NATO allies have agreed to boost defense spending. While space isn’t among the listed priorities for the extra funding, experts predict nations will beef up their national security capabilities in orbit.
Context: The 2025 NATO Summit began today in The Hague, Netherlands. At a press conference Monday ahead of the gathering of global leaders, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said new spending will go towards increased air defense, more tanks, building up munitions stores, and supporting the defense industrial base—all gaps that have been exposed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We meet at a truly historic moment, with significant and growing challenges to our security,” Rutte said. “As the world becomes more dangerous, allied leaders will take bold decisions to strengthen our collective defense—making NATO a stronger, fairer and more lethal alliance.”
The satellite in the room: Space didn’t make the secretary general’s remarks about new funding, but that doesn’t mean the alliance isn’t taking its investment in space capabilities seriously. This month, NATO defense ministers adopted a new list of capability targets—a classified list of the top capability requests of alliance members—and the list included space for the first time, according to Anca Agachi, a defense policy analyst at the RAND Corporation.
“I think in general allies are looking to invest more [in space] …particularly at this point at a national level,” she said. “There’s a lot of interest, primarily in commercial capabilities and accessing off-the-shelf capabilities.”
Agachi pointed specifically to spending by France, the UK, Sweden, and Luxembourg as evidence that Europe is ramping up its national security space posture. “It may not have been identified in the speech, but that doesn’t mean individual nations may not choose to prioritize and invest” in space, she said.
Other priorities: The increase in NATO defense spending, in addition to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, is likely to take most of the attention at the two-day summit. Still, experts laid out some ongoing space priorities for the alliance to focus on:
- Sharing information among allies to boost NATO’s space situational awareness;
- Growing space expertise among NATO members, especially for those allies with newer space programs;
- Working more closely in orbit with the AP4, which areNATO’s partners in the Pacific. These four partners are Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea;
- Deterring Russia’s nuclear ambitions in space;
- Focusing on capabilities such as remote sensing, comms, and PNT, which all enable terrestrial operations;
- Planning on how to build bridges to the commercial sector.
What’s next: The last bullet point is poised to get a lot more attention since NATO released its long-awaited Commercial Space Strategy today. While the document calls for greater cooperation between the commercial space sector at NATO, more sharing of best practices, and space standardization across the alliance, experts say the key to the document will be how it is implemented.
“Because space is such a force multiplier for the joint force, and an enabler for NATO operations, it will be hard to ignore space. The key will be integration and use of not only member capabilities, but also the commercial ones that NATO is acquiring,” said Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS. “So funding is important, but maybe even more important is successfully integrating, and using, what they’ve got to work with.”
