible. We can go back to that NRO example that John Shaw just had. The Soviets probably didn’t know exactly what these systems were and so they were technologies that were protected hiding in plain sight.  

06:36 – 07:41
(JS): Yeah. And you almost want a little, some uncertainty because they have to assume the worst. Hey, Scott, back to your question though about what’s that balance between classification or not. How did we do it in other domains? And Nina alluded to some of that, right? 

You want our strategic adversaries to know we have a B-21. But there’s a lot of things around that B-21 in terms of the tactics, its performance envelope, and such that you aren’t going to want to reveal in order to preserve its capability best you can and be the strongest possible deterrent that it can be.  

Any weapons platform that our Department of Defense or our Allies put into the field is going to have some level of secrecy behind it to preserve the operational art and or the possible surprise that it could have in an engagement.   

So I would just look to that as a model. That’s normalization of what we will do in space. A lot of things are going to be known that we have capabilities and we’re going to want that for deterrence purposes, for planning and campaign execution purposes, both within the Department and with our Allies. But there are always going to be some things that you’re going to keep close.

07:42 – 08:19
(NA): And John, let me just take it just a tiny bit step further, because I think what you’re also suggesting is that no matter what our strategy becomes for the space community and the space domain, it really needs to be looked at holistically.

It needs to be looked at across domains as well. Not just not just copy what other domains are doing or kind of use their same logic, but actually – we have an integrated and strategic conceal/reveal, classify/declassify type of strategy. I think we all just always have to remember space doesn’t exist on its own or for its own, but as part of the Joint Fight.

08:20 – 08:31
Now, each of you just spoke to how the DOD can leverage what it reveals for deterrence.    

But what challenges does the traditional policy bring that is causing the DOD to re-think its approach to classification? 

08:32 – 09:10
(NA): The most obvious answer is the United States can’t afford to keep up with China and Russia to a lesser degree as far as the numbers of systems they are producing that we consider to be weapons.  

And so we’re going to need friends and Allies and in order to fight in an integrated manner – they’re going to need to understand what these systems are. To me, that’s the most compelling reason to declassify. Maybe, maybe second to the deterrent reveal/conceal rationale. But we have to be able to share our capabilities with our Allies because we’re all going to be fighting together.

09:11 – 11:14
(JS): So let me tell a quick story. You know, it was in 1999, and I was working in the air operations center as we were planning the Kosovo air campaign. And I was also working inside the top secret SCIF, working on some space things that we were working on at that time. And, I personally was trying to struggle. How do I use these capabilities and integrate into the air campaign because no one else is cleared for them? And very routinely the first place that those met was at the two-star level. That was the first place where a leader could see kind of the whole picture.  

I even got a reputation working with General, it was General Short at the time. He was the three-star air component commander. He ended up calling me Captain Briefcase because I would just kind of show up with this briefcase to go talk to him and say, ‘Here’s what we’re doing.’ And he would be happy and warm to chat with me and we developed a good relationship. But he said ‘You know, John, it’s nice of you for coming to talk to me, but why aren’t we putting this into everything else that we’re working and planning on?’   

And, you know, I’m a Captain shrugging my shoulders, saying, ‘Sorry, General, I can’t. They’re not cleared, but I’m doing the best I can to try to synchronize it behind the scenes.’  

And as the Deputy Commander of U.S. Space Command, we were synchronizing operational plans with other Combatant Commands, most prominently, INDOPACOM United States Indo-Pacific Command, of course, because of the pacing adversary in China. You know, we’re bringing a lot of space capabilities into the fore, but we’re needing to synchronize those operational plans, Space Command’s plan and INDOPACOM’s plan. It’s trying to synchronize goals and ways and means and effects at just the right time in different phases to achieve the optimal result for a combined campaign. And if you can’t share all of those capabilities with the INDOPACOM staff or even the components there in INDOPACOM, you’ve got a problem.  

And so we actually made a lot of progress. We have more progress to make. So I’m not going to say it was as dire as it was in 1999, but it still remains a challenge for that overall, all-domain warfighting integration across Combatant Commands and ultimately to Allies.

11:15 – 11:29
And to that point, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks signed a memo earlier this year that essentially rewrites the classification policy for space programs.   

What changes are being made and how does this memo tie into the challenges we’ve been discussing? 

11:30 – 13:39
(NA): Scott. That’s classified. We can’t share that information on this podcast. Seriously, I have not seen the memo itself, but I began working on it ten years ago. Then-Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, General Hyten.  

I was his J5 and we began working on a framework for this very reason. The very considerations that we’ve been discussing: deterrence and what makes deterrence actually work. What do you hold dear? And what do you share or reveal for a deterrent effect? So we set up a framework essentially, and kind of ironically, that memo was classified.  

But what it did was it broke things – systems, capabilities, technologies – into categories of classification. Things you wanted to keep at the top secret level, including Special Access Programs, things that we intentionally wanted to share with Allies at a classified level still, though, and then an unclassified, so it’s actually time to reveal these technologies now, knowing full well that things classified at the secret level probably can be discovered by adversaries.   

Those satellites, much like the NRO satellites of the 80s and 90s that were confounding Russia, those capabilities will be able to be detected and tracked and that doesn’t mean their true roles and the essence of what they’re going to be doing needs to be revealed. But that’s going to be a complication that the Space Force is going to have to deal with that their systems and even potentially how they use them can be known to adversaries.  

And I guarantee you, that’s the essence of this memo today where all the details behind this memo will be highly classified, so that programs can begin the declassification process and that starts at the level that they’re already classified at. 

13:40 – 14:16
(JS): I think that’s a great background because, again, Nina has been working on this a long time. So I remember early drafts of this memo bouncing around that OSD policy was working on. I don’t think I actually ever saw the final version myself either.   

I think another feature, I’ll offer that was in it, and Nina kind of touched on it, is that trying to make a bigger distinction between technologies and general capabilities and physics and actual programs and vulnerabilities. And so we tended in space to kind of lump those all into one big basket. And this idea, you should be able to differentiate these things out was part of that approach. 

14:17 – 14:36
And so my next question here is: why now? It seems like we have this convergence of space-based threats, our own maturing space-based capabilities, and the need to expand Allied partnerships into the space domain.  

Considering all of these factors – why is now the right time to be re-considering our classification policy for space? 

14:37 – 15:17
(JS:)Well, I would say, it was the right time was probably 20 years ago and then ten years ago. I’m not sure I would agree with the way you said that today – now is the right time. I would say it’s more urgent. The urgency is greater than ever.  

And that is because, again, the Joint Force’s reliance and the Allied Force’s reliance on space is greater today than it was yesterday, and it will be greater tomorrow than it is today. And so if you’re going to properly account for that in multi-domain Joint Warfighting, you have to get to a point where we can all talk about it and understand the interdependencies and the synchronization of all of those capabilities, so that urgency is at its highest point it’s ever been. 

15:18 – 15:52
(NA): Absolutely, and the national security space architecture that is going to be augmented with Allied capabilities. They’re going to want to protect and classify some of their capabilities, as well. Some of their sovereign capabilities, so they’re going to have to decide what they want to bring to the table and reveal to the United States so that we can operate together.  

And I think it’s just like John said, more urgent every day, because the threat – Oh gosh, it’s just not going away. It’s not going away.  

15:53 – 16:34
(JS): Yeah, that’s well said. I need to point out that my story about 1999, we had a little bit of a luxury there, right? Because Serbia didn’t have space capabilities they were using against us, nor did they really have the ability to go after our space capabilities.  

And even then we struggled to kind of integrate it all together. And that’s what I would call that’s part of that Second Space Age from the Cold War until we really realized, ‘Hey we’ve got a threat and it’s a warfighting domain,’ which I say was around 2015 is when we made that change. In today’s Third Space Age, everything Nina said is true.  

Now you’ve got an adversary who is using space against you and going after your space capabilities and that just really ups the urgency of necessary integration more to the highest point ever.  

16:35 – 16:59
Thank you, Sir.  

And this leads us to the next stage of our conversation: the role of Allied partnerships in space. Over the past decade, the Combined Space Operations Initiative – or CSpO – has grown to ten members – with Italy, Japan and Norway joining just last year.  

For those in the audience who may not be familiar with CSpO, can you explain what CSpO is? And what purpose it serves? 

17:00 – 18:12
(JS): CSpO really was led by the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the early twenty-teens, and its purpose was to start bringing Allies into a discussion about policy and shared architectures. And so this was this mechanism, ‘Hey, let’s bring leaders together. How can we talk about shared policy? How can we talk about where we might have common needs or shared architectures?’  

I have to stress that CSpO. The analogy I’ve used for it is that it is the lobby of a very large hotel or building. It’s the beginning of discussions with Allies. It is getting in the door, having the discussion and then proceeding to someplace else where we normalize through either operational orders or relationships or command and control or even integrated architectures. So it’s just the beginning of that discussion.   

And it was very successful. If one were to look back over the last ten to 12 years that CSpO has existed, we’ve actually had really constructive discussions with Allies, brought them along, integrated other Allies, brought them along and has been successful.  

But again, it’s only the beginning of an alignment that then transitions to more traditional, proven Allied constructs for warfighting together.

18:13 – 19:18
(NA): I think it was around 2017. And, I was at a CSpO event. It was a tabletop exercise where the scenario was that an adversary was lasing a certain orbit. And so this nefarious behavior was affecting everybody around the table and as we walked through, ‘Okay – what do you do about this?’  

The representatives from two of the newer countries, the light bulbs came on, you could see it in their face. They’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, we are stronger together.’ And at the time, their nations didn’t have a space policy. But when we went through some typical responses – those kinds of things were appealing to these two countries and they, well now, they’re part of CSpO.  

But it was really neat to be there. The day that their representatives realized, this is an important alliance. We can participate and we can make our coalition even stronger by being part of this. So I think it’s a powerful thing. CSpO has been very successful.  

19:19 – 19:32
Thank you, Ma’am. And so how will initiatives like CSpO help the U.S. extend its traditional Allied partnerships into the space domain?  

And at the same time, how does space present an opportunity to do things differently when it comes to Joint Force operations? 

19:33 – 20:31
(NA): Everybody needs space today and so it might even be easier as we move forward with integrating space and it’s because it doesn’t even have to be a sovereign capability that a NATO country brings in, for example.

For space, you don’t have to follow all the traditional examples. We can certainly learn from them. But, for example, why couldn’t NATO buy space communications as a service? Every country doesn’t have to bring a satellite, a space communications architecture, and it’s a new way of thinking. So the traditional model of everyone bringing a sovereign capability to the fight.

I don’t think you have to do that in the space domain and that kind of opens the door for other things, like bringing in commercial capabilities where you can just purchase a service or rent a service. There’s so much that we can tap into here. It’s exciting. It’s an exciting time. It’s the growing space economy, right, John Shaw?

20:32 – 21:20
(JS): That’s right. Hey, here’s a way to think about it. I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to see growth of commercial space-oriented organizations in other Allied countries. Probably most of your audience right now could probably start thinking of aircraft-producing companies in other nations. Dassault in France, Saab in Sweden, British Aerospace. I mean, ‘How many commercial space companies in other nations can we think of right now?’ It’s not a lot. There’s a few, but you know, there’s not many. Why is that? We just haven’t gotten there yet. It’s going to happen.   

And there will be other commercial capabilities in Allied nations. We don’t really think about that. That’s a growth area. There’s going to be an emergence of the global space economy and a lot of other commercial space companies in other nations. 

21:21 – 21:30
This brings us to an interesting point: we’ve talked about how classification relates to our Allied partners, but how do these policies relate to the DOD’s commercial partners, as well? 

21:31 – 22:17
(JS): There are a lot of commercial companies producing cutting edge space capabilities that in many ways rival the more traditional ones that we’ve developed on the government side. Commercial imaging from space is getting very, very good and the ability to process it and disseminate it and exploit it is getting very good. Commercial communications are probably more advanced now in many ways with the proliferated low-Earth orbit architectures that are being developed and the universality in which that space communications is getting into our society.  

So, what I’m trying to point out is – we could make a mistake by classifying things that the commercial side might already be ahead of in the way that they’re using them and there’s going to be some cognitive dissonance between there that’s not going to allow us to integrate as effectively as we could. 

22:18 – 23:03
(NA): That’s for sure. We definitely as a nation, it’s almost like our secret sauce. Well, we have two secret sauces and one of those secret sauces is definitely our, our Allies, the way that we partner with other countries. But the other secret sauce that desperately needs to be brought to bear is the private sector. The commercial capabilities that are coming faster and they are leading edge technologies developed outside of the bureaucracy and integration with those capabilities also probably requires us to look at classifications and deciding, ‘Is it more important to protect secrets that are ten, 20 years old or, you know, is it worth the risk so that we can bring on performing tech?’ 

23:04 – 23:53
(JS): Yeah. I think Nina’s second secret sauce there – commercial. It’s really all about our strength and our ability to innovate. It’s a great strength that we have and why is it so pertinent to space right now? Again, I’ll go back to space is more important to society than it’s ever been.  

There are many opportunities to innovate and use space technologies to drive society forward, to generate capital flow for the space economy. It would be a huge mistake for the Department of Defense to not try to ride that wave. And in order to ride that wave together or work that together, you have to communicate as openly as you possibly can.  

And so that goes back to why we’re still going to have to have some form of classification with regard to operational art, how we’re going to use things but in terms of capabilities or strategic problems we’re facing we should be communicating that with the ever-growing commercial space industry.  

23:54 – 24:06
So all things considered – what about Elara Nova?  

From your perspective as a partners – how can Elara Nova and its team of consultants strengthen these partnerships on behalf of the DOD and the United States Space Force? 

24:07 – 24:33
(NA):Elara Nova was born for these kind of challenges. 

One of the things they ask people, ‘What are your challenges? What are your sticking points? Where can I help you?’ And then they put their brainpower to these problem areas and, and find success. All of this is right up Elara Nova’s alley. They can conduct studies, they can do assessments, they can write strategies and bring capabilities to bear for partner nations, all the while fixing their toughest challenges.

24:34 – 25:12
(JS): I’m proud to be associated with Elara Nova. I think that allowing for great communication of problem statements and understanding what challenges are, just like Nina said, I also think it plays a role in sort of we’re necessarily generally poking, ‘Hey, you’re doing it wrong, whether it’s Department of Defense, stifling innovation or it’s commercial, not quite hearing about what the threat is and what we’re might be facing or Allies might be facing in the future.’ And so it’s just it’s all about, I think, communication and sharing the broader problem statements of what we’re facing in the domain moving forward and then contributing to the potential solutions there.

25:13 – 25:50 
This has been an episode of The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security. As a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in space security.  

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. This episode was edited and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.