European nations are focusing on resilience, sovereignty, and assurance in developing their space capabilities, experts from commercial and government space said yesterday during the Defence in Space event in London.
Paul Tedman, managing director for European Space at Anduril Industries, who previously had a high-profile role at UK Space Command, said that resilience should be considered more than just a defensive posture. “We need to protect and defend, not just absorb. Space control is equally if not more important than resilience if you are going to have credible deterrents in orbit,” he said.
Tedman hailed recent moves by the U.K. government, calling the creation of a National Armaments Group a positive move and that an “outcomes-based approach is the right way to go.”
In terms of taking more risk, Tedman added, “The tech resides in the industrial sector. You have to look at challenges such as controlling the domain. How do you deliver that? What do you need to do in order to achieve that? Figuring this out fuels innovation and makes industry come up with solutions. I would also encourage a balance with commercial and operational risk. I would ask how can we take more operational risk? One person’s strategic autonomy is one person’s burden sharing. If you absolutely must have it, you must assure it. This is the only way to get what you need.”
He argued for a more flexible and agile approach to investing in new capabilities. He added, “I would also encourage the movement of money around. It should be a bucket of money you can move around in a very agile way. Having more agility in the finances is important when working with the industry.”
Captain Ben Sharp, who leads Space Strategy and Plans for the UK Ministry of Defence spoke to the U.K.’s new space strategy and the importance of being able to assure space services as they play a critical role in underpinning day-to-day life. Sharp echoed the sentiment that space is becoming an “increasingly contested domain.”
“Assurance is a lurking word in the background here. Sovereignty is about can we choose freedom of actions? Resilience is all about how can we continue in the face of threats? The MoD requires constant fresh information at high speed,” he said. “Government customers need to understand the problem and define it. If we want sovereignty, we need to define it. If we want resilience, we need to define the levels of disruption we are trying to survive and the service level we are trying to maintain. Can industry move from government aspirations and deliver measurable outcomes? We are having more deliberate, focused conversations about all of this.”
James DeBroeck, satcom lead for U.S. European Command, bought a U.S. perspective to the discussion saying that the U.S. has learned that any single system is not resilient, no matter how well its designed.
“You need to layer systems. While individual systems maybe strong, we are working with our partners on how we can develop a system of systems that can enable a rapid restoral of systems when a system goes down. That is the pie in the sky dream that we are trying to make it work. Sovereignty is freedom of movement. It is about partnering with our Allies,” he said.
Germany’s Work to Speed Procurement
Bundeswehr Commander Martin Hellmann, Cyber and Information Domain Service, also spoke to the issue of investing in new capabilities more quickly. Some of Hellmann’s most insightful comments were based around how slow Germany’s procurement processes have been. He admitted that if German procurement processes had been applied to the Ukraine conflict in the last few years, it would take 10 to 12 years to get things done. He made an interesting analogy involving the iPhone.
“Procurement would happen in a very slow way, and it is not OK anymore for space and cyber. Procurement as we did before was like looking at the iPhone 1 [when it was released] and then 12 years later rolling it out and saying you have to use this for the next 15 years,” he said. “Our procurement processes are ‘very German’ in a way. But we are working on it.”
However, things are changing at the Bundeswehr and Germany is working with the likes of Iceye to be able to deliver better data to its Armed Forces. “A 70% solution is better now than a 100% solution in 2035,” Hellmann said. “We are looking to build up hundreds of satellites. You have to refresh satellites constantly.”
A lot of eyes are on Germany with its record space defense budget, as the nation looks to build out its space defense capabilities. Germany wants to significantly ramp up its ability to build and launch satellites. Hellmann’s talked about the importance of open standards and being interoperable with other allied nations.
“We have to learn about how to build our systems. We have to think a lot about cryptography. We have to think about having standards as open as possible, but robust against threats. Our adversaries are quite clever in this domain. We want to build up resilience,” Hellmann said. “We have learned a lot from the incidents we have seen in Ukraine. It is not just about protecting ourselves. We need both defensive and offensive cyber operations. Our procurement efforts are scaling up, but it is still not fast enough.”
