The Universal Need for Space Expertise: A Global Strategic Imperative

With a projected $1.8 trillion space economy by 2035, regions around the world are looking to leverage the space  domain for a variety of use cases. Countries in Europe and the Indo-Pacific want space technologies for national security-related missions like missile warning and space domain awareness. Meanwhile, in other regions like the Middle East and the Global South, countries want to use space technologies for civil applications like environmental monitoring and economic growth. But despite this broad range of motivations for leveraging space, every country around the world has one, universal need: the need for space expertise.

In this episode of "The Elara Edge," Brad Head, Managing Director of International Partnerships at Elara Nova, takes us around the world of space to understand how each region of the world is looking to leverage space capabilities. A retired colonel with the United States Space Force, Brad has served in a series of high-impact roles: Director of International Affairs at Space Operations Command; Chief of Defense Planning at the U.S. Mission to NATO; and Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation in Brussels.

"The Elara Edge" is hosted by Scott King and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. The full story can be found on Elara Nova's Insights page here. Music was produced by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio.

Transcript

Host: Scott King

SME: Brad Head, Managing Director of International Partnerships

00:02 - 01:19

With a projected $1.8 trillion space economy by 2035, regions around the world are looking to leverage the space  domain for a variety of use cases. Countries in Europe and the Indo-Pacific want space technologies for national security-related missions like missile warning and space domain awareness. Meanwhile, in other regions like the Middle East and the Global South, countries want to use space technologies for civil applications like environmental monitoring and economic growth. But despite this broad range of motivations for leveraging space, every country around the world has one, universal need: the need for space expertise.

Welcome to “The Elara Edge,” here to take us around the world of space is Brad Head, Managing Director of International Partnerships at Elara Nova. A retired colonel with the United States Space Force, Brad has served in a series of high-impact roles: Director of International Affairs at Space Operations Command; Chief of Defense Planning at the U.S. Mission to NATO; and Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation in Brussels.

With three decades of experience in international space cooperation, Brad’s diplomatic efforts have advanced the strategic interests of the United States across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. 

Brad, welcome to the show! 

01:20 - 01:21

Thanks, Scott. Glad to be here.

01:22 - 01:41

Thank you for taking the time to be with us today, and for sharing with our audience how each region of the world views opportunities in the space domain. 

Together, we’ll cover Europe, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and the Global South - to include Africa and South America.

But let’s begin our conversation with Europe. What should we know about Europe’s approach to space?

01:42 - 04:13

Yeah, absolutely. I would argue that some of the more advanced countries in the world, when it comes to space, come out of Europe. We think about France, Germany, the U.K., Italy. But as we've seen the cost of launch gone down, we've seen a lot of new players emerge in the space world, countries that are now investing significantly in space capabilities that hadn't previously done that and a lot of this is done through the lens of two organizations: that being NATO and the European Union. 

NATO is an alliance, 32 nations that includes the U.S. and Canada here in North America, and then 30 nations over in Europe. Collectively get together to protect themselves and defend themselves and they declared space a domain in 2019.

So up until then there were three domains: air, land and sea and now they've included cyber and space. But since 2019, they haven't really done a whole lot to flesh out. ‘What does it mean for space to be an operational domain?’ And so there's a lot of work ongoing right now in the NATO context with regards to developing the space domain.

The other big player is the European Union, which is more on the commercial side of things and trying to bolster their industry. And that can be dual use. It could be both military and it could be for commercial means and so we see a big demand signal coming out of the European Union side of the house for strategic autonomy and by that they mean in some cases to have their own ability to do the things that they need to do for themselves, whether that's from a defense industrial perspective or from a sovereign security perspective.

The European Union actually has money sometimes to throw at things to incentivize co-production or cooperation between European nations, whereas [with] NATO, the U.S. is a huge player in NATO. And so you see them sometimes pulling in similar but kind of slightly divergent directions.

Now there is an overlap between nations that are both in NATO and the European Union. And so the demand signals coming out of that city sometimes send different signals, and they've got to figure out which one they're going to listen to more closely. 

Obviously, from a US perspective, we think that the NATO demand signal is the one that people should be keying off on and here I think the challenge that NATO is struggling with right now is clearly defining for itself how much of what types of stuff that it needs.

They don't have the expertise on the staff. The nations who have the advanced space capabilities, including the United States, are focused internally on kind of building out their respective space forces and space capabilities, and they don't have extra people to throw at NATO. And so this is one of the reasons why they haven't made much progress on operationalizing the space domain is they just don't have the right people with the right skills and backgrounds to get into those different organizations at all the different levels, to kind of map out the how much of what types of stuff and then the other big issue is how do you command and control that stuff.

04:14 - 04:24

Let’s dig into the NATO issue a little bit more. 

First, what were some of the factors that led to NATO declaring space an operational domain?

And then how can NATO overcome thos challenges you just described?

04:25 - 06:03

Yeah, I think one of the proximate causes, obviously, would be the Russian ASAT test a couple of years ago. It really showed people that to the extent that our military way of doing war and our societies way of doing life have become incredibly reliant on space stuff being available on the day to the extent that that is no longer a valid assumption. They realized, ‘Hey, we've got to be able to think through this in a coherent way about: how do we protect and defend our stuff?’

Now, once you've decided that, then you look at, ‘Okay, whether it's the on the lower end of the spectrum:  space domain awareness or satellite communication or overhead imagery, or moving up to the more warfighting functions like electromagnetic warfare or even orbital warfare and so it's interesting when we look at NATO, there's a discussion that is ongoing right now of whether or not space will go the way of cyber or whether it will go the way of nuclear. And by that, I mean, NATO is a nuclear alliance. There's three nations that have nuclear weapons, a handful of other nations that operate U.S. nuclear weapons.

But as an alliance, they have a coherent framework to talk about nuclear stuff and the escalation from conventional to nuclear as opposed to cyber, which is very sensitive and very classified. And so you may ask a nation,’Hey, can you turn the power off in that building from 10 to 2 on Tuesday? And they'll say, sure, just don't ask how I did it.’ And so everybody's got their stuff, but they all keep it close hold and secret to themselves.

 And so ideally, we would hope that the space conversation and NATO would go the way of that kind of nuclear conversation, where it just is the reality that NATO is a space alliance. It has a space component to it. There are some countries that have more advanced capabilities than other countries, but we have to be able to talk about that in a coherent way across the entire alliance and incorporate that into our exercises.

06:04 - 06:09

Can you give an example of how NATO needs to talk about space more like nuclear, instead of the way it talks about cyber?

06:10 - 08:35

I think there are subsets of the space mission that are obviously going to stay very classified, and rightfully so. But there's a huge swath of it that we could be talking more freely about. 

A specific example, when I was at the U.S. mission to NATO back in 2014 and Russia had annexed Crimea, my NGA colleague would come by and we were having this big discussion at the time about whether those were ‘little green men,’ right? So there was this big discussion about whether those people and that equipment were Russians.

And my NGA colleague would come by and he'd say, ‘Hey, here's this image. Would this be good to show to NATO?’ It's very clearly Russian equipment, very clearly Russian soldiers with uniforms. We say, ‘Yeah, that'd be great.’ And he said, ‘Well, I can't give it to you because it came off of some sensitive classified system.’

But then he would pick up the phone and call whatever the company was at the time and run his credit card and say, ‘Hey, at this date, time stamp at this geographic location, what do you have?’ And they would obviously have a very similar image, which was good enough that we could buy and then feed into NATO.

It's frustrating that we have to go buy commercial, the same product that we already have available that we want to share with our allies and partners, but we can't because of restrictions. But it's good that we have commercial assets that are out there that are available, which gets into at the Hague Summit recently, they published a commercial space strategy that largely mirrors the one that U.S. Space Force and the U.S. Department of Defense have put out, which looks to do a couple of things. 

One: how do they build a front door analogous to the one that Space Systems Command has in Los Angeles that allows industry to effectively engage NATO to understand what the requirements are, and contribute creative and innovative solutions that would meet those requirements.

They're looking at a commercial integration cell in their operations center, similar to the one that we have at the CSPOC at Vandenberg. And so pulling those commercial providers who have similar capabilities and different systems that provide resilience and redundancy for us: how do you incorporate those into your warfighting structures? 

And then they're looking at a similar model to what we call CASR, which is commercial augmentation of space. How do you have surge capacity if you need it on demand, where you've pre-negotiated these relationships with commercial providers? And if your sovereign national systems are impacted somehow, whether it's environmental, whether it is an act of war - how do I surge additional capacity leveraging preexisting relationships with commercial providers. So that document lays out those ambitions going forward.

I think it's good to pull together the commercial alongside the national sovereign, that it will contribute to the whole capability that NATO needs.

08:36 - 08:46

Now, in light of NATO’s commercial space strategy - what kind of architecture, if any, does NATO have in space? And how are they looking to acquire future space capabilities? 

08:47 - 11:06

NATO doesn't own or operate anything, NATO is a collection of assets that nations present to NATO, sometimes permanently and sometimes just in a time of war when they've been asked to. And so it is not like NATO is going to go buy anything at the NATO level.

There are times when they use common funding to collectively procure things, but in general, it is the nations who buy things and bring them together and so we need a coherent framework to inform the trade offs. 

A good example is space domain awareness. Everybody needs a little space domain awareness, but I don't need 32 nations across NATO all building their own space domain awareness picture, that would be horribly inefficient from an alliance perspective. 

And so if it is the case that a handful of nations could get together and build a coherent space domain awareness picture, merging both national sovereign and commercial capabilities together into a coherent framework, then providing that to the rest of the alliance. Then it frees up the other allies to focus on other things, whether it's overhead imagery or whether it's electromagnetic warfare capabilities.

And so there’s opportunities here and there's a couple of initiatives that they're working on right now that are in kind of nascent phases. But one is called THOR, which is to say, ‘Hey, here's an operational picture, here's a scenario that we have to be able to respond to, and how much of what types of stuff does it take to respond to that?’

And then turning that into what, in U.S. parlance, we would call a joint urgent operational needs statement that you can then feed out to the allies and say, ‘Hey, can any of you contribute some or all of this capability to meet this need as a way of jump-starting the longer term NATO defense planning process.’ And here there's a four year cycle in NATO called the NATO Defense Planning Process.

There's a document called Political Guidance, which is signed out every four years. That translates. It goes to Allied Command Transformation in Norfolk. They do some modeling and simulation, and they produce a pool of forces and capabilities called the Minimum Capability Requirement, which is a package of all these targets that are then apportioned to allies. And then there's both qualitative and quantitative aspects to those capability target packages that are given to the allies. And then every year they are held to account on ‘How are you doing on delivering on your assigned capability targets?’ 

Today, there are not space capability targets, but that is something that they know they need to get to over the next period of time to provide that overarching framework that would allow us to collectively procure and field the right types of systems to meet the collective need.

11:07 - 11:13

Now, when we’re talking about space stuff or a space architecture - what exactly are we referring to? 

11:14 - 13:18 

It's all the things that take to build a coherent space force. So it's the ground segment. It's the on-orbit segment, the electromagnetic spectrum and it is pulling all those things together. And so the way that I would tend to think about it would be by mission area.

So if you thought about missile warning missile track, right? So the U.S. contributed the early phase adaptive approach, which became NATO's ballistic missile defense, which was a composition of the Tipee Two Radar in Turkey, the Aegis Afloat down in the Mediterranean and the Ageis Ashore system in Romania as a coherent package of things that we presented. And it became the backbone of NATO's missile defense architecture in the same way as we think about building out other mission areas. We've got to have the connection between the systems. 

One of the reasons why NATO makes security cooperation easier on the space front or broader cooperation easier. They have a classification that they've all agreed to. They've got networks that they've all agreed to, but they also have something called standards. There's a thing called STANAGS, which is standards and agreements. This is a foundational thing that when we build these sorts of things, we're going to make sure that they work together. 

The easiest example is ammunition, right? So NATO developed a standard size of ammunition because up until then everybody kind of had their own caliber. And the idea was if we're out on the battlefield together and you get taken out, that I can pick up your ammunition and stick it in my gun and it will work, because we all use the same size and caliber of ammunition.

And in the same way, for example, on-orbit servicing or refueling as a mission area that's coming out in the near future, right? If my nozzle for my refueling, if your thing is going to come refuel mine, what is the configuration of my nozzle that it's going to have to hook up to? What type of fuel am I using? What's the frequencies that we're communicating on?

Where we have the ability to kind of standardize across NATO - some of these design configurations, not to prescribe specific solutions but to say, ‘Hey, so that we ensure that we are interoperable on the back side and we don't have to figure out how to build the calculator that connects your system with my system. Let's all build to common standards that we can agree on ahead of time.’

So this is another area that NATO can provide great value is: articulating what the standards could be as you think about designing and developing and fielding space-based systems.

13:18 - 13:26

Now for industry partners looking to support NATO - or a NATO country - how should they view opportunities for providing that space product or service?

13:27 - 14:39

Well now is an extremely exciting time for commercial providers to think about NATO, specifically as a result of the Hague Summit, right? So there was a defense investment pledge that was agreed at the Whales Summit in 2014 which said, ‘If you're below 2%, you should aim to move towards 2% within a decade.’ And here at the recent Hague Summit, that got bumped up to 5% total, three and a half on the things that were covered under the previous 2%.

And so there's a significant influx of defense investment that's being made, and a portion of that is going to be spent on space. And if you wanted to quickly absorb some of that increased investment, one of the easiest way to do that is with commercially available space stuff. Now building a system and defining requirements and working with industry to field your own sovereign system is something that is very expensive and takes years, if not decades to build out.

But commercially available stuff is available today. And so for those nations that are looking to invest significantly in the near term there's opportunities out there for commercial providers to kind of seize this moment where there's this increased investment to articulate how the capabilities you're bringing to the table meet those collective deterrence and competition and, if necessary, conflict needs in useful ways. The time is now, and there's a huge opportunity.

14:40 - 14:53

But it’s not just NATO that is facing a space-based threat in their region. There’s also China, which is emerging as a space power in the much broader Indo-Pacific theater.

How would you describe the countries in this region and how they think about space?

14:54 - 17:47

China is investing significantly in growing their military base capabilities significantly whether it's from space or to space and so we've got a variety of different nations across the Indo-Pacific AOR that are at different levels of maturity, particularly as it relates to national security space.

So I'll start with Australia. Australia is a member of Five Eyes. They're a member of what's called Operation Olympic Defender, which is the highest level of cooperation with the U.S. It's a named operation under U.S. Space Command. And so we see them investing significantly with real capabilities. They have phenomenal geography and are willing partners with the U.S. and so we've had a great relationship with Australia going back many years.

New Zealand is another nation. A member of Five Eyes, recently joined Operation Olympic Defender. Their national security space apparatus is still nascent, but their commercial sector is pretty amazing.

They are on the cutting edge in a lot of ways, and so we have a good relationship on the commercial side. But the military side is growing and developing. They're active members of the joint commercial office and again, are starting to figure out what it means to be part of Olympic Defender. 

We've got two countries in the region that are unique in Japan and Korea. And I say they're unique because we have entire headquarters dedicated to those countries alone. So when you think about the U.S. Space Force footprint: we've stood up component field commands, which are the U.S. Space Force components to a geographic or functional combatant commander. And so there's a Space Force Indo-Pacific that's in Hawaii that covers the entire AOR. 

But we have a Space Force component headquarters in Yokota, Japan and a Space Force Korea headquarters at Osan Air Base. And so to have individual headquarters dedicated to those individual countries is unique, and it gives us an opportunity to go very deep with those individual nations and say, ‘What is it you're trying to do?’

So, for example, with Japan, we know that they are heavily focused on space situational awareness, position navigation and timing, missile warning - missile track. And so we have opportunities to come alongside them and partner with them and warning missile track is an interesting one.

Obviously the Japanese are concerned, whether it's North Korea launching things over their island on a regular basis or the Chinese threat. And so they're interested in developing a national sovereign capability, but they would be interested in being part of a bilateral cooperation with the United States on that system. 

But they also look to Golden Dome, and they're very interested in ‘What does Golden Dome mean? What does that system ultimately going to look like?’ And they would like to be part of that overarching solution. And they have some very advanced technology and are good partners in that regard snd we've worked with them closely on things in the past. 

And then in the same way, Korea has got similar interests and missile warning missile track is obviously a big concern for them, and so we're actively working with them as they continue to grow and develop their thinking on ‘What does it mean to operationalize the space domain?’ Pulling them into exercises and cooperating in real time.

17:48 - 18:03

It seems to me you describe the Indo-Pacific in two groups: Australia and New Zeland in one group, and Japan and Korea in another. 

To varying degrees, each of these countries are allies to the United States. But can you compare and contrast the differences between these Indo-Pacific allies? 

18:04 - 20:06

They have similar threat vectors that have similar challenges, but their physical geography certainly makes a difference. I would add in there, besides those two that you mentioned, another category that we think about is the ASEAN region.

So those are your Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam. That's another group of nations that we have relationships with. I think one of the challenges when we think about the Indo-Pacific, that if I contrast it with the European theater. The European theater has a NATO and it has an EU, and we can engage a bunch of nations who have a similar thought process on things at the 32 level from a NATO perspective. 

All of our relationships across the Indo-Pacific are primarily bilateral relationships, and that makes it more challenging to come up with comprehensive approaches. And there's historical animosity sometimes between those partners where from a U.S. perspective, it'd be nice if we can get these 2 or 3 countries together and to share in information and to deal with common threats in the same way, but they have historic reasons why cooperating with each other is not on the table and we respect that. But it just - it makes it more challenging. So a lot of what we end up doing in that region is a lot of bilateral conversations. You think about the ASEAN region as an opportunity to tackle that at the regional level, but the reality is that ASEAN is more of a loose confederation, particularly as it relates to national security space.

I would argue that that part of the world, like a lot of the Global South, which we'll talk about here in a little bit, thinks about space from an environmental monitoring, disaster response and humanitarian assistance lens, that they're not really thinking about it from a national security perspective and so from a U.S. military perspective, it's sometimes challenging to cooperate with them but I think there is an interest there.

And then the other big player in the Indo-Pacific is India. And here, a huge nation, lots of money. Historically a pretty aggressive space power and putting things on the moon and launching things into orbit on a regular basis. But politically they have a policy of non-alignment and they're part of BRICS and so that creates some challenges from a U.S. cooperation point of view. But I know there's ongoing discussions and dialogue, and there's a lot of opportunity with India as a space player, again, because they are investing so significantly and so heavily into that.

20:07 - 20:11

Now, you mentioned that Australia has “phenomenal geography.” What do you mean by that? 

20:12 - 21:38

It's interesting. I was meeting with their attache in DC recently, and he mentioned the fact that Australia is actually wider than the United States, which I didn't realize.

But it's mostly empty, right? So there's a handful of people over here and a handful of people. And then this massive country, I mean, as wide as the United States is largely empty and it's in the southern hemisphere and it's in proximity to whether it's Russia or China or North Korea, those threats. 

I mean, this is from a U.S. perspective, when we think about allied by design and space security cooperation, I mean, one of the challenges we face is if you want a good understanding of the night sky in some part of the world, you have to have the ability, in some cases, to put stuff on the ground to look up at that night sky and the U.S. doesn't own any territory in the vast majority of the world. And so we have to partner with allies, partners and friends. And here when we think about doing those sorts of things, it kind of runs the spectrum. There's three ways to do that. 

One is for a country like an Australia, right? To allow us to put a system in their country. Two is to cooperatively develop something, and three is for them to field a sovereign national system and share the data off of that. And so we see the full range of those things in a country like Australia, with a system like DARC, for example, which is a - it's part of the AUKUS framework to field a system that would be beneficial to all of us and so it's a cooperative development. One of those is based in Australia.

And so again, just unique geography given they are in the Southern Hemisphere and on that half of the world, which we can't replicate no matter how much money we have.

21:39 - 21:43

And can you expand on the different ways countries can engage the United States in the space domain?

21:44 - 23:37

From a US perspective, we have a spectrum of cooperation. The entry point as a space situational awareness sharing agreement. U.S. Space Command has gotten some like 180 now agreements with whether it's nations or organizations around the world. 

And then the next rung up on that ladder is participation in what's called Global Sentinel, which is unclassified. It's kind of an exercise, but not really, where we sit around and go, ‘Hey, based on unclass scenarios and unclass information, here's a threat. What do we think we should be able to do about that?’

That then translates over to Schriever Wargames, which is held at a classified setting. Where we bring in a handful of nations and we have a more in-depth, classified conversation where we talk about what does that look like and what do we need to be able to do in response to specific space-based scenarios?

And then if we move up from there, there's an organization called the Combined Space Operations Initiative or CSpO, which is a handful of nations who've gotten together and said, ‘Hey, we're going to coordinate ourselves on two lines.’ One is the policy and legal framework. There's a conversation about: what are we saying about things in the UN? And how do we talk about it when somebody does something and is a bad actor? How do we use similar language to communicate that consistently across the world?

And then the other one is the operational framework, which gets back to this what NATO provides is: how much of what types of stuff, ‘Hey, is we're collectively thinking about this. What are you guys developing? What are we developing, and how do we ensure that it's interoperable and that we're all getting after the right types of things together?’ And that's more of a discussion forum and meets a couple times a year in different levels. 

And then at the highest level on that spectrum of cooperation would be Operation Olympic Defender, which again is a named operation under U.S. Space Command with a handful of nations. So it's the five nations U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and then recently we added France and Germany.

And so now we're trying to figure out ‘How do I do at the highest level, really sensitive space operations in that environment?’

23:38 - 23:45

In what ways should the commercial space industry be considering opportunities to support our Indo-Pacific allies or even ASEAN countries?

23:46 - 24:50

Obviously, there's some significant investment. I think the Japanese are investing some couple trillion yen, which translates to several billion dollars over the next decade in space. I mean, there's a significant investment in space. There's a recognition of the existential threat from China and in some cases, the pestering threat of North Korea.

They have a reason to invest significantly, specifically in certain mission areas and so if you're in the business of providing those sorts of solutions, that's something that you would find fertile ground. 

I think to be aware of in some of those nations I know, for example, in Japan, there's a big desire to produce things nationally and so they're looking more for licensing agreements and bringing certain capabilities into the country, rather than just buying purely from external sources.

Obviously, they would do that if they have to, but there's a desire to build out fairly robust space economies and space industries, and they are interested in growing and developing those space capabilities themselves. And so an opportunity to partner with one of those national providers to build out whatever the capability is, is probably a more fruitful path to take than trying to bring something in directly from the outside in some cases.

24:51 - 25:04

I’d like to take a step back now and compare the space threat from China in the Indo-Pacific, to the ongoing space threat near Europe with the Russia-Ukraine war. 

Can you describe how each threat is influencing how our allies are responding in their respective regions?

25:05 - 26:56

So China is the potential really bad threat and Russia is the active happening everyday threat. I mean, if you look at the European theater right now, there is PNT and SatCom jamming. There's electromagnetic interference that is actively impacting Europe today, that is being caused by the Russians.

My take on Russia is: Russia believes that they're more resilient than the West, and so they would be willing to foul the entire environment because they believe that their forces would be more resilient to falling back to pre-space days and so that is obviously a big concern and we saw that recently with the discussion about whether or not they had or intended to put a nuclear weapon on orbit.

Again that belies the idea that they think that if they did that, if they exploded a nuclear weapon in low-Earth orbit, it would foul the environment for their stuff, too, and I think it gets to the assumption that they would be more resilient and we would be, which this is an area that people have started thinking deeply about is: ‘How do I not assume that certain capabilities are going to be available? And how do I train and exercise as if those things were going to be degraded or denied, either temporarily or permanently across the AOR? And how do I ensure that we can continue to operate? And so it's kind of a back to basics capability, right? 

So, really it’s where am I in the world? Where are my friends and allies at? Where are the bad guys at? What are they doing and how do I talk to anybody else in the world? If we can blind you and keep you from being able to communicate, that's a pretty powerful thing. It doesn't matter how effective your forces would be otherwise. If they can't see each other and us, and if they can't communicate, it degrades a whole lot of stuff and all that's relying on space being available on the day.

Whether it's the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, they're looking at things about how they would kind of revert back to if things were contested or taken away all together. We have to be able to continue to operate in those environments and so we see that being talked about certainly in think tanks and thought about and exercised in war games, which hopefully we’ll never have to figure that out. 

26:57 - 27:03

Thank you, Brad. And so with that, let’s move over to the Middle East. How would you describe how this region of the world thinks about space?

27:04 - 29:40

I would break the Middle East up into three big buckets. One: the Central Asian states, the CASA region: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, a lot of the former Soviet countries that are over in Southwest Asia region. That's what I'm talking about [with] the Central Asian states, which are analogous to the Global South, which we'll talk about in a minute.

But that is an area for great power competition in being the partner of choice with those nations who in some cases have pretty strong historical backgrounds in space, in some cases part of the former Soviet Union and were critical elements of their space enterprise and so they've got some history and some experience and some industry to do that.

And so we see a competition for influence between whether it's China or Russia and the United States and Europe trying to get in there and be the partner of choice. And so that's one region. 

The next bucket I would describe would be the wealthy Arab nations. Here, I think primarily of Saudi, Qatar and UAE, and they are investing significantly in space. I mean, it's part of their broader movement to diversify away from a fossil fuel-based economy. 

I mean, the McKinsey report, the Space Foundation report, says that the space economy globally will be something like $1.8 trillion by 2035 and so there's opportunities there. You've got to invest significantly in some infrastructure and they're doing that and they also have to build the human capital. And we see visions like Saudi Vision 2030 that lays out an approach to become a cutting edge nation in that regard. And they've got some significant resources to invest in this and, you know, obviously, one of their big threats is the missile threat that they face from Iran.

And then they also are worried about imagery and satellite communications and other technologies and so I think there's an opportunity here to cooperate together to build things that are both beneficial to them and provide some kind of regional framework to think about how to do these things together, because they do face common challenges and contribute to whether it's a regional security structure from a U.S. perspective or global.

Again, go back to Golden Dome. Are there nations over there who could invest significantly in capabilities that would provide meaningful contributions to Golden Dome architecture? Certainly, it just remains to be seen how the U.S. defines that and how they open that up to allies and partners. 

And then the third bucket is an individual nation, which is Israel, which has always kind of been an outlier. In fact, it had been part of the U.S. European Command for years because it was so different from the way we thought about the rest of the Middle East and here we have a country that is very advanced and fully integrated across all the domains and operates in space in a lot of ways like the U.S. does. Again, fully integrating the effects in support of the Army, Navy, Air Force and special operations forces and so we kind of deal with them in a different way than we do the rest of the region in that regard.

29:41 - 29:46

Now, you just introduced us to this concept of being the “Partner of Choice.” What do you mean by that? 

29:47 - 31:41

So under the umbrella of great power competition, which is a way to talk about U.S. and Russia and certainly China, are all kind of vying for the narrative and the lead in the world in certain ways when they get to other areas.

And we'll talk about the Global South, like Africa and South America, those countries are looking to partner with somebody to help them grow and develop because they don't necessarily have the national industry or the history and the experience in doing those sorts of things. And so it's always a U.S. interest to be perceived as the partner of choice, and to have the opportunity to help those nations grow and develop.

Again, it's strategy to task like: so what is the problem you're trying to solve? If it is a ballistic missile threat from Iran, if it is Houthis or Yemeni or whatever, like the specific threat that's facing you, then starting with that and kind of mapping, what are the mission areas that you need and then tracking down to the types of systems that you need.

Do you have the ability to do that on your own, or do you need to partner with somebody else, whether it's the U.S. or other nations that have stuff that's available, and then pulling that all together? Again, I'm looking at this specifically through the national security lens. And so this is part of the conversation I think that we have with these various nations is, ‘Hey, what are your needs? What are your requirements?’

Here, I think of when I was with the government, at one point, we went into a particular nation and they said, hey, we want to do our version of a WGS, which is a big GEO SatCom bird. And we said, ‘Really?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, it's okay.’ Well, we'll go price it out and came back and said it would be a $1.2 billion or whatever.

And they're like, ‘That's, you know, our entire defense budget for the next decade.’ And we're like, ‘Okay, cool. Well, what did you really need?’ ‘Well, I need SatCom. Okay, well there's a lot of ways that you can get after delivering SatCom. You can go field one big juicy target that sits out in GEO, or you could buy into a constellation that's being provided by a commercial provider.

There's different ways to meet those requirements. And so I think, again, starting with defining requirements and then mapping to the mission areas and then the architectures and then flowing down from there looking at what you can do nationally and what do you need to partner with other people outside of whether it's the US or others to field those things.

31:42 - 31:49

Turning again to our industry partners, how should they view opportunities to contribute space products or services to the Middle East? 

31:50 - 32:15

There's a handful of nations that are investing very significantly in space that need a lot of help, that may or may not have the nascent national industry that may be interested in building that industry, or they may just be interested in buying the stuff and the mission areas that are foremost on many of their minds are the kind of missile warning missile track, satellite communication and overhead imagery, satellite ISR sort of stuff and so if you've got that sort of stuff, there's a ripe audience there for people like that.

32:16 - 32:27

This brings us to the Global South, which in this context we’ll be referring to countries in both Africa and South America. So with these two continents in mind, how would you describe their respective relationships with space?

32:28 - 34:47

The Global South, which I again, as you said, I would include the CASA region, which we just talked about in the CENTCOM AOR, but I would include all of AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, and Central American nations. They are looking at space primarily not from a security perspective. They look at it from humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, environmental monitoring, and then the other one: ‘How do I connect my massive population with opportunities in the world by providing satellite communication to connect them in an increasingly globalized and flattened world.

I just need to give them the connectivity and then they can be available to work in whatever environment all over the world and so the nations are looking at that and thinking, ‘How do I connect my populations to those opportunities by providing satellite communication?’ 

I was at a conference in Cairo recently, the new Space Africa Conference, where all the space-faring nations in Africa got together. They have just unveiled the African Space Agency, which is an attempt to provide coherence to that. But they are not worried about space from what we would consider traditional national security perspective. Again, they're focused on it from a more economic security and environmental security. 

In South America. You've got some countries that are significantly investing. And again, I think whether it's there or in Africa, this idea that there's the global space economy is going to be $1.8 trillion by 2035. ‘How do I position myself, my nation, my industry to get our fair share of that?’ 

And here again, geography matters. If you're on the east coast of Africa and you can launch that way, going against the orbit of the Earth and into unique orbits, there may be some opportunities to establish some pretty robust business. We also see from a U.S. security perspective, we've talked historically about having a gap in SDA coverage in the Southern Hemisphere, well Africa and South America happen to be in the Southern Hemisphere.

And so we have opportunities to put sensors there that kind of fill that gap. They also happen to have some, whether it's volcanoes or mountaintops that get above, not much light pollution, there's not much pollution. And you can get up really high with pretty good views of areas that we don't have as robust coverage as we would like, particularly as the threat vectors continue to change like hypersonic glide vehicles.

And so having that coverage is beneficial from a U.S. security perspective. And so we work with those nations and say, ‘Hey, would you be willing to either again, put something there, work with us to field something or you put something there and feed the data to us as a range of cooperation?

34:48 - 34:53

And going back to the “Partner of Choice” concept. How does this apply to Africa and South America, as well?

34:54 - 36:14

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we see Russia to a certain extent, and certainly China is all over the place. Again, I was in Cairo for this conference where the African Space Agency was at, and we were on the compound being hosted by the Egyptian Space Agency. And when you walk out and look at the roof of the Egyptian Space Agency, there's a big white bubble dome. And on it, written in Chinese and English, is brought to you by the Chinese military or Chinese national security or whatever. Interestingly, it wasn't written in Arabic, so I'm not sure who they're messaging, but it certainly wasn't the local population. 

And so we see China is all over the place building these relationships. They're providing things. They're building them and then operating them. Sometimes they're handing them off to the host nation and that hasn't always gone as well as it could be.

But there are also concerns that though the agreements say that they're being used for a certain reason, they could be being used for other reasons to monitor things for their own national security perspective and so we've had concerns about that. The Chinese have put pressure on national governments, who had been partnering with the U.S. and space and U.S. industry in particular, to turn off certain systems in certain countries and so that's been a challenge. And so again, we see this chess match playing out where both sides are trying to establish themselves as a partner of choice in all sorts of nations all across both the African and SOUTHCOM AOR.

36:15 - 36:25

And so what does the formation of the African Space Agency and the Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency reflect about how countries across the Global South are thinking about space?

36:26 - 37:46

They are trying to take every advantage that they can to position themselves and their industry and their governments to be ready to be the provider of choice for those certain capabilities.

And again, sometimes it is literally just where are you at in the world? And can you help close this gap, whether it's a control network or whether it's a launch site, there's going to be money to be made in all sorts of aspects over the next period of time.

For example, at the conference I was at in Cairo, they acknowledged that they've got millions, not billions to invest and space is still hard and it's still expensive and it's still complicated. And so they wanted to have national approaches, but they also want regional cooperation. And they've got different groups within the AFRICOM AOR that they formed where they cooperate together or like the entire continent gets together and says, ‘Hey, if I have a satellite that provides overhead imagery and it's not for national security perspective, it's: this is for environmental monitoring and poaching of wildlife. Why wouldn't we go together if we don't have that much money individually? Why wouldn't we pool our collective resources under some framework to allow us to field that capability?’

If we're trying to connect our youth with a global marketplace by providing satellite communication, each individual nation doesn't need to do that by itself. They can come together and so this is the intent behind the African Space Agency is to try and provide whether it's continental or regional approaches to national problems, and again, collectively pooling their resources to get after them.

37:47 - 38:00

You described these parts of the world as having more civil or commercial motivations for space. But why should the U.S., which also considers national security space priorities, still want to engage these parts of the world to develop their space capabilities?

38:01 - 40:21

In South America, for example, and I mentioned hypersonic glide vehicles. I mean, one of the challenges that we face is that all of our missile defense architecture, and this is one of the things that Golden Dome will be designed to fix is, if you look at it back to the Cold War: we didn't have any radars or any systems that were oriented looking from the South coming into the United States from the southern approaches.

It's Alaska, it's up in the northeast corner of Canada, and it's coming across the pole because if they were going to come, they were going to come that way. Well now, with these highly maneuverable hypersonic glide vehicles, it very easily could come straight up from the South, like there's new orbits that they can take advantage of in a maneuverable asset and so part of this is we're going to have to have something that's looking that direction. 

So it could be the case that we partner with Ecuador or Argentina or whatever and say, ‘Hey, we want to have a sensor here. We're going to help you build it. We want to look up at the night sky.’ But what we're really concerned about is being able to observe those approaches that we haven't historically had to worry about.

Because I mean, the biggest challenge is and this is Golden Dome, but like, it's the on orbit stuff so I can launch something into orbit. But the second I decide I want it to do something as it's flying over the United States. I give it a command. It turns and points down, and you got like two minutes before it makes impact anywhere in the world.

So, like, we don't have anything that can defend against that. We have things they can defend against, like, ‘Hey, we have indications and warnings that they're going to launch something. They're fueling it up. They're standing it up, we monitor all the launch sites, and then when they launch it, we can see where it's at and where it's going, and we track it and we can shoot it down here or there or whatever.’

But this that's on orbit, they can just turn and go pew in two minutes. That's a whole different math problem. Some of these other things. You got to pick up the phone and call the commander in chief or whoever. You don't have time with these other things. You're gonna have to build in pre-decided courses of action and some autonomous decision making to get inside that oodaloop. So this gets back to the access basing and overflight. We're going to have to be able to put stuff in other countries where we don't currently have stuff to fill that gap. 

But we're just not there yet. It's just continue to build a relationship and then being able to put the right types of things in the right places, to be able to close down on our gaps and do something useful for them too. And this is a challenge because again, they don't have the same national security perceptions as we do. They're not as worried about their neighbors doing anything to them and so what we would need and what they would need are very different things.

40:22 - 40:25

And so in light of that: how should industry partners view opportunities across the Global South?

40:26 - 40:54

Certainly in the AFRICOM AOR, it’s a lot of imagery focused things and then it's human capital development. There will be some launch. There's some space domain awareness as far as putting stuff that's able to look up at the night sky telescopes in the like. The SOUTHCOM AOR has got some more robust industry participation, and they've got some interest in growing and developing their own industry and I think launch is going to be a big thing down there that they're trying to grow and develop in other aspects too. But so I think there's opportunity across those mission areas in those regions.

40:55 - 41:11

Now, we just looked at each of these regions around the world and how each one is specifically thinking about space. But to take a step back and look at it from a big picture view: how should we consider all these regions - and their respective approaches to space - from a more global context?  

41:12 - 43:18

I'll start with the Indo-Pacific and say that's the pacing threat, and that's where the country that's advancing the most and so we're the most worried. We've got a handful of nations that are advanced and advancing and investing significantly. And then we've got a loose confederation of a bunch of other nations that aren't as worried about it from a national security perspective.

And so we move over to the European theater. We've got an active space fight that's happening right on their border with the Russia-Ukraine fight. And we see these are the nations that are historically going to be the force providers that step up the most advanced nations that are going to have the most robust militaries, and that are going to come alongside us in any fight that we fight. And so we want to make sure that we're all developing and fielding the right types of things in the right quantities, that we can effectively command and control those things, and that they're highly interoperable from the time that they're fielded, and not trying to figure that out on the fly after the fact.

Central Command region. It's kind of a diverse region. But if I think about particularly the wealthy Arab states, there's an opportunity here where they're advancing, investing significantly to diversify themselves from a focus on hydrocarbons to more robust and diverse economies. They are going to invest significantly in space, and we have an opportunity to have conversations with them about where they're investing and what they're investing in - the whole full range of space missions is something that multiple nations are significantly focused on.

And then in the Global South, whether that's SOUTHCOM, AFRICOM, the CASA region of CENTCOM, or even possibly the ASEAN region, the challenges are not the same. They're not national security focus. They are more on humanitarian assistance, disaster response. They are environmental monitoring and satellite communications focused to connect their people to opportunities all over the world and so they're not focused on it in the same way that we are from a national security perspective.

But that doesn't mean that they're not investing significantly at different scales for their space-based capabilities to position themselves both to meet those needs and also, again, as we've talked a couple of times about everybody's kind of looking at this global space economy as growing exponentially over the next period of time and everybody in their own ways are trying to position themselves to be ready, whether it's at the industry or the national level, to be part of that and to take advantage of that when it does come to fruition.

43:19 - 43:29

And as the Managing Director of Elara Nova’s International Partnerships, how can the consultancy support both these allies and partners around the globe, as well as support the industry partners looking to engage them?

43:30 - 45:34

The biggest challenge, whether it's - NATO's a good example, right? So they know that they need to grow and develop their space thinking and their space architectures. They just don't have the people to do that because the nations don't have them and haven't provided it to them. And so the challenge, like any startup, is how do I get from 0 to 1? How do I get from nothing to something. Once I have something, I can iterate going forward. 

And so here I think Elara Nova has taken the people who've been there and done that in the U.S. government industry, whether it's military, government or the intel community, we've got the people who've been there and done that and so we can bring those people to bear and to kind of help fill that gap.

And we talk about it in three buckets: capabilities, training and administration. So capabilities, based on the missions that you've articulated that you need. So how much of what types of stuff does it take and how do you net that all together into coherent approaches? 

Training can be foundational Space 100 kind of level training. It can be positional based on what mission areas that you're going to do. It can be more high level integration wargaming scenarios as I develop and field space capabilities, ‘How does that influence my other domains? Army, Navy, Air Force, and how do I think about that in a coherent way?’

And then the last one is administration. ‘What's my national space policy? What's my national security space strategy? What is my doctrine?’ And anybody who's ever been in a new organization, it's easy to take the existing thing and modify it and upgrade it. It's really hard for the first wave of people who come in and have to build it from scratch.

And so across all these areas where all these nations are now investing significantly in space, standing up space components, standing up space forces, thinking about space in a different way as they try and map out all the core documents it would take to provide the intellectual framework for doing that.

I think Elara Nova is uniquely positioned because we have the people who've literally been there and done that, and with the U.S. Space Force and the U.S. Space Command to come alongside and to provide that guidance and assistance.

So we think we're very uniquely postured to be able to provide that support. And we're having very exciting conversations with a variety of, again, nations and organizations all over the world and we're looking forward to having more of those and being able to come alongside and help nations as they grow and develop their space capabilities.

45:35 - 46:12

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge. As a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space and aeronautical domains, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in national security.

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. This episode was edited and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge