Overview
One of the many topics of discussion at the NATO summit in Washington, DC, was the growing need for collaboration between NATO member states on information gathered by reconnaissance satellites. This development is being calling the Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space (APSS) program and include over $1 billion dollars in funding from the 17 NATO nations. This money will not be going towards launching NATO developed satellites, but instead go towards building the infrastructure for pre-existing satellites systems to share information in a single database. In the agreement that are calling this pseudo-constellation ‘Aquila’ after Zues’s thunderbolt carrying eagle.
In this modern era of warfare and considering the pressures that currently face NATO concerning the Ukraine War the push for a system that allows all allied NATO nations to act on the same information seems like a good idea. It would allow smaller European countries that may not have the economic might to develop complicated reconnaissance satellites to have access to much desired military and strategic information.
Security?
At this point it seems like an obvious question to ask, but it does not seem to be mentioned anywhere in the statement released by NATO, but what will be the cybersecurity safeguards around a system such as this that is so important and integral to NATO’s defense. If this database was somehow compromised the security of all NATO nations could be at risk. An adversary could simply take down the database, mislead lead NATO with false information, or even false flag an unrelated country or group by planting false evidence of hacking from them inside the system. The APSS ‘Aquilla’ system, if secured properly, could prove to be a significant wartime advantage if such a situation would ever arise, but if it is developed without proper cybersecurity in mind it may end up being more risk than it is worth.