Re-printed with permission of the NATO Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre (JALLC). This piece originally appeared in JALLC’s 2025 annual magazine, the JALLC Explorer.
“Space is increasingly important for the Alliance’s and Allies’ security and prosperity. Space brings benefits in multiple areas from weather monitoring, environment and agriculture, to transport, science, communications and banking.” —NATO Space Policy 2019
“If you want a new idea, read an old book.” —attributed to Ivan Pavlov
NATO declared space to be a new operational domain in 2019, adding it to cyber, air, land, and sea, and thereby placing further emphasis on the need for multi-domain operations. Simultaneously, NATO released its first space policy, describing for the first time how the organization intends to approach, use, and defend this crucial area of future warfare. Five years later, what does this development mean for the typical NATO staff officer? How is one supposed to understand space and what role does it play in supporting operations in other domains? Chuck Ridgway, the JALLC’s former editor—and committed advocate of Seapower—took a look and weighs in.
As a kid, I was a huge Star Trek fan. In fact, the show played a major role in my childhood dream of becoming a naval officer. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, there were a lot of exciting things happening in space in our timeline too. I remember the last Apollo mission and the first landing of the space shuttle. I was also a military nerd and bought every book I could find on modern warfare.
Titles I owned included such works as Navies of World War 3 by Antony Preston, published in 1984, Modern Naval Combat by David and Chris Miller from 1986, and Advanced Technology Warfare published in 1985 and quoted below. I recently had a chance to thumb through these old treasures of mine and what I noticed was not that much has really changed, at least when it comes to hardware, tactics, or employment. Modern Naval Combat, for instance, profiles 44 classes of major warships. Thirty of them are still in service today, most with their original navy. The Mk50 Torpedo is still the main western anti-submarine weapon and the Harpoon missile is still the main anti-ship weapon. The challenges it describes in these warfare areas are still recognizable.
Space seems little different. The third chapter of Advanced Technology Warfare covers Space Warfare. It’s not an exaggeration to say that one could take its text, change 30 years ago to 70 years ago, change Soviet Union to Russia, add that China is now a major player in space, change the acronyms for a few systems, and have a completely relevant piece for today. Take for instance:
“At present, the overwhelming majority of both superpowers’ space effort is devoted to ‘non-weapon’ purposes, such as intelligence gathering, communications and navigation. Space-based assets are ‘force multipliers’, allowing many traditional military missions to be conducted more efficiently, although as technology advances space systems are evolving into ‘force enablers’, opening up new mission possibilities. To cite just a few examples, satellite systems now existing or in development will enable global control of forces, improved tactical communications, all-weather navigation, precise weapons delivery independent of range, and long-range naval target acquisition.
“As reliance on military satellites has grown, so too has the awareness that the loss of satellites in wartime could be a crippling handicap. This has led to the development of techniques for disabling an opponent’s satellites—either by destroying or jamming them—and has also led to the development of methods of protecting satellites from enemy action. Thus whereas space systems were formerly viewed as a means of aiding terrestrial military operations, space itself is now also seen as a new theatre of actual warfare. [emphasis added]”
Those words are 40 years old, yet they could just as well have come from the chapter “NATO in Space” in the book NATO 2030: Towards a New Strategic Concept and Beyond. The truth is, since the major accomplishments of the ’60s, ’70s, and early ’80s, there have been few dramatic leaps forward with space, just steady refinement of technology, at least before Elon Musk came on the scene. The same family of Atlas rockets used to launch the Mercury astronauts were used to launch the late 1980s-era Fleet Satellite Communications satellites—two of which still serve the U.S. Navy—and are in use to this day, with each version of the Atlas having improved electronics and engines. Sure, we don’t pick up film canisters dropped from a satellite using a C-130 anymore, and today’s satellites now have the bandwidth to control a drone on the other side of the world that is beaming back a live video feed, but we are not yet talking about space marines engaging in zero gravity combat, or protecting space-based trade with space battleships. Those days may come, but probably not in my lifetime. The simple fact is that the vast majority of what space is used for is still communication, reconnaissance, and navigation, just like in 1985.
So, what does it mean that space was declared an operational domain in 2019, when the things we’ve been doing in and via space have been relatively stable for decades? As nations continue to put more emphasis on militarizing space, whether as a new domain or through the creation of independent Space Forces, it is important to keep in mind that, fundamentally, what we use space for has not changed. It is a pathway for data. It is not territory that can be held, nor a commons through which goods, other than information or occasionally international space stations and ballistic missiles, can pass.
But space is also the ultimate high ground. Space military assets are persistent and force the dilution of an adversary’s power by making them take actions to avoid detection from ever-watching eyes. This persistent oversight is an important reason why space assets are force multipliers, that offer independent options only possible from space. And while, like the sea, space can’t be held, one can exercise both control and denial strategies in space. The pathway for data is only created by satellites, which are physical things in orbit that can be interdicted, all while holding certain orbits and denying those same orbits to an adversary.
It is equally important as well to recognize what has changed. First is the vast increase in the amount of bandwidth available, made possible obviously through there being more satellites but also through both the advances in computing technology to process the bits and bytes, as well as more efficient exploitation of the electromagnetic spectrum. When I was a communications officer on an Aegis cruiser in the 1990s, our fastest satellite comms system could operate at around 2400 baud (that is bits per seconds!). Today’s shipboard Advanced Extremely High Frequency (EHF) operates in the range of 8 Mbytes per second per terminal, around 3000 times faster (still a lot slower than my home internet). The satellites themselves can serve far more end-user terminals at these higher speeds. This increase in bandwidth has allowed military users to employ live chats, send email (with large attachments), and use video-teleconferencing. In the past, they would have been dependent on formal message, limited bandwidth datalinks, and line-of-sight or HF terrestrial radio.
The result of this increased bandwidth, coupled with the much higher resolution and sensitivity of today’s sensors, is that we have become far more dependent on using space. Modern military forces would be hard pressed to operate at all without access to space-based communication and the information transmitted through it. And we rarely practice getting by without it. Without, say, GPS, could our warship successfully make landfall within a hundred miles of the destination? Could a forward observer accurately call in artillery fire without using satellite-acquired intelligence information? Even terrestrial communications systems and networks rely heavily on the precision timing provided by GPS, without which they probably cannot run.
The second thing that has changed is that the commercial industry is now the leader in advances in space technology, pulling ever farther ahead of what even the U.S. government is capable of developing and fielding, and doing so at ever lower costs. SpaceX’s recovery of its Heavy-Starship rocket in October 2024 is highly symbolic of these advances, especially in the area of reusable launch components, which sharply reduce launch costs. A SpaceX Falcon launch costs about one-fifth that of an Atlas V’s. This is a game changer, nowhere better exemplified than with StarLink. With per satellite launch costs of around USD 400 000, Elon Musk has created a constellation of 5000+ satellites in low-earth orbit that provide robust, high bandwidth and, perhaps most important, very survivable communications connectivity.
But as industry outpaces government in space technology, governments, including militaries, become increasingly dependent on private enterprise for services critical to the warfighter. How will NATO Space Policy or the U.S. Space Force help if Elon decides to shut down StarLink in a conflict he doesn’t like, especially one where other means of communication have also been targeted and degraded by the adversary?
NATO has gone some way to recognizing and addressing these issues with its recent NATO Commercial Space Strategy. Endorsed by Alliance Defence Ministers in February 2025, the strategy aims to develop a closer relationship with commercial space partners from Allied Nations in order to enhance the Alliance’s operational space capabilities. You can read more about the strategy here including the strategic objectives and the approach to achieve them.
There is one more change that is perhaps most important. Our adversaries are increasingly able and increasingly willing to deny NATO the use of space. Gone are the concerns over antiballistic missile capability being destabilizing to nuclear deterrence and the stability that deterrence was meant to assure. Tests of antisatellite weaponry and non-kinetic means of denying the use of satellites indicate such capabilities will be employed in future conflict.
In this environment, and until we Earthers become dependent on rare metal ores from the Belt, the purpose of space policy—and of space forces—is to ensure the use of space for its current purpose: a pathway for information. Ensuring this use involves not just operating equipment but also keeping an eye on what our adversaries are doing in space and analysing how that impacts us. It requires having options available when attempts are made to deny NATO the use of space, as they surely will be; and options for when these attempts succeed. As we’ve seen with the astronauts stuck on the International Space Station, when something goes wrong in space, it can take months to get new equipment up there.
NATO Space Policy goes some way to addressing the reality NATO faces today. Recognizing that NATO itself will not develop NATO owned and operated systems, the policy is designed to help ensure all Allies can benefit from the use of space, particularly those Allies who do not operate space programmes of their own.
NATO Space Policy also places a heavy emphasis on resilience in our use of space, which will lead to the development of approaches that will allow us to continue to fight, and win, when the use of space is denied to us, attempting to resolve the inherent tension between the fact that “Satellite communications are essential in all NATO missions” and “In security and defence terms, space is increasingly contested, congested and competitive and requires the Alliance to be able to operate in a disrupted, denied and degraded environment.” [quotes from NATO Space Policy]
Perhaps most importantly, NATO Space Policy recognizes that space, much like the maritime domain, is a global commons, whose use is open to all nations and citizens of Earth, governed by a rules-based international order. The idea, since incorporated into NATO’s Strategic Concept, is that unfettered access to space is key to deterrence and defence and that access is being threatened by potential adversaries. Crucially, NATO now recognizes that attempts to deny the use of space as a global commons could rise to the level of an armed attack and result in invoking Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Nations in the past have gone to war to protect the concept of freedom of the seas. Are they ready to do so to protect freedom of space.
Purpose of Space Forces
NATO Space Policy arose at the same time and for many of the same reasons that the United States established the U.S. Space Force. Space Force was created to consolidate into a single bureaucratic structure the many programmes and projects that until then had been spread across the several military services and agencies with the aim of achieving better coordination and economy, while streamlining service. It also served to create a dedicated career field for space professionals, encouraging the development of intellectual capacity in this field. Many NATO Nations have followed suit.
The U.S. Space Force views space as made of three segments: the orbital segment (spacecraft beyond Earth’s atmosphere), the terrestrial segment (the ground-based equipment required to operate/interact with spacecraft), and the link segment (the electromagnetic spectrum connecting the terrestrial to the orbital segments). They all operate across physical, cognitive, and network dimensions.
Given that the mission of space forces is primarily to use pathways through orbital space for transmitting information, of whatever nature, space forces can best be viewed as a service provider, analogous to military logistics services. Much as many military branches have a dedicated logistics department, such as the U.S. Navy’s Supply Corps, or a separate branch, like the German military’s joint logistics provider, the Streitkräftebasis (Joint Support Service), which ensure the delivery of beans, bullets, and black oil to combat forces, space forces exist to ensure delivery of bits and bytes or, as put in NATO Space Policy parlance, to ensure delivery of space services and space data by maintaining space domain awareness.
Lessons Learned from Space
It would be helpful to turn to Lessons Learned (LL) to see how NATO can best adapt to meet these needs. However, a search of the NATO Lessons Learned Portal (NLLP) for the word space is as likely to return as many lessons on there being insufficient parking spaces or office space at an exercise as ones concerned with the space domain. Those lessons that do exist focus on there being an inadequate understanding of this new domain and failure to include it in exercises in a meaningful way.
In part, this lack of space-related lessons is tied to the newness of NATO’s policy about it. We have had just five years where space topics have been relevant to the NATO staff officers who populate the Portal. But it also results from the fact that we almost never have to operate without space-based communications and, as those few lessons make clear, very few exercises involve adapting in any meaningful way to a space (or communications more generally) denied environment. Quite simply, there have not yet been many opportunities to learn space-related lessons.
Finally, the shortage of space-related lessons is surely a result of the more general problems NATO continues to face in developing its LL capability.
Commander (ret.) Chuck Ridgway is a retired U.S. Navy surface warfare and a reserve Africa foreign area officer. After leaving active duty, he worked for 10 years as a NATO international civilian at the NATO Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre in Portugal while also serving as a Navy reserve officer with Naval Forces Africa.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.
Center for Maritime Strategy
By CDR (ret.) Chuck Ridgeway, USN
Re-printed with permission of the NATO Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre (JALLC). This piece originally appeared in JALLC’s 2025 annual magazine, the JALLC Explorer.
NATO declared space to be a new operational domain in 2019, adding it to cyber, air, land, and sea, and thereby placing further emphasis on the need for multi-domain operations. Simultaneously, NATO released its first space policy, describing for the first time how the organization intends to approach, use, and defend this crucial area of future warfare. Five years later, what does this development mean for the typical NATO staff officer? How is one supposed to understand space and what role does it play in supporting operations in other domains? Chuck Ridgway, the JALLC’s former editor—and committed advocate of Seapower—took a look and weighs in.
As a kid, I was a huge Star Trek fan. In fact, the show played a major role in my childhood dream of becoming a naval officer. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, there were a lot of exciting things happening in space in our timeline too. I remember the last Apollo mission and the first landing of the space shuttle. I was also a military nerd and bought every book I could find on modern warfare.
Titles I owned included such works as Navies of World War 3 by Antony Preston, published in 1984, Modern Naval Combat by David and Chris Miller from 1986, and Advanced Technology Warfare published in 1985 and quoted below. I recently had a chance to thumb through these old treasures of mine and what I noticed was not that much has really changed, at least when it comes to hardware, tactics, or employment. Modern Naval Combat, for instance, profiles 44 classes of major warships. Thirty of them are still in service today, most with their original navy. The Mk50 Torpedo is still the main western anti-submarine weapon and the Harpoon missile is still the main anti-ship weapon. The challenges it describes in these warfare areas are still recognizable.
Space seems little different. The third chapter of Advanced Technology Warfare covers Space Warfare. It’s not an exaggeration to say that one could take its text, change 30 years ago to 70 years ago, change Soviet Union to Russia, add that China is now a major player in space, change the acronyms for a few systems, and have a completely relevant piece for today. Take for instance:
Those words are 40 years old, yet they could just as well have come from the chapter “NATO in Space” in the book NATO 2030: Towards a New Strategic Concept and Beyond. The truth is, since the major accomplishments of the ’60s, ’70s, and early ’80s, there have been few dramatic leaps forward with space, just steady refinement of technology, at least before Elon Musk came on the scene. The same family of Atlas rockets used to launch the Mercury astronauts were used to launch the late 1980s-era Fleet Satellite Communications satellites—two of which still serve the U.S. Navy—and are in use to this day, with each version of the Atlas having improved electronics and engines. Sure, we don’t pick up film canisters dropped from a satellite using a C-130 anymore, and today’s satellites now have the bandwidth to control a drone on the other side of the world that is beaming back a live video feed, but we are not yet talking about space marines engaging in zero gravity combat, or protecting space-based trade with space battleships. Those days may come, but probably not in my lifetime. The simple fact is that the vast majority of what space is used for is still communication, reconnaissance, and navigation, just like in 1985.
So, what does it mean that space was declared an operational domain in 2019, when the things we’ve been doing in and via space have been relatively stable for decades? As nations continue to put more emphasis on militarizing space, whether as a new domain or through the creation of independent Space Forces, it is important to keep in mind that, fundamentally, what we use space for has not changed. It is a pathway for data. It is not territory that can be held, nor a commons through which goods, other than information or occasionally international space stations and ballistic missiles, can pass.
But space is also the ultimate high ground. Space military assets are persistent and force the dilution of an adversary’s power by making them take actions to avoid detection from ever-watching eyes. This persistent oversight is an important reason why space assets are force multipliers, that offer independent options only possible from space. And while, like the sea, space can’t be held, one can exercise both control and denial strategies in space. The pathway for data is only created by satellites, which are physical things in orbit that can be interdicted, all while holding certain orbits and denying those same orbits to an adversary.
It is equally important as well to recognize what has changed. First is the vast increase in the amount of bandwidth available, made possible obviously through there being more satellites but also through both the advances in computing technology to process the bits and bytes, as well as more efficient exploitation of the electromagnetic spectrum. When I was a communications officer on an Aegis cruiser in the 1990s, our fastest satellite comms system could operate at around 2400 baud (that is bits per seconds!). Today’s shipboard Advanced Extremely High Frequency (EHF) operates in the range of 8 Mbytes per second per terminal, around 3000 times faster (still a lot slower than my home internet). The satellites themselves can serve far more end-user terminals at these higher speeds. This increase in bandwidth has allowed military users to employ live chats, send email (with large attachments), and use video-teleconferencing. In the past, they would have been dependent on formal message, limited bandwidth datalinks, and line-of-sight or HF terrestrial radio.
The result of this increased bandwidth, coupled with the much higher resolution and sensitivity of today’s sensors, is that we have become far more dependent on using space. Modern military forces would be hard pressed to operate at all without access to space-based communication and the information transmitted through it. And we rarely practice getting by without it. Without, say, GPS, could our warship successfully make landfall within a hundred miles of the destination? Could a forward observer accurately call in artillery fire without using satellite-acquired intelligence information? Even terrestrial communications systems and networks rely heavily on the precision timing provided by GPS, without which they probably cannot run.
The second thing that has changed is that the commercial industry is now the leader in advances in space technology, pulling ever farther ahead of what even the U.S. government is capable of developing and fielding, and doing so at ever lower costs. SpaceX’s recovery of its Heavy-Starship rocket in October 2024 is highly symbolic of these advances, especially in the area of reusable launch components, which sharply reduce launch costs. A SpaceX Falcon launch costs about one-fifth that of an Atlas V’s. This is a game changer, nowhere better exemplified than with StarLink. With per satellite launch costs of around USD 400 000, Elon Musk has created a constellation of 5000+ satellites in low-earth orbit that provide robust, high bandwidth and, perhaps most important, very survivable communications connectivity.
But as industry outpaces government in space technology, governments, including militaries, become increasingly dependent on private enterprise for services critical to the warfighter. How will NATO Space Policy or the U.S. Space Force help if Elon decides to shut down StarLink in a conflict he doesn’t like, especially one where other means of communication have also been targeted and degraded by the adversary?
NATO has gone some way to recognizing and addressing these issues with its recent NATO Commercial Space Strategy. Endorsed by Alliance Defence Ministers in February 2025, the strategy aims to develop a closer relationship with commercial space partners from Allied Nations in order to enhance the Alliance’s operational space capabilities. You can read more about the strategy here including the strategic objectives and the approach to achieve them.
There is one more change that is perhaps most important. Our adversaries are increasingly able and increasingly willing to deny NATO the use of space. Gone are the concerns over antiballistic missile capability being destabilizing to nuclear deterrence and the stability that deterrence was meant to assure. Tests of antisatellite weaponry and non-kinetic means of denying the use of satellites indicate such capabilities will be employed in future conflict.
In this environment, and until we Earthers become dependent on rare metal ores from the Belt, the purpose of space policy—and of space forces—is to ensure the use of space for its current purpose: a pathway for information. Ensuring this use involves not just operating equipment but also keeping an eye on what our adversaries are doing in space and analysing how that impacts us. It requires having options available when attempts are made to deny NATO the use of space, as they surely will be; and options for when these attempts succeed. As we’ve seen with the astronauts stuck on the International Space Station, when something goes wrong in space, it can take months to get new equipment up there.
NATO Space Policy goes some way to addressing the reality NATO faces today. Recognizing that NATO itself will not develop NATO owned and operated systems, the policy is designed to help ensure all Allies can benefit from the use of space, particularly those Allies who do not operate space programmes of their own.
NATO Space Policy also places a heavy emphasis on resilience in our use of space, which will lead to the development of approaches that will allow us to continue to fight, and win, when the use of space is denied to us, attempting to resolve the inherent tension between the fact that “Satellite communications are essential in all NATO missions” and “In security and defence terms, space is increasingly contested, congested and competitive and requires the Alliance to be able to operate in a disrupted, denied and degraded environment.” [quotes from NATO Space Policy]
Perhaps most importantly, NATO Space Policy recognizes that space, much like the maritime domain, is a global commons, whose use is open to all nations and citizens of Earth, governed by a rules-based international order. The idea, since incorporated into NATO’s Strategic Concept, is that unfettered access to space is key to deterrence and defence and that access is being threatened by potential adversaries. Crucially, NATO now recognizes that attempts to deny the use of space as a global commons could rise to the level of an armed attack and result in invoking Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Nations in the past have gone to war to protect the concept of freedom of the seas. Are they ready to do so to protect freedom of space.
Purpose of Space Forces
NATO Space Policy arose at the same time and for many of the same reasons that the United States established the U.S. Space Force. Space Force was created to consolidate into a single bureaucratic structure the many programmes and projects that until then had been spread across the several military services and agencies with the aim of achieving better coordination and economy, while streamlining service. It also served to create a dedicated career field for space professionals, encouraging the development of intellectual capacity in this field. Many NATO Nations have followed suit.
The U.S. Space Force views space as made of three segments: the orbital segment (spacecraft beyond Earth’s atmosphere), the terrestrial segment (the ground-based equipment required to operate/interact with spacecraft), and the link segment (the electromagnetic spectrum connecting the terrestrial to the orbital segments). They all operate across physical, cognitive, and network dimensions.
Given that the mission of space forces is primarily to use pathways through orbital space for transmitting information, of whatever nature, space forces can best be viewed as a service provider, analogous to military logistics services. Much as many military branches have a dedicated logistics department, such as the U.S. Navy’s Supply Corps, or a separate branch, like the German military’s joint logistics provider, the Streitkräftebasis (Joint Support Service), which ensure the delivery of beans, bullets, and black oil to combat forces, space forces exist to ensure delivery of bits and bytes or, as put in NATO Space Policy parlance, to ensure delivery of space services and space data by maintaining space domain awareness.
Lessons Learned from Space
It would be helpful to turn to Lessons Learned (LL) to see how NATO can best adapt to meet these needs. However, a search of the NATO Lessons Learned Portal (NLLP) for the word space is as likely to return as many lessons on there being insufficient parking spaces or office space at an exercise as ones concerned with the space domain. Those lessons that do exist focus on there being an inadequate understanding of this new domain and failure to include it in exercises in a meaningful way.
In part, this lack of space-related lessons is tied to the newness of NATO’s policy about it. We have had just five years where space topics have been relevant to the NATO staff officers who populate the Portal. But it also results from the fact that we almost never have to operate without space-based communications and, as those few lessons make clear, very few exercises involve adapting in any meaningful way to a space (or communications more generally) denied environment. Quite simply, there have not yet been many opportunities to learn space-related lessons.
Finally, the shortage of space-related lessons is surely a result of the more general problems NATO continues to face in developing its LL capability.
Commander (ret.) Chuck Ridgway is a retired U.S. Navy surface warfare and a reserve Africa foreign area officer. After leaving active duty, he worked for 10 years as a NATO international civilian at the NATO Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre in Portugal while also serving as a Navy reserve officer with Naval Forces Africa.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.