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View from the Nations – France
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VIEW FROM THE NATIONS
FRANCE
Data collection and distribution is becoming an ever-greater facility of the Alliance’s newest operational domain – space. France’s Minister of the Armed Forces, Florence Parly, highlights the importance of space for NATO and its Member States, and how the new Toulouse-based NATO Space Centre of Excellence will assist with the development of this vital domain
Some 60 years have passed since John F Kennedy’s memorable speech that established space as “a new frontier”. Over the past 60 years, the world has changed a lot; frontiers have been pushed back and humanity has never stopped pushing the limits of our knowledge. Today, as I write these few lines, Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut, and his American and Japanese colleagues are at work in the International Space Station at an altitude of more than 400km, far away on the other side of the exo-atmospheric border.
As technologies and ways of life have been changing simultaneously, space has gradually become a decisive element of international security. It is both a provider of essential services and a carrier of many threats. It is now a new area of rivalry between state powers, jeopardizing the very functioning of our societies, as well as our ability to conduct our military operations. Because I believe it is the bedrock of tomorrow’s defence, I made space one of my priorities as France’s Minister of the Armed Forces. The release of our Space Defence Strategy and the creation of a national Space Command in 2019 are key milestones of our space policy.
In November 2019, by declaring space the fifth operational domain for NATO, Allies collectively decided
to invest in this strategic field. This was a most timely and necessary step. However, it is only a first step towards protecting our freedom of access and manoeuvre in space, and the unimpeded use of space guaranteed under international law. As our strategic competitors have already started to invest in this domain, we must be at the forefront to protect our interests. With the creation of the NATO Space Centre of Excellence, we are setting a real ambition for the Alliance. The message is loud and clear: NATO is in motion, and while space is no longer our new frontier, we know it is a potential battlefield.
A FUTURE SPACE HUB
In January 2021, NATO formally accepted France’s offer to host the future NATO Space Centre of Excellence in Toulouse. The new NATO space hub will be located at
With the advance of technology, space can no longer be considered a new frontier, but a potential battlefield NITECH ››› ENSURING ACCESS TO CRITICAL DATA
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NITECH ››› ENSURING ACCESS TO CRITICAL DATA NATO accepted France’s offer to host the future NATO space hub alongside the country’s Space Centre in Toulouse (PHOTO: GYROSTAT)
48 the heart of the biggest space ecosystem in Europe, next to our Space Command, Lab and Military Academy, as well as the French Space Agency, world-class aerospace companies, “new space” actors, innovative laboratories and academic institutions. It will, therefore, benefit from a unique range of expertise – both private and public, military and civilian, industrial and academic. That outstanding environment will allow it to cover multiple segments, including not only space support to operations, but also space service support, space situational awareness, and command and control systems. Of course, it will also provide for all pillars of a NATO Centre of Excellence: training and exercises, doctrine, lessons-learned and concept development. This project is commensurate with NATO’s ambition in space and with France’s ambition for NATO.
I attach great importance to the multinational dimension of this project and we will do everything necessary to ensure the widest participation of Allies and Partners. By bringing together a wide range of multinational space experts, this Centre will bring decisive space expertise to NATO, and will infuse a common allied understanding of the strategic and operational importance of space. I truly believe this collective project will allow the Alliance to pursue fully its ambition for space and accompany Allies towards longterm investment in space.
INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE
Steve Beeching
Managing Director, Viasat UK
What are NATO’s key security challenges?
There is a generational shift that is amplifying the NATO Alliance strategic challenge. Not only are defence missions now subject to threats that are global, more invasive and increasing in frequency, but Allied efforts, budgets and strategies are further impacted by disruptive events and black swans (consider COVID-19 and continued political unrest) and an emerging economic superpower shift. These events have led to uncertainty and an increasing demand on finite resources and financials.
This increasingly complex security environment is exacerbated by a pervasive, rapid digital and technological continuum, with a wider range of threat actors now able to acquire sophisticated capabilities that were previously available only to well-resourced nation-states. Adversaries are also leveraging rapid advances in emerging and disruptive technology to pose new and evolving threats – particularly in space, cyberspace and computing.
To stay competitive in an environment that is highly dependent on information and its trustworthiness, data and its provenance becomes a critical enabler for all command and control (C2) activities, from the front line to the rear echelon.
What are your thoughts on data as a strategic resource and accelerated realisation?
With statements such as those made by US Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist – “The responsibility of all DoD leaders is to treat data as a weapon system and manage, secure, and use data for operational effect.” – it is clear that data and digital networking must be treated as strategic resources across the battlespace. Similar to C2, trusted data transcends every domain, spanning every environment and security level. However, data is also the easiest to affect, manipulate and control as data is required to move, fuse or be acted upon with a higher level of trust and certainty.
Viasat believes that commercially developed, cutting-edge, innovative and fielded solutions are uniquely positioned to augment existing defence visions and capabilities in order to meet mission outcomes and ensure data is treated as a strategic resource. With budgets under pressure and the exponential pace of the digital challenge, there is an opportunity for NATO to join forces with commercial technology companies to accelerate outcome possibilities at the speed of relevance, utilizing the commercial eagerness to embrace the opportunity to invest in and support defence technology.
How does this apply to data as a strategic resource within space evolution?
Space capabilities and associated situational awareness are critical elements for effective multi-domain command and control to protect and defend space assets, respond to and mitigate threats and provide tactical response to restore and maintain communications for NATO and Allied users. With the private sector willing to support early trials, demonstrations and minimum viable products, solutions available today can be delivered in bite-size increments, offering immediate advantages, or promptly augmented and updated with required defence software and applications.
Can you discuss examples of such space evolutions?
An example of this commercial innovation is Viasat’s Enterprise Management and Control (EM&C) systems. The EM&C systems have been deployed since 2002 and continuously iterated to deliver best-available SATCOM networks with integrated, fused end-to-end situational awareness (SA) that combine space, terminal, security, network and cyber operations to offer real-time access to trusted data and intelligence feeds.
This system currently delivers a Hybrid Adaptive Network (HAN) manager as an augmented service for centralised integration, coordination, and orchestration across existing satellites, commercial networks and space situational awareness. For NATO, this concept accelerates the opportunity to provide access to a cohesive enterprise common operational picture that will provide a robust network delivery and monitoring framework.
Why is the need for a seamless SATCOM network so important?
The SATCOM enterprise is often a disparate federation of stove-piped systems operated and controlled by individual organizations. The proposed Enterprise Management and Control system assessment framework provides a process to attain integrated situational awareness for the NATO and Allied
operators, accelerated by existing solutions that incorporate real-time data and information from each of the distinct networks and systems through open APIs and services.
This provides operators with the capability to rapidly identify threats while supporting orchestration services that automatically move and restore the highest-priority users in degraded or con ict situations. The system also monitors the health of assets and users, global network resilience and threat mitigation through machine-speed orchestration from advanced SA data. This allows operators and commanders to inspect and monitor the network health in real time at the macro level. In addition to enhancing SA visibility,
the system delivers both improved resiliency in degraded environments and overlays space SA. The agile operations ensure seamless restoral of network outages and sustained operational advantage through scalability as additional networks are integrated into NATO.
By monitoring space-based threats for detecting interference (intentional or unintentional) against space assets or monitoring for orbital conjunctions, it ampli es integration assurance for the entire end-to-end data journey necessary to operate a seamless SATCOM network.
The Commanders’ Desktop can be upgraded to include interoperability with the visual integrated satellite communications information, operation and networking (VISION) platform, providing the same integrated Common Operating Picture (COP) across networks, systems, users and monitoring systems at the tactical edge.
What are the resultant NATO and Allied operational mission accelerated bene ts?
The primary bene t for introducing this concept is to increase network resilience through machine-time orchestration and threat mitigation from advanced situational awareness data. Using data fusion from multiple data feeds and network level SA, the NATO enterprise, down to its commanders, will have improved access to intelligence information for supporting command-level decisions.
Using integrated data feeds from multiple network, terminal and third-party data sources also enhances; visibility of threats or issues across the SATCOM domain; rapid identi cation of issues that impact reliable communications service delivered to end-users (current and predictively); increased interoperability and integration of data sets within a single enterprise view; and increased coalition and Combined Space Operations across trusted allies.
While this includes monitoring of space-based threats for detecting interference (intentional or unintentional) against a space asset or monitoring for orbital conjunctions, it streamlines the integration to include each of the end-to-end elements necessary to operate a SATCOM Network. This includes space assets; ground sites or gateways (antennae, modems, physical infrastructure); Data Centers or Network Operations Centers; bre; Cyber Operations Centres; and Space Operation Control Centres.
This concept o ers operators and commanders the ability to inspect and monitor the network health in real time at the macro level, as well as for operators to drill down into detailed performance information to isolate and identify speci c issues.
Any nal thoughts on real-time implementation to achieve defence outcomes?
The early trial of space management and control systems, such as the HAN, enables NATO armed forces to maintain the tactical advantage, in complex and contested areas of operation where the ve traditional operating domains (air, land, sea, cyber and space) can become blurred and confused. It supports overcoming the challenge to rapidly generate and update a trusted COP for units operating on land, in the air and at sea.
Early-adopter experiments using available solutions improve mission realisation and prioritise budget e ciencies with ongoing dev-ops upgrades to optimise machinelearning and threat-detection algorithms for defence use. Sustainment is provided with additional systems, data sources and new or existing modules updated and expanded for ongoing interoperability and extension of capabilities.
