NATO Ankara Summit Creates a Call-to-Action for Defense Industrial Base
The Elara Edge
Host: Scott King
SME: General (Ret) James “Scorch Hecker, Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova (JH)
Brigadier General (Ret) Chad Radeuge, President of the Cyber, Data & Communications sector at Elara Nova (CR)
Tom Goffus, Executive Partner for Global Security (TG)
Brad Head, Executive Partner for Global Growth (BH)
00:02 – 01:46
Heads of State and Government from 32 nations will gather at this month’s NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey, looking to accelerate progress toward the goals agreed to at The Hague Summit last year.The Hauge Summit Declaration pledged to strengthen collective defense by committing member nations to spend 5% of annual GDP on defense by 2035, while deepening transatlantic defense industrial cooperation and reaffirming the alliance’s support for Ukraine.
But now, several factors are also heightening the stakes of the Ankara Summit: Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, recent conflicts in the Middle East and “NATO 3.0,” or the increased pressure on allies to take on greater defense investment and burden-sharing responsibilities. In response to these factors, there is growing momentum as NATO nations increasingly invest in their defense capabilities, which also presents a call-to-action for the defense industrial base to respond in kind.
Welcome to The Elara Edge! Today we’ll be looking ahead to the NATO Summit in Ankara and the context and conversations that member nations and the defense industrial base should be paying attention to – both at the summit and in the weeks and months to follow.
We have four guests today, each with a unique and qualified experience that reflects both the complexity of the challenge NATO faces, as well as the opportunities the alliance has to meet its growing demands.
Our first guest is retired General James “Scorch” Hecker, a Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova. Scorch recently retired after a 36-year military career with the United States Air Force, culminating in roles as Commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe, U.S. Air Forces Africa and Allied Air Command at NATO.
Sir, welcome to the show!
01:47 – 01:58
(JH): Well, it’s great to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity, Scott, to address this very important topic. I think it’s going to be a pretty memorable summit that we have, so I’m looking forward to the outcomes.
01:59 – 02:19
(SK): We’re glad to have you.
Returning to the show is retired Brigadier General Chad Raduege, President of Elara Nova’s Cyber, Data and Communications sector. General Raduege previously served as the Director of the Command, Control, Communications and Computers Cyber Directorate, as well as the Chief Information officer at Headquarters, U.S. European Command.
Sir, welcome back to the show.
02:20 – 02:22
(CR): Scott, great to be here. Thank you.
02:23 – 02:38
(SK): Our third guest today is Tom Goffus, Executive Partner for Global Security at Elara Nova. He is the former Assistant Secretary General for Operations at NATO, and previously served as the Policy Director for the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services.
Tom, thanks for joining us.
02:39 – 02:52
(TG): Thanks, Scott.
02:52 – 03:12
(SK): And also returning to the show as a familiar voice for our audience, and that’s Brad Head, Executive Partner for Global Growth at Elara Nova. A retired Colonel with the U.S. Air Force, Brad has previously served as the Chief of Defense Planning at the U.S. Mission to NATO and later served as the director of International Affairs at Space Operations Command.
Brad, welcome back to the show.
03:13 – 03:15
(BH): Thanks. It’s great to be here. Looking forward to this conversation.
03:16 – 03:39
(SK): So let’s jump right in. We’re here to discuss some of the expectations, challenges and the broader environment surrounding this year’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, which will be held on July 7th and 8th, or shortly after we release this podcast.
Now, Tom you just recently left NATO, from your post as Assistant Secretary General for Operations, so as the guest with the most recent experience at the alliance, I’d like to turn it over to you for some opening remarks.
03:40 – 09:21
(TG): Okay. Thanks, Scott. Let me just start with the framing from a NATO perspective. What I think most allies would tell you is that they see a more aggressive Russia, a more unpredictable America, and a more challenging China. And those are the dynamics driving allies to make decisions and take action.
I should say first that the overall objective of the NATO summit is not to have a major blow up, not to have a fiasco. But overall, this year’s summit, if I summed it up in one word, would be ‘Implementation.’ The three big rocks at the NATO summit in Ankara, will be one: defense spending pledge implementation, two defense industrial production and innovation expansion. And number three, NATO 3.0 execution, also known as burden-shifting by another name.
So, first: defense spending implementation. The 5% pledge is broken down into two parts, 3.5% on core defense requirements think planes, tanks, ships, and 1.5% on defense-related requirements such as critical infrastructure, defense industrial base and resilience.
The 3.5% is very precisely defined, while the 1.5% is broad by design. That 3.5% aligns with the capability targets assigned to each ally as part of the NATO Defense Planning Process. And that process works as such: you ID the threats, that drives the building of operational plans, which in turn drives capability targets that are needed to execute those plans.
The last targets were assigned and agreed in 2025. The next ones won’t be out until 2029. So I expect for 2029, several big new areas. For example, I expect space, autonomous systems, drones that is, and Arctic-specific capabilities. Those are just three areas that we expect to see new capability targets defined in.
So back to spending for the summit. You can expect positive announcements. Poland and the Baltic nations could be at 5% as early as this year. Germany is shooting for 3.5% by 2029. Sweden is looking at 3.5% by 2030, and the other hard chargers that I expect will hit the line before 2035 are the Nordics and the Netherlands.
Second, on defense production capacity and innovation: in order to actually translate money into capability, we have to have defense production capacity. And what has been clear is that increased defense spending without increased defense production capacity won’t result in more capabilities. It’ll result in more expensive capabilities.
As the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine sharply underscore, our defense industrial base is currently not structured to produce what we need at the volume and pace required. And this key dynamic is why NATO has announced that the Defense Industry Forum that is connected with the summit in Ankara will be expanded into the largest industrial event in NATO’s history. At Ankara commensurately, I think NATO is expected to officially launch its front door for industry and that’s a single portal where contractors can upload their potential innovative solutions. Those solutions are then routed to the appropriate NATO point of contact, aimed at connecting industry directly with the alliance procurement needs at speed.
And a third one – on the 18th of June, Secretary Hegseth brought this up with the allies – and it was called “NATO 3.0.” And what it means is that Europe and Canada will have capability gaps that they need and want to close alongside the money to do so.
Now, here’s where I would offer a word of caution about rhetoric versus reality. The framing coming out of Washington is that America is forcing a reluctant Europe to finally carry its own weight. That is the political rhetoric. The data tells us a bit more of an interesting story. The Secretary General at that same defense ministerial said that European allies in Canada put in over $90 billion more into defense in 2025 than in 2024. That’s roughly a 20% single year increase. So the step up is not a future ask that the allies are resisting. It’s a present fact that they are already delivering on at a pace that has no precedent in the alliance’s history.
Now, I want to be very clear that I’m not making a political argument here. I am making a market argument. Strip away the rhetoric and look at where the money, the capability gaps and the durable demand actually sit.
So if America is generally stepping back from its conventional role in Europe, then Europe and Canada own the gaps and they also own the budget to close them. So your takeaway is Europe defense spending is rising faster than at any point since the founding of the alliance. And that demand is going to be met substantially through industrial production. So I’m going to stop there and conclude. Just a quick summary.
First, avoid a fiasco. Make the event short and sweet. Second, allies are dealing with a more aggressive Russia, a more unpredictable America, and a more challenging China. And third, three big implementation rocks: defense spending, defense production and innovation and NATO 3.0. That is my framing for the Ankara Summit, and we’re hoping for a successful outcome there. Thanks, Scott.
09:22 – 10:46
(JH): Great opening there. Really appreciate you outlining the three big rocks and I think it’s important you mentioned some of the burdens-shifting. Getting an extra $90 billion over just a one year period is very important. But we need to make sure that we spend that money wisely in what I used to call an “integration by design,” and I’ll just use integrated air and missile defense as an example.
In the past, each country would buy their individual system. So we ended up having some systems, but unfortunately they didn’t talk to one another and that doesn’t work. So we got to make sure that there’s a force inside of NATO that can take this money, group it together, and buy a system for all of NATO that is interoperable amongst one another.
Another thing that you talked about was shifting the money, the 5% and those kind of things. In some areas, that’s going very well. Let’s talk F-35. By 2032, we should have around 700 of them in NATO. What people don’t realize is of those 700, only 54 are going to be U.S. So that’s a good positive shift that we’re seeing.
Now areas where we’re not seeing such a good shift is areas like tankers, AWACS, E-7 Wedgetaill, ISR platforms. So those are areas where we need to improve if we’re going to make this shift happen. So I’ll just pause there.
10:47 – 11:37
(BH): One nuance that I would add. So I happened to be at the U.S. Mission and NATO in the run up to the Whales Summit, when the first investment pledge was agreed. And that pledge said that allies that were above 2% should stay above 2%, and allies that were below 2% should aim to move towards 2% within a decade, which was not particularly aggressive and hard to hold people to politically.
And what we see in the updated investment pledge at The Hague Summit and what they expect to see at Ankara are investment plans. The nations are supposed to come with specific plans that show how they’re going to get to 5% by 2035.
The other nuance in that investment pledge, the kind of why of the investment pledge was in order to fill their capability targets. But the whole point of it was to buy the types of stuff that we collectively need to meet our collective level of ambition, so we’ll unpack that in a little bit.
11:38 – 12:18
(TG): And I think really good point on the F-35, Scorch as well.
The other thing that I emphasized before I left NATO, and this is more in Chad’s lane, and he’ll probably cover some of this later, but that’s a lot of data. A four ship of F-35s in an hour generally will produce four terabytes of data. If you can’t take that data and move it, process it and share it, then that’s a good chunk of your investment that’s on the cutting room floor.
And so that’s going to be a big challenge is how to move big amounts of data, what gets processed at the edge and what gets pushed around the alliance. But I thought that was a perfect example of the shift in burden-sharing that is ongoing in Europe right now.
12:19 – 12:41
(CR): Tom, great point on the data-sharing. And what I would offer is the challenge for the alliance really is having an architecture in place that as you set up these things like a front door for industry to come in, that you don’t just buy a whole bunch of tools, but that you have an architecture that supports interoperability. If you don’t have that, then you’re not going to be able to communicate anyway. It’s a waste of money.
12:42 – 12:55
(SK): Now, given the three priorities Tom laid out for us: there’s going to be a lot of different capabilities that NATO will be looking for moving forward.
General Hecker, Sir, what do you see as the main capability gaps that NATO will have to address?
12:56 – 15:28
(JH): Yeah. Thanks, Scott. I think one of the ones that really stands out to me, that I struggled with a lot when I was the AIRCOM commander, was air defense because ever since the Cold War ended, NATO has really kind of taken a knee when it came to investment in air defense.
We would buy some things, but not near enough. And as an example of that, what we do when we kind of are putting together our air defense plan is we will take a look at what we call the Critical Asset List, and we would determine things that needed to be protected. These would be like airfields, oil production facilities, headquarter buildings, munition storage areas.
And then there’s also another thing called the DAL, which is what you’re going to actually defend – the Defended Asset List. Well, there was a huge mismatch there. There was a lot more assets that we needed to protect than we actually could protect.
And then you add the fact that the systems that we had weren’t always interoperable and then the third thing that really made the problem worse was when the Ukraine Russian war started, you had the introduction of these one-way attack vehicles. When I first showed up there, the war was just started about three months, and there would be a couple a day.
When I left, it was up to around a thousand a day from each country going against each other. And then the most recent attack that we just saw from Ukraine, they had basically a thousand of these things in one day, and the production capability has really increased in the country. So that compounds the problem that we have when it comes to defending these assets.
And the other thing that we need to think about is how are we going to sense these things? Because a lot of these are at low altitude. So a traditional radar on the ground doesn’t work as well. You know, once you get 10 or 15 miles away, they’re hiding at 500ft just because of the curvature of the Earth.
So we need to make sure we can detect these things. And there’s capabilities that came out of Ukraine where they can do this with acoustics, which is basically putting up a microphone. And they got somewhere around 20,000 of these in their country now, and then they just take the acoustics that are coming from the noise that is emitted from the UAVs, and then they triangulate and they get a pretty good fixed position, and then they have mobile firing teams that can move out and shoot these things down. And they’re doing it in a cheap way, you know, with Triple-A and EW and things like this, that we just don’t have that capability near to what we need it to be in NATO.
15:29 – 16:24
(TG): So on that Scorch, just curious, you’ve been watching both what’s been going on in Middle East and what’s been going on in Ukraine. Like you said, the threat is much more complex than we ever thought about before. I mean, in Epic Fury, you had two Iranian F-5s and they were just on Iran state TV. The pilots that got in and bombed a base in Kuwait. And to your point about curvature of the Earth, they were flying under power lines when they were doing that.
One of the things that I took away from both Israel and Ukraine is they don’t really do point defense, they do layered defense, thinning the herd, if you will.
And Ukraine, like you said, they don’t have all of their sensors around one particular city or one. It’s 20,000 of these things all the way across the country. So for me, one of the things is if you’re going to sit in your one point defense and hope that that’s going to save everything, that’s not how air defense works in the modern battlefield. But having said all that, what do you think, Scorch? What else strikes you that we should be taking away from the Middle East and or Ukraine?
16:25 – 17:30
(JH): You know, number one is you can’t kill a threat unless you know it’s there. So we need the sensors, whether that’s acoustics, space-based, or radar on the ground or an E-7 Wedgetail up in the air, we need to be able to sense it in order to shoot it.
And then we need the shooters. The ones that we have are pretty much exquisite ones that cost a lot of money. And we can’t be trading $3 million PAC-3 missiles for a $30,000 drone.
Ukraine has figured out ways to shoot these things down at relatively cheap and now industry is definitely getting it. But we need to accelerate that to make sure that we’re prepared if something should happen, and then we need to make sure we have the command and control that connects all these things, so that the sensor detects the target, it gets to the shooter, and then the shooter shoots and we don’t want to waste missiles on it.
So we got to make sure that the right shooter with the right probability of kill shoots that. And then we need operators that are trained to do it. And we need logistics to make sure that they get resupplied. So it’s not an easy problem, but it’s something that’s right in front of us and we just can’t look away from it.
17:31 – 17:45
(SK): And taking that integrated air and missile defense example, you just spoke to a number of variables within that mission area alone.
So as NATO looks to better field its integrated air and missile defense system, how does the alliance go about prioritizing which element goes first?
17:46 – 19:10
(JH): Yeah. Overall, when I look at the lessons learned from Ukraine and Russia war, the number one thing that stands out is neither side was able to get air superiority.
So what we saw over the last three years is trench warfare, several casualties, bombings of civilian infrastructure and nothing that we want to be a part of. And if you contrast that with what Israel and the U.S. did against Iran, they were able to establish air superiority fairly quickly by doing counter anti-access aerial denial. So they were able to take those double digit surface-to-air missiles out and take other radar sensors that they had in Iran. And we could basically fly with immunity over Iran and take out high value targets, etc..
What we weren’t able to do is take out all of their one-way attack vehicles. That’s just going to be a fact that we’re not going to be able to do that in the future, because they produce these things underground, they can set these things up anywhere, and it’s going to be difficult to get all of them. So that’s why we need to make sure that we invest in defensive capabilities for the few that actually get through. And we can’t do this for a long duration using expensive, exquisite shooters. We need to get way cheaper shooters to make that happen.
19:11 – 19:45
(BH): And if I could add one nuance, Scott, to the way that you framed that question, I think a way a lot of people think about NATO. NATO is a collection of 32 nations that pool their resources to respond to a collective defense. NATO as NATO doesn’t actually own and operate most things.
So one of the things that NATO can and should do is to provide that overarching framework that would allow countries to invest their resources in a coherent way so that those capabilities [that] come together, are interoperable and additive, and not that there’s gaps and seams. And that’s something I think we’ll talk about here in a minute, particularly as it relates to the space domain and the investments that are being made there.
19:46 – 19:50
And as it relates to the space domain, what does interoperability look like for NATO?
19:51 – 23:07
(BH): Yeah, I think a couple things. One, NATO declared space an operational domain in 2019, but they’re continuing to struggle with defining what does that mean in practice?
And so we see a lot of activity, but not necessarily the most coherent. For example, there are programs like the Allied Persistent Surveillance from Space, which is looking down like overhead imagery. 3SAS is focused on looking up. There’s a launch capability, there’s a SATCOM capability, there’s a group of nations that are getting together around these various mission areas and working on something.
But there isn’t an overarching framework that is coherently driving those investments. Like I talked about. It’s not NATO as NATO investing in things. It’s individual nations investing in things.
And when you get into something like space, which is very expensive and very complicated, that is ripe for these kind of multinational programs or even at the NATO level. Not that it would be a common funded, but the individual nations would be contributing to something. So there’s not a lack of programs, but there is a lack of coherent investment thesis.
And so I think a couple of things that need to happen over the next period of time are in the NATO Defense Planning Process. In the last cycle, there was nothing for space, specifically. We need to get to a point very quickly that we are articulating those capability targets, which are the things that tell nations. Here’s what you need to go invest in.
And I look at the Space Force. General Saltzman at the Space Symposium, rolled out the Objective Force baseline, clearly articulating by mission area, by geography. And there’s a classified annex that goes into more detail where we think we need to have those coherent investments.
So that’s something even the US Space Force is still working on. So it makes sense that NATO would be struggling with that. But again, I think we need to get the right pieces in place, the right capabilities in place.
And here a dynamic that we see a place is the commercial strategy. So there’s a team over there in the defense investment world that has created a NATO Commercial Space Strategy, which is largely in line with the U.S. strategy. But there’s an acknowledgment that in the same way the U.S. talks about e’ploit what you have, buy what you can and build only what you absolutely must,’ because it will cost billions of dollars and take decades to build capabilities and we have real operational challenges today.
I think we’ve got commercial providers that are chomping at the bit to provide that. And so as this increase investment comes from the Hague Investment Pledge, and we have individual nations saying, “Hey, I’ve got X many millions of euros that I need to go spend and I’ve got to spend some of that on space, but I don’t have the first idea what is worth investing in.” NATO could help provide that framework so that we are investing those dollars in a coherent way to field real no kidding capabilities.
And I think the last bit of that is the command relationships. And so once you get those pieces and parts together, NATO and Scorch can talk to this better than literally anybody because he owned that as the AIRCOM commander. He also owned the space function.
There isn’t really a coherent way to command and control space capabilities that flows back through the U.S. under Operation Olympic Defender. We’ve got Space Force Space out at Vandenberg, which is the operational headquarters that actually deliver space effects on behalf of the U.S. And we coordinate with other nations under the Olympic Defender umbrella. But NATO as NATO does not really have much of an ability to command and control a space fight right now.
23:08 – 23:45
(JH): Yeah, Brad, information sharing when it comes to space is so important. The problem is a lot of nations, including ours, don’t share the information with the other countries, or in my case, the commander who is out there. So if I didn’t know what the capabilities were, it’s kind of hard to command and control it.
So we were starting to tackle that and we released some things from the U.S. that previously we hadn’t released to NATO countries before, and I think that started the ball going, but I think we still got a long ways to go when it comes to information sharing, particularly when we talk about space.
23:46 – 24:40
(BH): Absolutely. I remember I went to the space ops commanders conference two years ago when you were still in that position and you said, “Hey, if I don’t know it exists, I can’t ask for it. So if you just want to whisper to I think it was Johnny Stringer. If you just want to tell one guy, tell Johnny, and he’ll be the keeper of all the information. You don’t even have to disclose how you would do stuff.”
And then I understand. In the last year they actually put out a survey to try and get nations to in a more formal way to provide that input. And I think that that’s still a gap in the knowledge that’s missing.
I know certainly from a U.S. perspective, that’s something that they’re interested in. And I think from a NATO perspective, the same thing: this idea of like, ‘Hey, what do nations have? What are they in the process of buying? And what would they be willing to do? From a trade-off perspective, would they be willing to invest in this capability as opposed to that capability, if they understood that in the aggregate everything was going to get taken care of?
And I think that’s still something that we’re struggling with both from a NATO perspective and a U.S. bilateral with all the different nations’ perspectives.
24:41 – 25:14
(TG): Yeah, and I’ll just throw in on that. There’s an old policy from 2019 that misses the whole space revolution that basically says, “A couple of us big allies will take care of space for you – don’t worry about it.” But allies are moving out right now with or without capability targets.
The Bulgarians have two nanosats doing Black Sea overwatch. They have their own satellite manufacturing company there in Bulgaria. So nations are going to move out one way or another in the next three years before those capability targets are there. And we do really need NATO to structure this so that we do it in a logical and effective way.
25:15 – 25:45
(SK): And on Brad’s point of NATO facing real operational challenges faced today in the space domain. We have a telling example from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when one hour prior to the invasion, Russia deployed a cyber attack on a commercial satellite that Ukraine was depending on for their command and control.
So here is an example of a country that was leveraging a commercial space service, which was then disabled in the context of a pending invasion. So to tie it back to the coming Ankara Summit, what conversation needs to happen today to make sure that NATO, or a NATO nation, doesn’t find themselves in a similar position?
25:46 – 26:59
(BH): If I was going to kind of reinterpret that question, I would kind of frame it in the terms of: Can we rely on commercial? If I have my own sovereign national system, I can protect that, and I know it’ll be there in the time of need. A commercial provider, whether it’s they say, “Hey, we’re not comfortable with you using that in a certain way, or they’re vulnerable to things that I’m not responsible for or able to defend them from those sorts of attacks.”
It does present vulnerabilities. That is a challenge that has been acknowledged, and we’re actively working through that. But I do know that commercial providers in space are doing things that 5 to 10 years ago were the exclusive remit of a handful of nation states.
And nowadays, if you’ve got a commercial provider who’s going to do on-orbit servicing and refueling, that is the equivalent of what is considered orbital warfare. If I can get up close enough to your satellite to touch it, fix it, refuel it, I can break it and take it where it doesn’t want to go.
And so now we’ve got commercial providers doing everything up to and including that. It is unrealistic to think that we’re not going to rely on commercial, but there are challenges and risks, and we’ve got to ensure that we’ve got those systems available to us in a time of need.
So that part of that is the agreements that we put in place. And part of that is, frankly, the agreements between those commercial providers and the government to go, “Hey, to the extent that you rely on these things, then there’s an obligation to protect those assets.”
26:60 – 27:14
(SK): Thank you, Brad. And so NATO also has their political guidance window coming up in 2027.
What opportunity does that present the alliance as far as taking a meaningful step towards ensuring NATO has space capabilities available to them at that future time of need?
27:15 – 28:23
(BH): This is a critical moment in time, right? So we mentioned the fact that in the last cycle, there wasn’t a demand signal from the political level of NATO to force the system to produce these capability targets that brought coherence to the space domain.
The 2027 political guidance. If you look at the way the NATO Defense Planning Process operates, the guidance gets signed out that says, here’s what I want you to go do. Here is the level of ambition. Do these two big kind of conflicts, these 5 or 6 smaller conflicts, different geographies, different domains that results in what’s called the minimum capability requirement.
So the guidance articulates that. And then there’s operational plans. And out of that we come up with here’s how much stuff we need. If there isn’t guidance in this cycle that says you will go develop some space capability targets, and we’ll figure out how we apportion those and how we hold people accountable to those and their kind of effects-based, not specifically platform-based.
Then you’re going to miss the window of time. And if you miss this window of time, your next window is 2031, which won’t produce capability targets till like 2032-33 timeframe. So NATO has got to figure out in this next round of political guidance, a coherent approach to creating that demand signal for space, which includes the commercial stuff that we’re just talking about.
28:24 – 28:49
(SK): Now, moving this conversation forward once more, having 32 nations provide different systems and platforms to the alliance comes with an inherent integration problem that General Hecker referenced earlier.
And going back to the F-35 example, there’s expected to be over 700 coming available to NATO through its member nations that will have to collect, process, and share massive amounts of data interoperably.
So this question is for General Raduege. Sir, where does NATO begin to address this challenge?
28:50 – 30:19
(CR): Yeah, NATO begins with this by creating a framework of some sort of digital architecture to figure out how to connect those platforms. This modernization challenge where we have these digital assets and capabilities coming in and not having the reliant infrastructure associated with moving those capabilities, that information sharing that General Hecker talked about, it’s really a systemic problem and not the exception of today.
What we’re seeing is really advanced platforms that are trying to operate on legacy networks, and they’re dependent on communications infrastructure that’s not designed for the contested environment that we’re asking it to fight in. And the big question is why? Well, I would say the digital backbone is harder to fund than the platforms themselves, and that’s simply because it’s a kinetic, non-kinetic discussion.
What sells – that’s aircraft. What doesn’t sell is investing in your infrastructure. What we’re seeing is that innovation and modernization is indeed happening, and industry is, frankly, leading the way with many cross-cutting and great capabilities. But there’s no funding to put those capabilities in place.
We can’t afford to just buy those capabilities and hope that interoperability works. So our biggest operational consequence, and really the threat to the alliance, is that every investment is dependent on the digital foundation that has not been proven under attack. If you summarize it in a meaningful way, the comms infrastructure is the limiting factor in this case.
30:20 – 30:50
(SK): And so, how does that also factor into the expectation that any system or platform leveraged by NATO is not going to be operating in a benign environment? In any modern day operation, there’s going to be a contested environment where every system is going to be facing jamming, spoofing, and electronic warfare attacks.
So this question comes back to the command and control aspect, which we saw Russia directly target when it first invaded Ukraine. How does NATO ensure its command and control and the foundational networks you were referring to is resilient to this myriad range of attacks?
30:51 – 32:43
(CR): Yeah. Resiliency, the word that we often utter, but quite honestly, sometimes misunderstand. When we talk about resilient command and control, we’re talking about having multiple pathways, whether that’s satellite, terrestrial, airborne, HF, what we would call our PACE Plan or Primary Alternate Contingency Emergency communications. It requires some sort of zero-trust architecture that always assumes that the network is compromised.
It requires that cross-domain solutions allow for appropriate classification sharing at speed, and that there are pre-delegated authorities to allow commanders to act when that connectivity is degraded. And what I would say is that there are indeed pockets of excellence, but there’s an alliance-wide architecture that really remains a very fragile environment.
The hardest part is not the technology itself, and it’s not the integration of that technology. It’s really the culture. It’s a cultural decision that must be made where we accept that the network is degraded and we design and train to that reality rather than optimizing for some sort of peacetime efficiency.
The cyber command gap is real and Brad talked about some of that command gap on the space side. But frankly, NATO’s Cyber Operations Center provides coordination and situational awareness right now. They do not have the same authority to employ integrated cyber effects across the allied networks in times of crisis.
NATO, what they really need is an exercise series that specifically designs to break the command and control under attack, not to test the architecture when it works, but to find where it fails when the crisis begins. Frankly, the days of assumed and exercised exquisite comms is over. We must practice resiliency in this place.
32:44- 33:27
(JH): Yeah, Scott, I can just throw in when I would do my exercises. There is nothing more frustrating than if I had a team at a certain base and they didn’t even have a classified network, and there’s several bases that don’t.
So then we built some teams that could go up and set up a classified network and then there’s different levels of classifications. Like when we were talking with space, some it’s just at the secret collateral level and then you need some that go beyond that and that needs to be a lot greater in the NATO countries.
And I think there’s some good progress being made there. But we need to improve that even more, and then we need backup plans on top of that.
33:28 – 34:22
(CR): Yeah. General Hecker, that’s a great point. I had the privilege of serving with you in the European theater under the command of General Cavolli. General Cavolli at the outset of some of the Ukrainian operations, had an observation when he would go into some of the coalition C2 centers and at times there would be 80% of the environment was set up for U.S. secret and above operations, and the remaining 20% was all behind some plywood walls.
And we’d say, go and do all the Coalition and Alliance comms over there. But never could the two speak. And so he would come to me and he’d say, “Chad, really what we’re looking at is the future fight is not 80% U.S. secret and above. It’s really 80% alliance coordinated activity where we can talk amongst ourselves and maybe you have that exquisite 20% that’s off in the corner, but we need to switch the model of what we currently have in place.
34:23 – 34:56
(SK): And another follow-up question for you, Sir. Earlier Brad spoke to the opportunities to leverage the commercial space industry for NATO’s space needs. But what about commercial opportunities in the cyber realm? Things like commercial cloud, commercial communications, data service exchanges, things of that nature.
So, my twofold question here is this: One – what opportunity exists for NATO and NATO member nations to leverage commercial opportunities in cyber and cyber-related technologies? And two – how does NATO, to Brad’s point earlier about commercial space, ensure that resiliency, in its cyber systems?
34:57 – 35:54
(CR): It’s a great question. And what I would offer is that you start with the bottom line up front, which is asking yourself two important questions.
First, which commercial services are so operationally critical to your entire operation that their loss would degrade the mission execution? Question two is what is your plan to fight without those capabilities? You ask yourself those two questions and you start building in opportunities and resiliency.
There is continued opportunities for commercial providers to integrate into our live operations, and whether that’s some sort of stress testing exercise, simulating attacks, working through physical disruptions, having our commercial partners that are there, providing those capabilities from a cloud environment to cyber tools and techniques, having all of those things in place, I think creates a more realistic environment for us, and it also allows for that resiliency to be learned together.
35:55 – 36:14
(SK): Thank you, Sir. Now as we look to close our conversation today, I have three remaining questions and I’d like each of you to respond to.
The first is, given our discussion around the likelihood of the threat coming at the seams, what is the biggest seam NATO should be cognizant of and be prepared to protect against? And how does the alliance go about doing that?
36:15 – 37:21
(TG): Scott, I’ll go first on seams. Where Iran in Epic Fury, where we had the leakers come through our air defenses were generally along the seams. One of the biggest ones were the air pictures between the Army and the Air Force and I talked to the Ukrainians who went down with their system to go take a look at it. And they were like,”This is crazy.”
There are 23 or 25 different air pictures, and they’re not all shared. And to Scorch’s point earlier, when you’re not sharing the air picture, either one you’re going to miss and you’re going to get leakers like what happened, or two, you’re going to fire more weapons at what you’re shooting at, then needed in an already adverse cost-ratio exchange.
So the seams go right back to what Chad was talking about which is the exchange of information in the most seamless way is necessary. And in missile defense, one of those seams as Scorch brought up is the air and space seam that’s going to get bigger as space plays more in missile defense.
We’re going to have to sort that out before we spend the more than 100 billion on Golden Dome, because otherwise we’re just building on a rickety foundation and that’s not going to go well.
37:22 – 39:31
(JH): Yeah, Tom, let me talk about another one. This is more on the offensive side, but we do not have the capability to produce in the quantities available of offensive one way attack vehicles that are launched from NATO toward our enemy country that we’re fighting, and they’re cheap. So it’s easily the capability to get some of the nations that can’t afford F-35s, for instance, to buy a bunch and build the capacity to build a bunch of these one way attack vehicles.
And those one way attack vehicles are not necessarily just going to be used like they are in Russia and Ukraine right now, but they will be part of a larger, coordinated attack for counter anti-access aerial denial. So you’re going to have space providing intel and EW and those kind of things. You’re going to have F-35s with stealth going in.
You have to have the tankers to refuel all of this. You need your AWACS and those things going in as well. And we saw that they were able to make it happen in Iran with Israel and the U.S. But we need to practice that a lot more and then integrate these one-way attack vehicles at the same time, because that just creates a lot of confusion and the success rate will go way up if you can do that.
And not only does it do that, it empties the enemy’s magazines. So now they are on the wrong side of the cost curve. They’re spending SA-10’s going after $30,000 drones as opposed to vice versa. So I think that’s a seam on the offensive side that we really need to get after and NATO has the capability to do that, particularly with some of our smaller countries. They would be perfect for doing that.
And when I would talk to them, they’re more than willing. The biggest thing is when they go ask their defense minister to do it. There’s not a requirement, or at least there wasn’t when I left, I was trying to make it a requirement on the list of what NATO needs for equipment.
There was nothing in the way of one-way attack vehicles. I don’t know, Tom, if that ever got through in that they’re on the list now. But defense ministers aren’t going to buy something that is not on the list that NATO needs.
39:32 – 40:35
(TG): It’s a great point. And Brad, chopped down this road with the new political guidance that’s coming out in 2027. They didn’t make the list as far as I can tell. And it’s going to be a hard list because what kind of drones do you want or do you need? Do you specify a number of drones?
It’s really about the effects. So where they’re going is effects-based kinds of things. And actually what they’re sitting on for 2029 is a disposition that is like if normally your country got told you need four fighter squadrons and you can come back to them and go, really, all I need are two fighter squadrons and four different squadrons of drones, and I can achieve the same effects. I’m just giving you a hypothetical.
Nobody knows how to do that yet. And basically what NATO has done is go, “We’re open. Give us the argument, prove it to us, and we’ll accept it. More than likely.”
So there’s going to be a real need for operational analysis to kind of come up with that and figure out what those capabilities are to do that. So it’s a really good point on the drones. And you’re right, it’s a big gaping hole in what NATO capabilities we have right at this minute.
0:36 – 41:25
(CR): Scott, I’d come in and talk about the digital seam. When we think about NATO communications architectures, faced with simultaneous jamming, cyber intrusions, physical attacks, and that those information sharing gaps between the Allied networks, that’s where we need to invest our time and our resources.
We should be celebrating the fact that we found gaps, and that we’re closing those gaps through technology or processes. We should not be white carding these exercise environments. We should be recognizing that finding those gaps is exactly what the future fight is all about and we have to figure out a way of fighting through that.
So it’s no longer a lost training environment because you can’t send the email. It’s no longer that the network is down and so everybody goes home. Now you have to figure out how to work through that and fight through that at the digital seam.
41:26 – 42:20
(BH): And I think so I’ll end this off with sounding like a broken record. But on the space side, I think clearly articulating what the collective set of requirements that we need so that we have coherence in the investments that 32 individual nations are making, and then having the ability to command and control those effects.
I mean, space is critical to any future battlefield in the same way cyber is. And so they’re going to have to figure out how to command and control those effects, particularly in the space domain. You think about like electromagnetic warfare capabilities, who’s doing PNT and SATCOM jamming, and what can I do about it? If I had some systems in the same way that we have like Patriots that do defense, we’re going to have those sorts of systems.
And so even if it just starts with that regional EW kind of capability, getting those capabilities chopped to NATO and then having somebody with the authority to command and control those on behalf of General Grynkewich, as SACEUR, and then having the actual tools and systems that are able to do that kind of work, I think is something that needs to be sorted out over the next period of time.
42:21 – 42:30
And as far as the Ankara Summit itself, what will you be looking for both at the summit and in the weeks and months to follow? What will be your metrics for success coming out of it?
42:31 – 45:41
(TG): I’ll lead off again on that. I’m focused primarily on the defense production and innovation follow through. And then on NATO 3.0, the only way that’s going to get fixed is by producing a lot more capabilities for European and Canadian allies.
And I’m looking for two aspects out of that. You know, the cost exchange ratio of a $3 million PAC-3 against a $30,000 drone. This came up with the Ukrainians interestingly enough.
In 2023, at the Munich Security Conference, he was the minister of Strategic Industries Commission. The Ukrainian asked to see me. And so I walk up and I say, “Hey, what’s going on?” And he goes, “Well, because here’s my issue. I have three different anti-tank weapons. I know how much each one of them cost by going on the internet. And I know from the battlefield how many it takes on average to kill a tank. So I’m doing cost-ratio analysis.”
And he said, “Tom, I’d like to talk to the people at NATO that are doing this.” And I said, “Yeah, I’d like to too.” It’s not how we thought before, but it’s what we need to get at. So I’d like to see some progress on cost-ratio analysis. We’re talking about it more, but something needs to be done there.
And then the other piece is on the acoustic sensors that Scorch mentioned, 20,000 of them. I talked to the guy that put that architecture together, and I said, “So was this some kind of requirement that the Ukrainian government gave you to fill to put acoustic sensors out here?” He goes, “No, there was no requirement when we saw that our friends and our relatives were dying and getting hurt and so we wanted to do something about it. So we made this up as we went to figure out how to do that.”
They did not wait for an RFP and a full blown set of requirements to move forward. And it’s a different ecosystem than what we’re used to and we got a lot to learn from commercial.
And one of the things that we were trying to and Chad will appreciate this. I was trying to get cloud solutions for NATO before I left and they said, “Oh boy.” Well, if you started tomorrow to get approval to pursue one of those kind of things, by the time you go through all the committees, it’s 54 months before you can spend the first euro.”
54 months. That’s the process to get all the approvals done. And I said, “You got to be kidding me? Everything will be in a rearview mirror by then.” And they said, “Nope, that’s how the process works.” So we need to fix the process. And the folks at NATO headquarters know that. And this is the process of acquisition and what I think it needs to go down is there are a couple things that the Ukrainians do.
They don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good. They have the operators talking directly to the innovators. When I went to Ukraine in March, I talked to one drone manufacturing company and she said, you know, “We set up 1-800 hundred number for the operators.” I go, “What do you mean?” She goes, “Well, you know, the guys on the front lines every night flying the drones. We gave them 1-800 fix it number so they can call in 24/7 directly to the engineers to get a patch made on the drone. When they see something not work, they just pick up the phone and call. And that next day they have a patch that tries to fix whatever they highlighted.”
That’s not how our system works, in general. So if we’re going to get somewhere operators talking to innovators, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good. Build it, try it, fix it, and rinse, lather, repeat. It’s more of the commercial operation than waiting on an RFP and doing a 30-day campaign to try and get a program a record going.
45:42 – 46:38
(JH): What I’ll be looking for is, you know, last year they had the five-fold increase in IAMD commitment. What are they going to do this year to follow through with that? Because there needs to be a named force package review with measurable readiness standards to push this thing forward or otherwise we’re going to be here on this podcast next year talking about the same thing, right? So that needs to happen.
How much we talk about the 5% GDP? That is 100% necessary. And the system that we need, needs to be integrated by design from the get-go. So everything’s talking to everything else, and we need to take advantage of all NATO countries capabilities, whether it’s exquisite capabilities like a Patriot or a simple triple-A on the back of a pickup truck that can shoot down a one way attacks, we need all of them. So we just need to get after it. So that’s what I’m going to be looking at, at the outcome of this.
46:37 – 47:06
(CR): Well, I’m going to be looking to see whether a coalition digital backbone initiative is in fact directed with the specific architecture requirements that we’ve talked about, or whether the cyber and comms resiliency efforts will remain at the 1.5% category level.
We do have a precedent for this in the alliance. We have NATO interoperability standards. On the communications protocol side. We need the same on the digital and data side as well and that’s what I’m going to be looking for.
47:07 – 47:53
(BH): Yeah. And I think I would say the specific concrete plans for getting to 5% and investing those things in a coherent way, particularly as it regards the space domain, getting those capability targets in the NATO Defense Planning Process and the political guidance agreed, and then providing that coherence, updating the NATO space policy. When you talk to people over there, they go. “It’s still fit for purpose because it doesn’t keep us from doing anything that we want to do.” That’s certainly one way to look at it, but it also doesn’t tell you where you’re going and what you need to be able to do.
So I would prefer if it was much more aggressive and forward leaning and driving things, as opposed to just looking and go, “oh, it doesn’t keep us.” That would be my pitch, is that we have a much more coherent way forward on the space domain to take advantage of the increased resources that are coming in as a result of the political moment that we find ourselves in.
47:54 – 48:11
(SK): Now, our audience is made up of leadership across government and industry, who will also be paying attention to the conversations and actions coming out of the Ankara Summit.
Can you share a little bit about Elara Nova and how the strategic advisory firm is positioned to support them as they respond to NATO’s needs?
48:12 – 49:02
(TG): I think that what we’re seeing in Europe right now, the desire to grow the defense industry production pie means partnerships are going to win, despite the political shin-kicking that’s going on, companies still want to work with American companies. American companies have a lot that they can do with European companies.
There’s a real opportunity here. And one of the things that Elara Nova can do is help companies navigate the partnership landscape. Who should you be partnering with? What countries are most forward leaning in the areas that you want to work in?
That’s something that Elara Nova can be really good at helping companies in a bit of a matchmaking regime in order to get to the point where we can produce enough to, as Scorch said, to spend that money smartly rather than just spend that money. Scorch?
49:03 – 49:32
(JH): Tom talked about the 90 billion increase. Hopefully we get another 90 billion next year, and it looks like we might be on the U.S. side to 1.5 trillion. So there’s lots of money out there.
And what Elara Nova can do is help you get partners and make sure that we spend that money wisely, like Tom said. So that’s with the operational backgrounds that we have with a lot of the folks that are on board, they can make that happen and we can do it smartly and your company can make money out of it as well.
49:33 – 50:05
(CR): What I would offer from an Elara Nova perspective is that our value proposition is working at those seams. And we talked about seams in this conversation quite a bit, but what takes place in space and aerospace and cyberspace and how those things are interoperable together, that’s where Elara Nova is built, is to have these remarkable people that we have an opportunity to work with, with the relationships that we have around the world to integrate all those in a very meaningful way and so it’s that integration between multiple domains.
50:06 – 51:16
(BH): And I think I would say a couple of things. One, as we see nations going through these transformations, helping nations navigate those institutional capacity building, we have an unrivaled team of experts who have been there and done that at the very highest levels that can come alongside our allies, partners and friends and help them to navigate those transitions to say, “Hey, we learned lessons and you don’t want to go down this road. Here’s something you need to start thinking about early.” So we have the ability to kind of help in that regard from a national perspective.
And I think with our commercial clients, whether it is European providers in this case who are trying to penetrate the U.S. market, or U.S. companies who are trying to penetrate the NATO market, the days of waiting for an RFP to then compete for a program of record and then be the company that wins that, and you’re going to have that business for the next 10 or 20 years. That moment is passing.
And so understanding where the requirements are emerging and skating to where the puck is going. We’ve got the ability to provide some very unique insights in that regard, because we have deep understanding at the highest levels of where those enterprises are moving. And so I think we can help clients on both sides of that house understand where they should be going and where they should be investing that would be something that Elara Nova is fairly uniquely positioned to help with.
51:17 – 51:54
This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage.
As a strategic advisory firm, Elara Nova builds expert teams uniquely tailored for client needs to deliver actionable results. With the trusted insight to deliver your decisive edge, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in global 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. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.
NATO Ankara Summit Creates a Call-to-Action for Defense Industrial Base
Alliance Seeks Meaningful Progress on Last Year’s Defense Spending Pledge
Heads of State and Government from 32 nations will gather at this month’s NATO Summit in Ankara, Türkiye, looking to accelerate progress toward the goals agreed at The Hague Summit last year. The declaration pledged to strengthen collective defense by committing member nations to spend 5% of annual GDP on defense by 2035, deepen transatlantic defense industrial cooperation and reaffirmed support for Ukraine. Now, several factors are also heightening the stakes of the Ankara Summit: Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, recent conflicts in the Middle East and “NATO 3.0,” or the increased pressure on and intention of allies to take on greater defense investment and burden-sharing responsibilities. In response, there is growing momentum as NATO nations increasingly invest in defense capabilities, which presents an unprecedented call-to-action for the defense industrial base to respond in kind.
“At this critical intersection, NATO nations see a more aggressive Russia, a more unpredictable America and a more challenging China, and those dynamics are driving allies to make decisions and take action,” said Tom Goffus, Executive Partner for Global Security at Elara Nova and the former Assistant Secretary General for Operations at NATO. “There will be three big focus areas at the NATO Summit in Ankara: implementing last year’s defense spending pledge, expanding defense industrial production and executing the NATO 3.0 concept.”
In Washington DC at the Atlantic Council on 25 June, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte summarized the key themes of the Ankara Summit as: “Transformation in defence investment; revolution in defence industry; and affirmation of our enduring support to Ukraine.”
Within this construct, he asserted that the major overhaul of defense spending and defense industry will deliver a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO – his NATO 3.0 definition.
The Defense Spending Challenge
The Hague Summit’s 5% defense spending pledge can be broken down into two parts: 3.5% of spending for core defense requirements like plans, tanks and ships, and 1.5% on defense-related requirements like critical infrastructure, the defense industrial base and resilience.
NATO’s framework for defense spending is known as the NATO Defense Planning Process (NDPP), a five-step process that occurs every four years in which threats are identified, operational plans are developed and capability targets are determined. The NDPP was most recently updated in 2025, which means the next set of capability targets won’t come until 2029.
But as the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have shown, capability needs are rapidly evolving as technologies advance.
“There will be several new capability targets for 2029, that I believe will include space, autonomous systems and Arctic-specific capabilities,” Goffus said. “And at the Ankara Summit, we can expect positive announcements on spending plans for several NATO nations. Poland and the Baltic nations could be at 5% as early as this year, Germany and Sweden are looking to reach 3.5% years ahead of the 2035 timeline.”
Defense spending by NATO nations is accelerating. According to the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, European allies and Canada have invested $90 billion more in defense spending in 2025 compared to 2024, a roughly 20% single year increase.
Defense Industrial Production and Integration by Design
Along side growing calls for greater investments under the NATO 3.0 concept and these substantive increases in defense spending, the defense industrial base must also expand to be able to accommodate this increased demand with greater production. One acute example is air and missile defense, a mission area where Secretary General Rutte called for a 400% increase in investment by NATO nations.
“Our defense industrial base is not currently structured to produce what NATO needs at the volume and pace required for the threat,” Goffus said. “So NATO has announced that the Defense Industry Forum connected to the Ankara Summit will be the largest industrial event in NATO’s history. But increasing transatlantic defense production capacity takes time, that’s why NATO is also expected to officially launch its ‘Front Door’ for industry at the summit which will be a single portal where contractors can upload their innovative solutions.”
This is one of many initiatives designed to answer the Secretary General’s call “To scale up production, spark innovation, and outsmart our competitors.”
There’s also an inherent challenge of coordinating investments made by NATO nations in a cohesive way, so members are not duplicating capabilities or investing in ones that don’t directly benefit the alliance.
“NATO needs to spend that money wisely in a way that’s integrated by design,” said Gen (Ret) James “Scorch” Hecker, a Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova and the former Commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe, U.S. Air Forces Africa and Allied Air Command at NATO. “To use the air and missile defense example, when each NATO nation would traditionally buy an individual air defense system, they often weren’t integrated with one another. This created a huge disparity between NATO’s ‘Critical Asset List’ of things that need to be defended, compared to its ‘Defended Asset List’ of what was actually defended.”
Complicating matters further is the growing complexity and urgency of the air and missile threat. But even still, NATO can address this complexity if the alliance coordinates their investments appropriately.
“We need to make sure that all 32 nations providing air and missile defense systems can address three different threats: ballistic missiles from space, air threats like fighters and cruise missiles and one-way attack vehicles like drones,” Hecker said. “While not every nation can afford a PAC-3 battery, several nations can buy the less exquisite anti-aircraft artillery necessary to respond to one-way attack vehicles. Yet all of these capabilities must still be integrated with a resilient space-based ISR and command and control architecture.”
Calls for a Space Investment Framework
Coherent space capability invesmtent and development is another emerging imperative for NATO, which first declared space an operational domain in 2019. This coincides with growth to a projected $1.8 trillion space economy by 2035. This presents an opportunity for NATO nations to meet their defense spending pledge by investing in space capabilities necessary for the alliance.
“NATO nations are coming to the Ankara Summit with specific plans that show how they’re going to get to 5% by 2035,” said Brad Head, Executive Partner for Global Growth at Elara Nova and the former Chief of Defense Planning at the U.S. Mission to NATO. “But NATO as a collective defense alliance doesn’t actually own and operate most of its capabilities, which are instead provided to the alliance by the individual NATO nations. So what NATO can and should do is provide that overarching framework that would allow countries to invest their resources in a coherent way, so that the capabilities provided to the alliance are interoperable and additive.”
While NATO released its own commercial space strategy in 2025, the alliance has yet to articulate capability targets for space in the NATO Defense Planning Process. But that’s also where NATO can look to recent actions from the United States Space Force to create a vision and a demand signal that the commercial space economy can respond to.
“The NATO Commercial Space Strategy is largely in line with the Space Force’s Commercial Space Strategy, whose approach is to exploit what you have, buy what you can and build only what you must,” Head said. “General Saltzman also recently unveiled the Space Force’s Objective Force 2040 baseline to clearly articulate its capability needs by mission area and geography, with a classified annex, to coherently drive the service’s investments. NATO could provide a similar framework to coordinate Allied investment dollars in a coherent way and develop real value-add space capabilities. There are real operational challenges in space today, and commercial providers are preparing to respond.”
The Digital Foundation Imperative
Underpinning all of the capability investments of NATO nations, from air and missile defense to space capabilities, is a digital architecture to synchronize and coordinate the exchange of data and information that has become foundational to any modern fight.
One primary example that puts this challenge into context is Secretary General Rutte’s projection that NATO will have over 700 F-35 fighter jets available to the alliance by 2032. A single F-35 can generate around a terabyte of data during every flight, which is equivalent to 500 hours of high definition video.
Consequently, this creates an imperative for NATO to ensure that the hundreds of F-35s provided by its member nations can operate together and exchange data in an integrated fashion.
“There’s a modernization challenge NATO has where advanced platforms are trying to operate on legacy networks,” said Brig Gen (Ret) Chad Raduege, President of the Cyber, Data and Communications sector at Elara Nova and former Chief Information Officer at Headquarters, U.S. European Command. “NATO needs to create a framework for a digital architecture that will connect all of these platforms. At the same time, NATO’s communications infrastructure is not designed to operate in a contested digital environment that defines modern warfare. So NATO’s biggest operational vulnerability, and threat to the alliance, is that every investment NATO makes is dependent on its digital foundation.”
Likewise, NATO will require a command and control architecture that will be resilient in the face of the threat. This reality is evident in light of Russia’s cyberattack on a commercial satellite system Ukraine relied upon for command and control at the onset of its 2022 invasion.
“As it stands today, NATO’s alliance-wide command and control architecture remains fragile,” Raduege said. “Resilient command and control means multiple pathways, such as satellite, terrestrial, airborne or radio frequency means as part of the Primary Alternate Contingency Emergency (PACE) communications plan. This PACE plan requires a zero-trust architecture that always assumes the network is compromised and has pre-delegated authorities for commanders to act upon when connectivity is degraded.”
As the operating environment evolves across domains, the NATO Summit in Ankara will be a surefire indication of how the alliance intends to respond. It will then be up to the defense industrial base to position themselves accordingly, and that’s where Elara Nova is similarly prepared to support.
“Right now, there’s a real opportunity because Europe has a desire to grow its defense industrial production,” Goffus said. “So despite the political shin-kicking that’s going on, there’s a lot of American companies that can work with European companies and support NATO nations in achieving their capability targets. One of the things Elara Nova can do is help companies determine which countries and companies to partner with so that NATO nations can spend their growing defense investments wisely.”
Elara Nova is the trusted global security partner delivering decisive advantage. Learn more at elaranova.com
Episode 37: Foreign Military Sales Reform to Strengthen International Cooperation
The Elara Edge Podcast
Host: Scott King
SME: Brad Head, Managing Director of International Partnerships (BH)
Heidi Grant, Executive Partner (HG)
00:02 – 01:20
When a foreign partner seeks military technology from the U.S. defense industrial base, there’s two ways for them to acquire that capability: Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) and Foreign Military Sales (FMS). In Direct Commercial Sales, the foreign country negotiates directly with the contractor. But in the Foreign Military Sales process, the United States government manages the sale and transfer of that technology with additional training and sustainment support in a way that strengthens international cooperation and the collective security of the United States and its Allies.
However, a recent surge in demand for hardware and software technologies alike is challenging the current FMS process to keep up, resulting in two recent executive orders and a series of organizational changes to reform and modernize the Foreign Military Sales program.
Welcome to the Elara Edge. We have two guests today to discuss the opportunities and challenges of the current Foreign Military Sales process and the motives driving the effort to reform the program.
First is Heidi Grant, Executive Partner with Elara Nova. Heidi is the former Director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and the former Director of the Defense Technology Security Administration.
Heidi, welcome to the show!
01:20 – 01:21
(HG): Thank you.
01:22 – 01:40
Also joining us is Brad Head, the Managing Director of International Partnerships at Elara Nova. Brad is a retired colonel with the United States Air Force and previously served as the Chief of Defense Planning at the US Mission to NATO and later served as the Director of International Affairs at Space Operations Command.
Brad, welcome to the show!
01:40 – 01:41
(BH): Great to be here.
01:42 – 01:50
Let’s begin with the traditional approach to Foreign Military Sales, or FMS. What purpose does it serve? And how is it designed to work?
01:51 – 03:03
(HG): Yeah. So I’m going to give a little more background so people know why I’m interested in doing this interview. So I was in the Pentagon on 9/11. Shortly after that, I went and worked at CENTCOM, and that’s where I first met all these international partners that were there to support the U.S. operations. And I learned then that a lot of countries around the world, while they would love to be a valued partner, they didn’t have the capability or capacity to be a strong military partner with the U.S.
Following working at a couple of combatant commands. I went on to be the Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force for International Affairs, and as you mentioned, kind of culminated my career in the government with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.
But a lot of people don’t have a clear understanding of what is Foreign Military Sales? A lot of people think it’s the US taxpayer dollars financing. That’s not what Foreign Military Sales is. Oftentimes, nations pay every penny of the cost of a sale. It’s a government to government process that’s used and it’s administered by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and you have U.S. government experts managing the sale with a foreign government.
03:04 – 03:51
(BH): Yeah. I mean, so I’ll add one job that I’ve had in my life that you didn’t highlight in the opening was I ran the Office of Defense Cooperation in Brussels at the embassy, supporting Belgium, Luxembourg, the European Union and NATO.
And I think part of the conversation we’ll have is about that system. But that’s really the front lines interacting with the foreign nation’s military. So, for example, when I was in Brussels supporting the Belgian military, they bought F-35s and MQ-9’s and we did some space cooperation with Luxembourg.
So space security cooperation is a fairly new thing. And I think that is part of the conversation we’re going to have today is understanding the overall Foreign Military Sales process and procedures and then kind of where some of the challenges are that make it fit for purpose for doing the space security cooperation mission in particular.
But yeah, so just I think that’s a good context. We’ll get started.
03:52 – 04:53
(HG): One other thing I wanted to highlight about Foreign Military Sales, because I always get this question like: ‘What’s the difference between Foreign Military Sales and Direct Commercial Sales?’ And it depends on several things. The maturity of the country, whether they can manage the sale on their own, and maybe they don’t need U.S. government involvement in the sale. Or if there’s technology security reasons where they’re required to go through Foreign Military Sales.
But one of the advantages of Foreign Military Sales is the US government looks at it as a package approach. So it’s not just a sale of the equipment, but when they do the sale in the package, they’re going to ensure that the training is in there, the sustainment is in there.
So for the lifecycle of that capability, where oftentimes if you go Direct Commercial Sale with a U.S. company, they’re not required to do the sustainment piece of it. Oftentimes they do, but it’s not a requirement where this is a requirement that the U.S. government has is this total package approach is what they call it for Foreign Military Sales.
04:54 – 05:23
(BH): That’s a good point. I mean, this isn’t just about selling specific pieces of equipment. It’s ensuring that a partner nation has the capability that they’re really trying to get after. And the totality of that, including the sustainment over an extended period of time. There’s a lot of countries we could sell things to that would be interested in buying those things, but they may not be able to use them, sustain them, or operate them.
And so this total package approach, which the government insists on as part of the Foreign Military Sales process, is really focused on that, making sure that we’re delivering capabilities to our allies, partners and friends.
05:24 – 05:34
So say that I’m a representative from an Allied or partner nation. And I want to buy a certain technology or capability from a U.S.-based defense contractor.
How do I go about doing that?
05:35 – 06:35
(HG): In each of our embassies around the world, the U.S. has trained security cooperation officers that are located there in the embassy in their country. And that is their first point of entry, is to go and talk to the person locally there about their interests, and they can then connect them into the company or into the U.S. government and help advise them which way is the best to go.
But it’s not going to stop them from talking directly to industry if they want to go and learn a little bit about the technology, direct to industry or direct to one of the services. But oftentimes a country isn’t sure: is it Army? Navy? Air Force? Who would manage the case for them? Our country’s unique that we have such a broad defense base here that there might be several companies that offer the same capability.
So that’s why I would say it’s best to go into our embassy, who has a broader view of all of the capabilities out there and which U.S. companies offer what they’re looking for.
06:35 – 09:42
(BH): Yeah, the Security Cooperation Office is the office that I ran in Belgium and other Combatant Commands called them different things. Now they’ve all solidified around the term ‘military group,’ but at the time I ran the Office of Defense Cooperation and that office was responsible for Foreign Military Sales and then the Commerce Department, would be working if it turned out that you wanted to pursue something through the Direct Commercial Sales route.
So you didn’t want the total package approach with the U.S. government involvement, and you just wanted to go buy the piece of equipment directly. Now there are certain times that that’s not a viable option for restrictions on certain types of technologies. But those two offices, again, the Commerce Department, if you’re looking for a Direct Commercial Sale or the Security Cooperation Office now called, ‘milgroups’ for the Foreign Military Sales.
And here I’ll just highlight one of the challenges that we face right now when the space security cooperation enterprise in particular, is the lack of guardians or even space-smart people in a lot of these positions on the front lines. So if you look out at various embassies around the world that are having heavy conversations with their host nation, that’s responsible for building their air and space force team but they don’t have a guardian or even somebody who has any deep experience with space on their team, which makes it challenging. I think it’s even more complicated because the U.S. doesn’t have a catalog of things that they’re actively trying to sell.
So, for example, when I was in Belgium and Belgium was in the process of replacing their F-16 fourth-gen fighters, they were looking for something more advanced and potentially a fifth-gen fighter. And it just so happened to be that the F-35 was the primary option that was for sale in the world, and they evaluated a couple of different options, but that’s the one they went with.
But because I wasn’t a fighter pilot, an F-22 pilot or even a real subject matter expert, I think one of the challenges that we’re running into right now, as nations are looking to the U.S. and trying to buy those sorts of capabilities and build those sorts of forces, is that in the absence of those trained experts on the front line and a list of things that we have for sale in the space world, we’ve got WGS, which is a satellite communication network that some countries have decided to partner with us to build for their satellite communication needs.
But other than that, we have a couple of systems that we can talk to other allies, partners and friends about. Everything else is kind of a handmade wooden shoe. You have to sit down with somebody, have an informed conversation to define very specific requirements that would then get translated through the system to DSCA and then on to the implementing agencies, whether that’s SAF/IA on the Air and Space Force side or other services.
And so you either need a list of things that you’re actively selling or you need experts on the front line. And we currently don’t have either one of those. I know Deanna Rhyalls and her team in the space division of SAF/IA are actively working on what does that list look like that we want to sell allies, partners and friends? And I know DSCA is working on the human capital side to make sure we’ve got trained experts out there, whether they’re on the front lines at the embassy or on the C field com and their S five teams or the combatant commands, even at that level in the J five teams. So that’s one of the challenges that we’re kind of working through during this period of time right now.
09:43 – 11:16
(HG): Yeah. So I don’t see it actually any different than other domains that we have. I think it starts with from a U.S. perspective, what kind of capabilities would be helpful to strengthen the coalition for our international partners to step up to make our capability capacity together stronger?
Talking about the wooden shoe that Brad just brought up, it’s very similar to fighter jets – where if you look at F-16s around the world, you probably don’t find two that are exactly alike, because countries have the right to ask for unique things based on their sovereignty.
So that’s one of those things where it’s made Foreign Military Sales very difficult or more challenging, because in the past, the U.S. used to operate things and then we’d say, ‘Okay, now let’s transfer this to an international partner.’ Where in today’s environment, we’re finding that our international partners want it at the same time, we’re getting it.
Like Brad mentioned, the F-35 as we were just training on the F-35, some of the partners in the F-35, they were also needing training. So they’re asking for things either sometimes even before we get them – non program of records. So that’s why you know you hear this all the time that ‘Oh the Foreign Military Sales process is so slow or it’s broken.’
I do not agree with that statement. The Foreign Military Sales process is not broken. There’s always room for improvement. But there’s a reason oftentimes for oversight and accountability why things go slow.
11:17 – 13:10
(BH): Yeah. I would add there’s a couple of different control regimes to protect U.S. sensitive military technologies. There’s the International Traffic and Arms Regulation, ITAR, there’s the Export Administration Regulations, EAR. And then there’s actually one called the Missile Technology Control Regime, MTCR, that are all relevant when you get to space in particular. And if you go back even just five-ten years ago, space was the exclusive remit of a handful of nation states.
And now we see, with the commercial space sector moving quickly and the price of launch coming down, that more and more nations who historically would never have thought of themselves as a space faring nation now have a realistic pathway to getting involved in some of those areas that they haven’t historically. And so we find a demand signal that’s just growing out there for nations as they think about getting involved and understanding that space is the critical component of any multi-domain operation.
And you see that in Ukraine and we see that in Iran today, that space is a critical player in that whether it’s the missile defense, missile tracking piece or if it’s the satellite communications, navigation timing, the overhead imagery, or even some of the offensive systems that maybe it use to deny those advantages to our adversaries.
Nations are seeing the need for those things, and they’re actively pursuing those, and so as they engage the U.S. system, they run into some of these control regimes that would force them to go the FMS route, as opposed to, in some cases, being able to buy those technologies from the industry partners directly. But there’s nothing, as Heidi indicated, it’s not that they can’t sell those things.
It’s just that there are mechanisms by which we ensure that we make a sound policy decision that’s fully integrated across the whole of the U.S. government, from the State Department and the Commerce Department and the Defense Department in a variety of different agencies to ensure that we’re making the right decisions on the types of technologies that we are willing to sell and export to other nations.
13:11 – 13:18
And what are some things industry needs to be thinking about to better provide a technology or capability through the FMS program?
13:19 – 14:53
(HG): Right. So, a country can buy directly from a company. It’s the company’s responsibility if it’s what we call a dual-use for both commercial and defense to go through and get the licenses needed through Commerce and make sure it’s coordinated with the State Department. So there’s a process, as long as the company has the marketing license to be able to export, the country can go directly to them. If it’s something exportable.
You know, one of the things I found when I was Director of Defense Technology Security Administration is I think a lot of people weren’t aware of their role looking at the sensitive technology making security Department of War decisions on whether that technology poses a risk.
And their motto was ‘Keeping the U.S edge.’ And so they review all of these requests from companies to be able to export to make sure that the U.S. does keep the edge. And, you know, that’s a sensitive topic to bring up when you have international partners hear that, but I’ve talked to international partners and they want the U.S. to have the military edge. So they are supportive. We need to keep the edge and that’s what DITSA does.
One of my biggest recommendations. Now this is more to companies is they need to sit down with the Defense Technology Security Administration early in the process and often because it will avoid them over-promising technology release to different countries. It’s just important to get that knowledge ahead of time before something’s promised to be able to export.
14:54 – 15:15
(BH): One thing that’s it’s an interesting thing is that you could have an entire complex system that is releasable to another nation, but there could be a single component, a guidance chip or a cryptography chip that’s embedded in there that is restricted in a certain way that would prevent that sale or restrict that sale from a certain country or partner without changing something about the way that thing is built or configured.
15:16 – 16:56
(HG): I would say there’s several things that the U.S. looks at when they decide, is this a technology that we want to export or not? And one of the first things you’re looking at: is there a legitimate need for this export? And I’ll give you an example, is titanium. And we would look like somebody wanted some unusual amount of titanium.
Well, titanium is used to make golf clubs, but it’s also used to make weapons. So you got to review that and say ‘Okay, why are they asking? Is there a military need for this? And you also look at does this transfer contribute to regional stability or does it trigger an arms race?
So you want to look at that. You want to look at human rights. I mean, so there’s a whole checklist of things that you’re going to look at. And one of the biggest things is are they going to be able to secure this technology and protect it. And so it doesn’t get in the hands of terrorists or adversaries. And overall, is that transfer in the strategic interest of the U.S.?
And this is where as a DTSA director. There was a committee that I used to sit on where it was an end-user review committee, where the DTSA director sits on it. There’s a representative from Department of State and Department of Commerce, and there might be some times where I would say, ‘Well, I’m concerned there’s some risk about the security piece,’ but then the State Department’s looking at it through the lens. Well, this partnership is really important and then commerce is view is like, ‘Well, this is really important to our economy.’
So oftentimes these three agencies get together. And if at the director level, if you can’t come to an agreement, it can go all the way up to the President and the Cabinet on whether we should transfer our technology or not.
16:57 – 17:21
Now there was a recent study that was published by the Bruegel a think tank based in Brussels that showed foreign military sales purchases from European nations jumped from an average of $11 billion a year from 2017-2021 to $68 billion in 2024 alone.
So given that surge in demand from our international partners over in Europe, how might that be creating a burden on industry to meet these growing demands?
17:22 – 19:19
(BH): A little explanation may be helpful. So when I was in Belgium and the Belgian government signed an order for 34 F-35s, in practice what happens is that order comes through The Security Cooperation Office makes its way back through DSCA and ends up in SAF/IA, which is the implementing agency in that case for an F-35 sale.
And then what practically happens is SAF/IA. In this case, it’s the JPO, the Joint Program Office, because F-35 was handled differently. But that office picks up the phone and calls Lockheed in Fort Worth and says, ‘Hey, you know how you’re already building 1300 F-35A models for us. Well, I want you to add 34 more slot them here, here, here and here.’
Put this specific configuration on them. And when they come off the end of the line, slap a Belgian tail flash on the end of them. Then the U.S. government takes ownership of it. And then we transfer it back over to the Belgian government. So we’re essentially, when other countries buy, it increases the scale of the buy that the U.S. government is getting so the fixed cost associated with developing things comes down.
But again, some of the delay in delivering these capabilities is the fact that if you wanted some of these systems and we see this playing out right now in Ukraine and some concerns in Iran, and I think the President actually had some of the leading defense industry leaders come to the White House talk about needing to ramp up production to the extent that the system itself does everything it’s supposed to do as quickly as it wants to do it.
And you put in an order for a Patriot battery or whatever the system is, and the industry says, ‘Oh, it’ll be seven years before I can deliver that.’ That’s on the industry side. And so they’ve got to have predictability in the demand signal and a guarantee that they’re going to have the authority to sell those sorts of things to those other nations.
But there’s an industry component to this that contributes to the frustration and delay. It’s not all on the U.S. government side. And so our industry partners, having the willingness and the ability to lean forward and to take some of those risks within the parameters and authorities that they’re authorized, I think is an important element to add to this.
19:20 – 20:41
(HG): Yeah. You bring up a good point, Brad. And I can tell you I was not as sensitive to the industry side of this until I worked for industry. And what happens is, in an international partner’s mindset, the first time they start talking about wanting a capability, they start the clock. ‘I told you ten years ago, I want that capability, right?’
But in industry I mean, they have shareholders. They can’t start moving out on it until they actually get an order. You have to be careful how much a company is willing to put in their own funds, not knowing what the order is going to happen or not.
And munitions is a great example of what we’re seeing now. Allies have been encouraged to put in their weapons order for decades, and now all of a sudden, everybody wants munitions. So, I just, this is something where they need to put in the order to justify companies to add another production line. But if you look at a lot of our major defense primes, the majority of their focus has been more on the U.S., which is really important.
But I think there needs to be a lot of companies who aren’t set up to do international sales. If you look at where the money is right now and where the need for the growth in military capability, it’s in our international partners as spending increases globally on military capabilities.
20:42 – 22:27
(BH): When I was at NATO doing defense planning, we were trying to get everybody to get to their 2% metric and the NATO 2% pledge, which was agreed at the Whales Summit in 2014, basically said Allies that are above 2% should stay 2%, allies below 2% should aim to move towards 2% within a decade.
And then the last little bit in there, the why was in order to fill their NATO capability targets and to alleviate any NATO capability gaps. And then we saw last summer, they’re now committing to reaching 5% of their GDP on defense spending and a subset of that will be in space.
And so again, I think this demand signal is coming. And so having the conversations early and often to understand what is in the range of the possible. When Allies come and say, ‘What can we do to add value?’ being able to clearly articulate that.
And then for NATO as NATO, to get to a point where they can clearly articulate to each other how much of what types of things that it will take to deliver the coherent set of collective capabilities that they need to fight the space fight that will be part of any multi-domain operation going forward.
And then as a subset of that conversation, you then look at, ‘Okay, well, how much of that is going to be a sovereign-national system that I might need to pursue through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales process? And how much of that could I get from a commercial provider? And so as the U.S. anticipates this demand signal coming in the very near future, positioning itself to provide that message on the front side: What’s the clear demand signal?
If you’re asking, making sure that industry is ready to deliver on that, it will help streamline the process to get to decisions earlier so that the government approval process isn’t the delay. There may still be delays in fielding capabilities, but it won’t be because the system is taking too long and is broken.
22:28 – 22:52
This brings us to the crux of our conversation today, which is two executive orders aimed at reforming Foreign Military Sales program. And I’d like to take a moment to dive into each of them specifically.
The first executive order is Reforming Foreign Defense Sales to Improve Speed and Accountability and was signed in April of 2025. So now, we’re coming up on a year since its release. Can you speak to what this executive order set out to achieve?
22:53 – 24:25
(HG): That one is largely – it’s about fixing what we would call the machinery of the process. What they’re required to do is create a priority partner list and an end item list. It’s something I know in the Air Force we had already done. But what’s great about this is these partner priority lists will go all the way up through the State Department.
I mean, we’ve got to remember that the State Department really is the lead agency as far as foreign policy. So anyway, I think the priority partner list and priority end items is a big one. Export-ability by design. Again, something we’ve talked about within the Department of War, but this will be a broader initiative that industry needs to keep in mind export-ability from the very beginning. And this is really I think this is very significant for the space field – the technology there.
The third thing is streamline congressional notifications and streamline it as normalizing the process through Congress, that’s going to be helpful and consolidated inter-agency approvals will be part of that.
And then they’re looking at electronic tracking system where it’ll get better visibility not only to the U.S. industry, but to foreign buyers and the transparency in the process will be helpful, and then the other Missile Technology Control Regime restrictions are going to be reviewed because there is some question what is included under that regime maybe should not be and moved out of it and so they’re looking at some barriers for that one.
Those are the kind of the main things that were in that executive order, which are huge – if we can remove some of those barriers.
24:26 – 24:34
I’d like to dive a little deeper into the export control element. What’s the significance behind reviewing and revising the Missile Technology Control Regime?
24:35 – 26:57
(BH): When the Missile Technology Control Regime was created, it was, you know, we’re not going to sell ballistic missiles to country X, Y, or Z.
But now, given the way it was written, there are things that fall into those categories, including those missile systems, ballistic and cruise missiles, but also things like UAVs that weren’t really on the radar when those regimes were invented. And so there’s different categories within there that again, we’ve got to work through and so what I would argue, and this is a point that I think is worth highlighting.
So as Heidi said: ‘is the system broken or is it just it’s built to be delivered of it?’ So it is slow. One of the things that the service has done, particularly SAF/IA under Deanna Rhyalls team, is what’s called the star baseline. And so the baseline is a process by which the SAF/IA and the service have sat down and figured out what types of things would we be willing to export to certain countries by mission area and very specific subsystems?
And they’ve got nations in tiers and ways that they think about those things. And what they’ve done is they’ve essentially decided ahead of time. This is not a shopping list. It’s a classified document and is restricted in its distribution. So it’s not intended for Allies to get it and go, ‘Oh okay. Let me go buy that then. Because they said I could have it.’
It literally is intended to say short circuit the process. It decides ahead of time that we are willing to, from a matter of policy, export something to a country so that when a request comes in, we can go, ‘Yep, we’ve already decided that this doesn’t need to delay that process any further.’ Now, just because something isn’t in the existing star baseline doesn’t mean that a country couldn’t ask for and potentially be given that. It would just require what’s called the top line.
So if a country comes in and asks for something and SAF/IA goes and looks and says, ‘Oh, that wasn’t something we envisioned, or we had not decided ahead of time that we were willing to sell that country that type of technology, they would do what’s called a top line review, which would take some period of time, weeks and months to make a policy decision across the whole of government from the United States perspective, to then move that thing forward.
So again, is the system broken or does it not move fast enough as some of the executive orders have hinted at? This is a concrete step that Deanna and her team at SAF/IA have taken to try and help expedite that process and keep that policy review from taking too long.
26:58 – 27:07
There’s also a second executive order that came out in early February of this year: Establishing an America First Arms Transfer Strategy.
What is this one about?
27:08 – 29:12
(HG): Yeah. So that one’s a little more at the strategic level about looking at foreign policy and the industrial strategy. This one, they’re calling for a prioritized sales catalog. And again, that was supposed to happen within 120 days between the Secretary War, State and Commerce, which I mentioned to you, were kind of the three main agencies to publish this catalog of what they would like Allies to buy.
Now, keep in mind, these are all sovereign nations, and they’re going to buy what they want to buy. But this is something where we would say, these are what we would be interested in them growing their capability, what we’d like them to buy. So think of it kind of as a menu reflecting the industrial and strategic priorities of the United States. So that’s one.
And then the second thing is kind of Promoting American Military Sales – a task force. It’s a new and it’ll be interagency again, which is awesome. And it’ll be led by the National Security Advisor to oversee the implementation and then quarterly performance metrics is another. They’re going to look at all the FMS case execution data and publish publicly for the first time. So that again Allies, industry, Congress can all use it – is the intent.
And then looking at partner prioritization – favoring allies who have invested in their own defense and hold strategic geography for U.S. operations and contribute to U.S. economic security.
So when people say, how can I be a valued international partner? Well, are you participating? Are you allowing access? These are the people that are going to be prioritized for the export of some of our best equipment. And again, these are not new concepts. There’s something that for the last couple decades that we’ve looked at, but it hasn’t been integrated and driven from the top of the U.S. leadership and that’s what I think is exciting, is bringing all the agencies together with very clear alignment and focus on international partnerships.
29:13 – 29:48
Now, beyond the executive orders, the Department of War has also announced an organizational change – or realignment.
The Defense Security Cooperation Agency is the government agency that manages the Foreign Military Sales process. The Defense Technology Security Administration is the agency that determines which technologies can be shared with Allies and partners.
But at the end of last year, the Department said it was moving both of these agencies from the policy directorate of the Pentagon, to the acquisition directorate.
Now Heidi, you’ve held leadership positions with both of these agencies. So what is your takeaway from this realignment?
29:49 – 31:18
(HG): Yeah. So the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and Defense Technology Security Administration, they both worked under agencies and reported directly to the head of OSD policy because, as mentioned, Foreign Military Sales has historically been used as a foreign policy tool.
Now, as we see a little bit of it’s still going to be a foreign policy tool. You still need Department of State involved, but you’re seeing a shift now more to look at the impact to our industry and using Foreign Military Sales. It’s an important part of our industrial base. So having it aligned under acquisition is where it has shifted.
So the head of acquisition will be now held accountable for expediting Foreign Military Sales. And looking at it, I think it’s going to be helpful because they’re going to look at it to say, ‘Does it help our industrial base, our supply chain opportunities, or looking at it through a lens of industrial and foreign partnerships?’ So it’s a combination of both, but holding the acquisition community accountable for the timelines contracting process.
Sometimes you might have to take a trade-off and it’s under the same leader where you take a trade-off that you are going to expedite equipment to the U.S., or are you going to expedite the equipment to a foreign partner? Well, you need to look at that and have those conversations with operators, with policy to make sure that’s being done and aligned to the best interests of the U.S.
31:19 – 33:37
(BH): And if I could just piggyback a little bit on the realignment. So DSCA is moving out from under the policy side of the Pentagon to the acquisition side of the Pentagon, which I think highlights: the current administration talks a great deal about burden-shifting and burden-sharing.
Now, the U.S. historically does not like to talk about having gaps and seams, and I get that. But at some level, it just is reality that we’re not going to have enough of the right types of systems everywhere we need them to be able to do everything we’re going to do.
So for example, when I was in Belgium and they were looking to replace their F-16s with something, and their war plan that they have for the defense of Europe says ‘We need X many fifth-gen fighters,’ and we knew that the U.S. had a certain number they were going to be able to bring to bear, but some are going to be held in reserve for the Pacific Theater, and others are going to be held in reserve for the CENTCOM AOR, and therefore we needed allies and partners to fill in those gaps.
And so, again, we were very sensitive about talking about those in any kind of detail. But the idea that we’re going to leverage allies and partners as we think about what do these global architectures look like and it kind of gets to that International Partnership Strategy with the service.
We talk about integrated by design or allied by design. I think the U.S. is acknowledging that it can’t do everything, everywhere that it needs to do. And so as it thinks about building these systems, there are going to be requirements for Allies, partners and friends to contribute to these constellations. A good example would be the Golden Dome, right? As we think about whatever that architecture is ultimately going to look like.
If, for example, you’re going to have sensors on the ground to look up and monitor things, they’re going to be in other people’s countries. So you’re going to have a mechanism by which you’re having the conversation, ‘Hey, can we put this in your country? But you could just as easily have a conversation to say, ‘Hey, would you be willing to buy and field this system?’
So whether it’s ground-based or space-based, as the US builds that out, they look at allies, partners and friends to figure out what they could do. And then to the extent that those countries are going to buy those systems to contribute to those architectures, those processes would run through the overall FMS system. And it fits perfectly with this realignment of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees this whole FMS enterprise, from under the policy side to the acquisition side.
33:38 – 33:50
And what are some other actions the United States is taking or should take to facilitate better engagements on the front-end of the Foreign Military Sales process, particularly as space becomes a more prevalent as a warfighting domain?
33:51 – 34:56
(HG): Yeah. I think what’s happening now is one, as Brad mentioned earlier, is educating more people on the space domain and space capabilities that are needed, but almost like normalizing space as a domain. It’s no different than any other domain. We need to exercise together. We need to be integrated together for deterrence, and then if needed for war efforts.
We need to get more guardians educated on security cooperation and through the pipeline, there’s a specific training program that you go through to be that person at the embassy where you become – it’s called a Foreign Area Officer. So we need more guardians to become Foreign Area Officers that have space expertise.
I mean, we’ve got people that are fighter pilots, we have logisticians, we have intel officers. So each of our different communities are represented. And then you kind of place them where we think we best need them in embassies, where maybe the space capabilities are going to be more prevalent. So that would be the one thing on the human capital side that I know that SAF/IA, they’re working, and looking for the resources to do that.
34:57 – 36:44
(BH): Yeah. The specific program there at one point was called the Regional Space Advisor, which was the Space Force’s version of a Foreign Area Officer. I haven’t heard much about it lately. When I was in the government, they were talking about having the first class out there and fielded.
And it’s just I think, as Heidi indicated, it’s a matter of priority. We don’t have enough people to go around for all the things we have to have them for and so trying to figure out where we would carve out the bodies to fill out this program.
I think another area that’s related to this is in the FMS world, there’s this thing called the surcharge that. So you’re buying a certain amount of stuff, but then there’s a surcharge that’s on top of that. And that surcharge actually goes to sustaining the entire security cooperation enterprise for the United States all over the place.
And so, for example, when we were in Saudi Arabia, they were looking and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t have the right space experts, uniformed military bodies who are coming over here.’ But a way to do that is to take some of that Foreign Military Sales money and use that to go get some contract support where you can go identify people who have the relevant experience and bring those people in.
One of the challenges in the space security cooperation world right now is that there are cases in the pipeline that are making their way through, but there aren’t that many space FMS cases at this point that are generating that kind of revenue that would then go to sustain the system.
And so I know General Purdy at SAF/HQ and Deanna at SAF/IA, have been trying to identify a pot of money to kind of provide the seed corn to get the momentum going or prime the pump to get that system moving and I think they’ve had some success recently.
And then Mr. Mike Miller, who’s a the current head of DSCA, and he was acknowledging the same thing where we got to get the space side of the security cooperation enterprise from a human capital perspective, up and running at a level that will then become self-sustaining over time.
36:45 – 39:41
(HG): And I use analogy again, this is kind of normalizing conversation that we went through the same thing when we were selling F-15s to several countries where trying to get uniformed F-15 pilots to go help with international training. We didn’t have the capacity. We needed pilots in our own cockpits, so we ended up having to do contracted training instead of sending our uniformed trainers internationally.
So there’s oftentimes it’s kind of looking at like we need like our guardians right now working U.S. priorities and how do we build enough of them then to work on the international business, which is really important too, to build that capability capacity of our partners. So it’s kind of this pull; this tension right now.
But like I said, I think you’re always going to have complaints about the process taking too long because there’s a lot of people in the process that are trying to get to ‘yes.’ And sometimes it takes time to understand how to put the right security measures in place in order to get to ‘yes.’ The catalog of yes list. That’s easy. The catalog of no, that’s easy.
It’s this in-between gray area where people are trying to figure out how do we get some of these capabilities to our partners but put the right security measures in place, that oftentimes takes a little bit longer.
And there’s been FMS reform initiatives for the last decade at least. But what’s unique now and exciting right now to see is executive orders come in from the President’s office, not just to the Department of Defense or the Department of State, but it’s across all agencies to reform Foreign Military Sales.
But Foreign Military Sales, it’s important to understand, is on the backbone of our acquisition process. So if you don’t reform the acquisition process, you’re not going to reform FMS. So that executive orders came out to reform both at the same time from the very top is really exciting.
And not only these executive orders, but I think the work that the Space Force is doing and SAF/IA is doing to have this catalog and looking at ways to expedite and implementation plans, working with our partners on that.
And then there’s also been organizational changes at the Department of War. They’ve moved Security Corporation and Technology Security Administration underneath the acquisition process. So that senior leaders from other countries have one point of entry.
They don’t need to go to OSD policy and acquisition.All of this is goodness, but like anything, it’s new. Space isn’t new, but opening it up to international partners is still fairly new.
You know, the hope is that those reforms and this reorganization is going to be able to streamline some of the processes. Those are the big, exciting opportunities that are happening right now that the partners should be watching closely.
39:50 – 39:53
And then in your respective capacities as leaders of Elara Nova’s International Partnerships sector, what role does Elara Nova potentially have in this actively reforming Foreign Military Sales process?
39:54 – 41:32
(BH): Yeah. I think a couple of things. I mean, one, when we think about who our customer is for Elara Nova on the International Partnerships front: support of the US government, where it’s not adequately postured to execute the mission, which could include people being on the teams that are out there on the frontlines that fill those gaps.
Two is engaging with allies, partners and friends directly to help them understand and define what those requirements are and understand how to navigate the process. We’ve got people like, I worked in an embassy run by the Security Cooperation Office. Heidi was SAF/IA, DTSA and DSCA like there’s nobody else who’s got that kind of resume. And we’ve got other people with deep experiences at a variety of levels that can help people understand and define those requirements and then map its way through the process.
And then the third: helping U.S. industry trying to understand and trade those foreign markets and understand how do I navigate the landscape: whether it’s ITAR, EAR, Mission Technology Control Regime? How do I position my capabilities so that Allies, partners and friends are aware of it and would be interested in building that?
And again, as we have conversations and talk about what’s your architecture, what’s your priority mission area, what’s your balance between sovereign-national and commercial? And to the extent that its sovereign-national and you’re buying your own systems using that exploit-buy-build model, if you’re going to go buy our systems, how do you define those and how do you effectively engage?
And so we got people who can help on all of those fronts. Whether you’re designing the architectures and helping refine the requirements on the front side, navigating the process or shaping the demand signal, if you’re an industry partner, we’ve got the ability to do all of that, in a fairly unique way, particularly as relates to the space domain.
41:33 – 42:02
(HG): It’s been great to be part of the Elara Nova team and just see the demand that’s come in from the international partner for Elara Nova expertise again across all domains, which is exciting, but specifically in the space domain. But the architecture where Elara Nova can be helpful is connecting the different domains where there are expertise, but it’s an area where there are not a lot of expertise in the international environment.
So Elara Nova is positioned and ready to help close that gap.
42:03 – 42:37
This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. 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.
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Executive Orders, Organizational Realignment to Streamline Acquisition Process
When a foreign country seeks a military technology from a defense contractor in the United States, there are two ways for them to acquire that capability: Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) and Foreign Military Sales (FMS). Under DCS, the foreign country negotiates directly with the contractor. Under FMS, the U.S. government manages the sale with training and sustainment included. Which process is used depends on the technology, the partner nation and the policy considerations involved. But a recent surge in demand is challenging the current FMS process, resulting in two recent executive orders aiming to reform and modernize the program.
“There’s been FMS reform initiatives before, but what’s unique now is the executive orders are coming directly from the President,” said Heidi Grant, Executive Partner at Elara Nova and the former Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for International Affairs (SAF/IA), and former Director of both the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) and the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA).
One key advantage of FMS over DCS is what Grant calls the “total package approach,” where the U.S. government ensures the sale includes training and sustainment across the lifecycle of the capability.
While many critics, including senior U.S. leaders, have characterized the system as “broken,” the reality is more nuanced. The Foreign Military Sales process was deliberately designed to be thorough, ensuring that each transfer aligns with U.S. strategic, security and foreign policy interests. The challenge is not that the system fails to function, but that it was not built for the scale, speed and technological complexity of current demand.
How the FMS Process Works
The FMS process begins at U.S. embassies, where trained security cooperation officials, known as military groups or “milgroups,” help partner nations determine whether FMS is required and initiate the process.
“DSCA — the Pentagon agency that administers the entire FMS enterprise — routes the request to the appropriate implementing agency,” Grant said. “For Air Force or Space Force, that agency is the Secretary of the Air Force for International Affairs (SAF/IA), who coordinates with the defense contractor to add the order to an existing production line, apply any required configurations and manage the delivery.”
Brad Head, Managing Director of International Partnerships at Elara Nova, saw this process firsthand as Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation in Brussels.
“Belgium selected F-35s to replace its F-16s with a 5th-generation capability,” Head said. “DSCA sent that request to the F-35 Joint Program Office, which coordinated with Lockheed Martin to add Belgium’s order to the existing production run with Belgium’s unique configuration. Then the U.S. government took ownership of the jets and transferred them to Belgium with the appropriate training and sustainment package.”
Belgium acquired a world-class capability with the support needed to sustain it. NATO’s collective defense posture was strengthened, and adding partner demand to the production program helped reduce costs for the United States.
Why the System is Struggling to Keep Pace
Allies and partners are seeking not only traditional weapons systems, but also emerging technologies in areas like unmanned systems, cyber and space. The Brussels-based think tank Bruegel found that European FMS cases reached a record $76 billion in 2024, roughly four times the European average since 2008. This surge is challenging the FMS program in several ways.
First, the Defense, State and Commerce departments must agree the transfer serves U.S. strategic interests. Each brings a different lens, and when they cannot reach agreement, decisions can stall or escalate to the Cabinet level.
Second, export control regimes add complexity. ITAR and EAR govern defense and dual-use technology transfers, while multilateral agreements like the MTCR impose additional restrictions. These controls protect sensitive technologies, but they can also restrict capabilities that did not exist when the regulations were written. Even a single restricted component embedded in an otherwise releasable system can prevent a sale.
Third, contractors must balance U.S. production requirements against surging international demand.
“Industry cannot invest in additional production capacity until a firm order justifies it,” Grant said. “A partner may place an order for a critical system, only to learn the delivery timeline is seven years because the production line is already committed. Munitions offer a clear example — demand has surged beyond what current production lines can support.”
These challenges compound. Delays in interagency decisions slow export licensing, which creates uncertainty for industry and limits investment in production capacity. Friction at each stage reinforces the next, extending timelines even for cases aligned with U.S. strategic priorities.
Executive Orders to Reform the Process
The first executive order, signed in April 2025, targets several of these bottlenecks directly.
The order directs Defense, State and Commerce to create a joint priority list for partners and end-items, establishing shared priorities up front and calls for a review of the MTCR to reclassify certain technologies.
“The ‘exportability by design’ mandate is significant,” Grant said. “It directs the defense industrial base to build capabilities eligible for export from the outset, rather than requiring costly modifications after the fact.”
The order also streamlines congressional notifications and creates an electronic tracking system giving foreign buyers and U.S. industry visibility into where a case stands.
Separately, the Air Force is also accelerating approvals through the “STAR Baseline,” a classified document that pre-determines which technologies the U.S. is willing to export.
“The STAR Baseline short-circuits the process,” Head said. “It decides ahead of time what we are willing to export to a country, so that the U.S. doesn’t have to start a review from scratch every time an FMS request comes in. Technologies not covered by the baseline still require a broader interagency review that can take weeks or months.”
A second executive order, signed in February 2026, aims to shape the demand signal that drives sales in the first place.
“This executive order directs the Defense, State and Commerce secretaries to develop a prioritized sales catalog, or a proactive menu of capabilities reflecting both the industrial and strategic priorities of the U.S.,” Grant said. “This catalog signals to allies what the U.S. would like them to buy, while a new Promoting American Military Sales Task Force and mandatory quarterly performance data will increase accountability.”
This reflects a broader shift: rather than responding to partner demand as it emerges, the U.S. is signaling preferred capabilities and partners in advance, shaping demand to align with its strategic and industrial priorities.
Organizational Realignment to Empower Acquisition Officials
The U.S. government’s reform efforts extend beyond executive orders. DSCA and DTSA — previously under the Pentagon’s policy directorate — will now move under the acquisition and sustainment directorate. This reflects a shift from FMS as primarily a foreign policy tool to a core function of the defense industrial enterprise.
“The head of acquisition will now be responsible for managing FMS timelines and resolving trade-offs between U.S. and international deliveries against current demands,” Grant said. “This also gives senior leaders from partner nations a single point of entry, rather than having to navigate between the policy and acquisition sides of the Pentagon.”
The move will carry strategic implications for future military programs that require allied support.
“The U.S. is acknowledging that it can’t do everything, everywhere,” Head said. “As the U.S. builds global architectures like Golden Dome, allies and partners will be required to contribute systems based in their own countries. Allied acquisition will be central going forward and placing those agencies under the same leadership that manages U.S. acquisition ensures those two tracks can be coordinated.”
The Unique Challenge of Space Security Cooperation
These challenges are most acute in space, where demand is accelerating and the supporting processes are least mature.
“Until recently, space was the exclusive domain of a handful of nations,” Head said. “But with launch costs coming down and the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East underscoring space as a critical component of multi-domain operations, allied demand is surging.”
Unlike mature FMS programs for fighter jets or air defense systems, the U.S. does not have a well-established catalog of space capabilities it is actively offering to allies. Outside of a few existing programs like Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS), most space cooperation is what Head described as “a handmade wooden shoe” — or a custom-made capability.
U.S. embassies also lack space-smart personnel to guide partner nations.
“You either need a list of things you’re selling or you need experts on the front line, and we currently don’t have either one,” Head said.
Likewise, the space domain also faces a funding challenge. A surcharge on every FMS sale funds the personnel, training programs and institutional support that underpins the security cooperation process. But there is currently not enough space cases to generate the revenue needed to sustain a space-focused workforce, leading SAF/IA and DSCA to identify seed funding to address this problem.
Grant noted this tension is not without precedent.
“When we were selling F-15s to partner nations, uniformed pilots were needed in U.S. cockpits and couldn’t be spared for international training missions,” she said. “The solution was contracted training support. It’s the same tension right now with guardians. We need them working U.S. priorities, and at the same time we need to build enough of them to support the international business.”
In this sense, space is not an exception to the FMS system, but rather an early indicator of where the entire enterprise is heading. As demand for advanced, rapidly evolving technologies grows across domains, the challenges seen in space today are likely to emerge more broadly across the security cooperation landscape.
How Elara Nova Supports the Process
As the FMS system evolves, the challenge will be translating reform into execution across government, industry and international partners. Elara Nova brings experience from within the security cooperation enterprise, including leadership roles at DSCA, SAF/IA and on the front lines of defense cooperation.
For the U.S. government, the firm helps fill capacity gaps where the security cooperation workforce is stretched thin. For allies and partners, it translates requirements into cases the system can act on. For industry, it maps the export control landscape before companies invest in markets they may not be accessible. Elara Nova provides the insight to navigate the system and the experience to deliver results.
Elara Nova is a trusted guiding partner that builds tailored teams to illuminate unseen opportunities and deliver impact across every domain. Learn more at https://elaranova.com/
LITTLETON, Colo., Nov. 5, 2024 — Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy is proud to announce the appointment of Brad Head as its new Director of International Partnerships. With a distinguished career in the United States Air and Space Forces and renowned expertise in forging strategic partnerships, Head’s extensive experience in defense, international relations and space policy will reinforce Elara Nova’s position as a global leader in the space consultancy arena.
Brad Head’s role at Elara Nova arrives as the company enhances its international strategy to address the complexities at the intersection of international relations and the space domain. In his new position, Head will leverage his background in high-stakes negotiations and multinational agreements, gained through his previous positions as Chief of Defense Planning at the United States Mission to NATO, Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the United States Embassy in Brussels, Senior Director of Mission Engagement at Immersive Wisdom and most recently as the Director of International Affairs at the United States Space Operations Command.
In these various capacities, Head accumulated nearly three decades of experience engaging in international negotiations across the broad spectrum of government, industry and multinational stakeholders. His notable achievements include securing a $5.1 billion F-35 deal and $271 million MQ-9 deal with the Belgian Air Force, pioneering a Space Memorandum of Understanding with Luxembourg and concluding an Acquisition and Cross Service Agreement with the United Kingdom.
“Brad’s wealth of expertise, extensive network across the space community and his unmatched commitment to international partnerships are invaluable to Elara Nova as we broaden our international presence,” said Major General (Ret) Roger Teague, Founding Partner at Elara Nova. “With Brad’s leadership in fostering strategic partnerships at the transnational level, we look forward to driving even greater innovation and collaboration with our global partners to secure a peaceful and prosperous space domain. We are thrilled to have him on our team.”
Elara Nova has already distinguished itself as a leader in facilitating partnerships that effectively support national security objectives for the space domain. With Head at the helm of Elara Nova’s international portfolio, the firm is poised to deepen relationships on behalf of its clients and foster collaborations that advance the accessibility and sustainability of the space domain for generations to come.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Scott King
Manager, Strategic Communications
Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy
scott.king@elaranova.com
About Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy
Elara Nova is a global professional services firm advancing business and government agencies to maximize their strategic advantage in national security space. Elara Nova creates unparalleled value for our clients and the warfighter, allies and partners they serve. The team is comprised of Senior Leaders that have decades of government and private sector experience in space strategy, operations, acquisitions, engineering, technology and policy to build comprehensive solutions that support our clients’ success.
For more information about Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy and its services, please visit www.elaranova.com or contact info@elaranova.com.
NATO Investing in Space Capabilities to Enhance Multi-Domain Operations, Establish Deterrence
Air Marshall Stringer reflects on NATO’s journey since declaring space an operational domain in 2019
Since declaring space an operational domain in 2019, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has sought to reinforce its multinational alliance with space capabilities. Toward this end, NATO has released an Overarching Space Policy, founded the NATO Space Operations Centre and published a Commercial Space Strategy. Each element lays a foundation from which NATO leaders can acquire the space capabilities they need for a future conflict. But for Air Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, the retiring Deputy Commander of NATO’s Allied Air Command, implementing these plans is more critical now than ever before.
“Strategies are great, but you’ve got to implement them,” Stringer said. “There is a real need and urgency for space capabilities, but we’re still playing catch-up even six years later. A few NATO nations have spending power to acquire space capabilities and that creates a fantastic environment for the commercial space sector to develop, sell and compete in. But for those nations that don’t have that spending power, space is a dual-use domain that offers one of the most vibrant, commercial-public alliance ecosystems we can still exploit.”
NATO’s decision to declare space an operational domain stems from an urgency to overcome what Stringer calls “the two long shadows” that loom over the military alliance today.
“The first long shadow began with the peace dividend, the conscious decision not to invest in defense after the Cold War,” Stringer said. “This led to the second long shadow: counterinsurgency operations against adversaries with little to no counter-air or space capability, electronic warfare or spectrum dominance. That is, until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. But even then, the rising threat goes back further to Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 and Georgia in 2008.”
Planning for space in a future conflict
Every four years, NATO follows a framework known as the NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP), to align Allies’ defense plans with the NATO’s capability requirements. The most recent cycle began in 2023.
“We’re just now getting into phase four of the five-phase space domain implementation plan,” Stringer said. “The campaign plan sets a chart for us in three key areas: establishing a unified space command and control, enhancing our capabilities on space domain awareness and space based-ISR and developing the ability to deliver combat space effects. But the reality is that while some individual NATO nations have long-established combat space effect capability, those that don’t can now contract for it from commercial providers.”
The challenges NATO has in acquiring space capabilities, however, is not unique solely to the space domain. It parallels a broader, historical challenge in that the military alliance itself does not own warfighting capabilities.
This is a challenge Brad Head, Managing Director of International Partnerships at Elara Nova, witnessed firsthand during his time in uniform at NATO’s STEADFAST DEFENDER exercise a few years ago.
“General Christopher Cavoli, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe at the time, asked at the start of STEADFAST DEFENDER exercise about what space capabilities NATO had,” Head said. “But the Army lieutenant colonel who was leading the exercise’s space efforts told him, ‘NATO doesn’t have any space capabilities because member nations retain their sovereign space capabilities and will only provide it to NATO if it’s needed and available.’”
Assuring access to space capabilities
While this challenge is not unique to NATO’s space capabilities – the alliance itself doesn’t own assets like fighter jets, tanks or naval destroyers, either – today’s commercial space industry presents new opportunities for NATO to access the space capabilities it requires.
“NATO’s lacking physical ownership of space capabilities doesn’t worry me, but the assured access to those capabilities definitely does,” Stringer said. “But the commercial driver in space has been there for decades: satellite communications were being driven by commercial providers since 1991, and the cost per kilo of putting payloads on orbit is cheaper now compared to where it was ten years ago. What is changing for the better, though, is a better educated middle and senior echelon that recognizes not just our reliance on space, but also the different opportunities to get the space capabilities we need.”
That’s why moving forward, Stringer identifies two space priorities for NATO to continue building toward to ensure that NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), a role currently held by General Alexus G. Grynkewich, will have the space capabilities needed to accomplish a given mission.
“Our first priority is to rapidly develop the space cadre of our member nations because that means nations can put more people into the NATO space enterprise,” Stringer said. “That includes developing our overall space education and training capability in member nations to a multinational set of standards. The second priority is ensuring we continually refine NATO’s family of plans and making sure the space capabilities identified in those plans are assured to the SACEUR.”
Responding to a rising space threat
Preparing for a future space fight is not only necessary – it’s vital. There is greater competition in space today that threatens to undermine the relative homogeneity of Western military dominance over the past few decades. This is in part because rising competitors, namely Russia and China, have been able to study the West’s military playbook throughout that same period of time.
”We have enjoyed an unnaturally long period of relative peace in Europe, but we must prepare for war if we want to maintain that peace,” Stringer said. “We’re in an era of stealth technology, precision-guided munitions and the exploitation of space-based capabilities and militarized systems, which was first realized during the First Gulf War in 1991. Our combination of the 5 T’s – technology, thinking, tactics, training, and theory of victory – was phenomenal in 1991, but looked remarkably the same in 2021. Meanwhile, we disinvested in some key areas like integrated air and missile defense, and our competitors have now sought to turn our approach to warfare against us.”
As a result, NATO is making a renewed and greater investment into acquiring warfighting capabilities.
“NATO nations committed to spending five percent of their GDP on defense at The Hague Summit,” Head said. “This means nations are going to be investing significantly and space capabilities will be a key part of that conversation. That means NATO is now in a position to clearly articulate their priorities to their member nations and industry partners.”
One of the highest priorities will be taking the necessary steps to achieve not only space superiority, but the air superiority that will inherently come with it.
“All of NATO’s components must be able to exploit the freedom of access and freedom of maneuver that space-based systems and air superiority provides, but that’s also one of the key elements our opponents have sought to neutralize,” Stringer said. “This means one of our key missions is counter anti-access and area denial, which is not solely to free up access and maneuver for NATO’s air component, but to ensure freedom of access and maneuver for everybody.”
NATO’s imperative for multi-domain operations
This vital intersection of air and space superiority further reflects the multi-domain operations that will be critical to a future fight, but particularly challenging for a multinational alliance like NATO.
“Even with the recognition of space and cyber as being operational domains in their own right, there is more to multi-domain operations than just the three military domains of land, air and maritime,” Stringer said. “Multi-domain operations include all instruments of alliance power. This means fusing intelligence and economic warfare with both traditional military and non-military means across domains within a protracted campaign.”
According to Stringer, laying the groundwork for successful multi-domain operations requires a thoughtful approach that goes beyond acquiring the latest space technologies.
“Multi-domain operations places a premium on two things: how does your command and control system function across nations and how do you empower your commanders and their staff to excel?’” Stringer said. “If you don’t have those two things, all the flashy equipment you might have is not going to perform as you need it to. This is where the space workforce is really important, because otherwise you’re not going to get the maximum return on your investment.”
Establishing and maintaining deterrence
Now, looking ahead, it’s more than just creating an alliance that can deter a future threat, but defeat it.
“You don’t build forces to deter, you build forces to win,” Stringer said. “Therefore, you must have the military forces that can demonstrably win in all five of the operational domains recognized by NATO. Therefore, building the capabilities you need to assure deterrence is important, because if anyone that threatens you will end up significantly worse.”
Deterrence, established and reinforced by a multinational force like NATO, will be pivotal to keeping space open and free for countries around the world.
“It doesn’t matter whether you feel space should be preserved as a sanctified area,” Stringer said. “That decision was made for us when nations were going to space with the rapid expansions of military and commercial space technologies. Space has underpinned our way in warfare to a basic, tactical level. We come back to a classic: ‘Imagine a day without space,’ but now it’s a real challenge that we have to recognize.”
Elara Nova is a trusted guiding partner that builds tailored teams to illuminate unseen opportunities and deliver impact across every domain. Learn more at https://elaranova.com/.
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
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