JUNE 21, 2019 / 11:47 AM / 3 MONTHS
AGO
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - NATO aims to
recognize space as a domain of warfare this year, four senior diplomats said,
partly to show U.S. President Donald Trump that the alliance is relevant and
adapting to new threats after he signed off on the creation of a U.S. Space
Force.
FILE PHOTO: Employees chat at a
production line of Airbus' European Service Module (ESM), which is delivered
for NASA's Orion Spaceship, at the Airbus plant in Bremen, Germany, February
19, 2019. Picture taken February 19,2019. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer/File Photo
The decision, set to be taken at a
Dec. 3-4 leaders summit in London that Trump is due to attend, would formally
acknowledge that battles can be waged not only on land, in the air, at sea and
on computer networks, but also in space.
“There’s agreement that we should
make space a domain and the London summit is the best place to make it
official,” said one senior NATO diplomat involved in the discussions, although
cautioning that technical policy work was still underway.
NATO diplomats deny the alliance
would be on a war footing in space, but say declaring it a domain would begin a
debate over whether NATO should eventually use space weapons that can shut down
enemy missiles and air defenses or destroy satellites.
The decision to declare space a new
frontier for defense may help convince Trump that the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation can be a useful ally in deterring China’s rise as a rival military
power, the diplomats said.
While NATO countries today own 65% of
satellites in space, China envisions massive constellations of commercial
satellites that can offer services ranging from high-speed internet for
aircraft to tracking missiles and armed forces on the ground.
China is developing weapons it could
use in orbit and became the first country to land on the far side of the moon
last year.
Russia, once a strategic partner for
NATO but now viewed by many allies as a hostile power, is also a force in space
and is one of the few countries able to launch satellites into orbit.
“You can have warfare exclusively in
space, but whoever controls space also controls what happens on land, on the
sea and in the air,” said Jamie Shea, a former NATO official and now an analyst
at Friends of Europe think-tank in Brussels.
“If you don’t control space, you
don’t control the other domains either.”
NATO defense ministers are expected
to agree to a broad space policy next week at a regular meeting in Brussels,
although there will be no decision yet to declare space an operational domain
of defense.
A second diplomat said that while the
decision was weighty and had real consequences, it would likely be “a gift to
Trump”.
Trump, who used NATO’s last summit in
July last year to harangue European allies over defense spending and accused
Germany of being a prisoner of Russian energy, signed a plan in February to
start creating the U.S. Space Force.
Even though the London gathering is
some six months away, European allies are already nervous about whether Trump
will use the meeting to again question the value of the alliance, of which he
is the de-facto head.
WHAT
TRIGGERS ARTICLE 5?
The U.S. military is increasingly
dependent on satellites to determine what it does on the ground, guiding
munitions with space-based lasers and satellites as well as using such assets
to monitor for missile launches and track its forces.
No longer forced to simply circle the
earth’s orbit, satellites can now be maneuvered in space to spy on other space
assets. India launched an anti-satellite missile test in March.
Italy, Britain and France are
Europe’s main space powers, while Germany is drafting new laws and seeking
private investment to secure a slice of an emerging space market that could be
worth $1 trillion a year by the 2040s.
France wants more assurances of how
its space assets would be used in the event of a crisis. In other areas of
warfare, national assets belonging to NATO allies are put under the command of
the supreme allied commander during a conflict.
Slideshow (4 Images)
Most sensitive of all would be
deciding if an attack on a allied satellite constituted an assault on the
alliance and whether to trigger NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause.
Similar to a decision to make cyber a
domain of warfare in 2016, NATO’s decision would initially mean increased
military planning, a review of NATO vulnerabilities and scrutiny of how to
better protect commercial satellites used by the military.
Reporting by Robin Emmott; Additional
reporting by Sabine Siebold; Editing by Catherine Evans
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust
Principles.
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