The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has recently announced the largest multi-national investment into its combined space capabilities in its 75-year history. On July 9th, 2024 the Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space (APSS) program was announced with 17 nations of NATO signed on to the program. APSS is designed to enhance the Alliance’s ability to monitor space activities with unprecedented accuracy and timeliness by integrating ground, sea, and space assets to gain a complete picture. With the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding, APSS has now transitioned into the implementation phase, where over the next five years, 17 Allies will contribute more than 1 billion USD. This investment will leverage commercial and national space assets and expand advanced exploitation capacities.
NATO’s recognition of space as a key operational arena has been evolving over the past several years, with the establishment of a NATO Space Policy in 2019 and a Space Center in Germany in 2020, the APSS program is a continuation of this trend. The establishment of space as an operational domain is of great importance, as it not only links space and cyberspace together, but also places them on the same scale as air, land, and sea domains. This allows both space and cyberspace domains to get access to funding and research to protect the assets critical to many technologies and activities used in everyday life.
During the same announcement as APSS, the establishment of another program, ACE, was announced by NATO with 22 signatories. The Allied Software for Cloud and Edge (ACE) services creates the building blocks to improve NATOs operational sharing capabilities by the creation of a NATO-wide Digital Backbone. The integration of ACE as a software and cloud backbone solution allows operational communications from all operational domains to be shared with extreme speed and efficiency with all relevant parties. ACE aims to provide a resilient and flexible digital infrastructure, allowing for real-time data processing and decision-making at the edge of the network. This capability is crucial for NATO military operations, where rapid information exchange and data-driven decisions can determine the outcome on the battlefield.
While the announcement of the APSS and ACE programs represent a significant step in the recognition of space and cyber as critical operational nodes, it also presents risks to the alliance. With member and partner countries spread around the globe, the APSS and ACE programs are likely to play an integral role in the military readiness and communications infrastructure. While in a quasi-peacetime status this allows efficient communications, it creates drawbacks for the alliance during conflict scenarios. Many space capabilities are still left largely unsecured to cyber-attacks, and overreliance on these assets creates vulnerabilities to military readiness. While space and cyber are critical to projection of military power worldwide, the limitations of on-orbit systems must be accounted for until more secure systems are operational. To fully exploit space and cyber capabilities, the infrastructure being developed and relied on for APSS and ACE need to be carefully planned to protect against threats well into the future. If deliberate thought into cyber security isn’t incorporated as a main building block in these and other systems, NATO is likely to falter during any future conflicts with a cyber-capable adversary capable of denying space access.