00:00Staying in France, this week the country inaugurated a new Space Command headquarters in the southern city of Toulouse.
00:06President Emmanuel Macron oversaw its opening.
00:09He warned of what he called the brutalization of space warfare.
00:13He also announced an additional 4.2 billion euros in funding for France's military space activities through 2030.
00:20Take a listen to Emmanuel Macron.
00:22After turning the Air Force into the Air and Space Force, we created the Space Command.
00:31That's why we're here.
00:33I wanted to celebrate the operational capacity of our Space Command, which embodies our 2019 space defense strategy.
00:41We also decided to increase funding for space as part of the defense law.
00:45An additional 4.2 billion euros for 2026 to 2030, on top of what had already been allocated.
00:57Well, for more on the militarization of space, we can bring in Mark Hilborn, a senior lecturer in the School of Security Studies at King's College, London.
01:06Good morning. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.
01:10Here.
01:11Now, you are someone who's in the field of security studies.
01:14How much attention does outer space security tend to get?
01:18Is it something that's a growing issue in your field?
01:22It's a growing issue.
01:24It's something I often make the joke that we've been working in a vacuum when we think about space security.
01:29It's something that hasn't really until very recently gained, I think, attention.
01:33And as we see in Ukraine, space has a fundamental part to play in modern warfare.
01:38So certainly growing in terms of the attention and the budgets.
01:42Can you talk a bit more about what you mentioned in Ukraine?
01:45I mean, how are we seeing the interaction between what's happening in space and what's happening on the real battlefield?
01:53I mean, Ukraine is a phenomenal example of what we call sensor-to-shooter capabilities.
01:58The Ukraine has been very good at orchestrating rather than originating a lot of the technology.
02:04So using things like Starlink for both command and control and the piloting, the maneuvering and navigating of UAVs and USVs, you know, surface vehicles, maritime vehicles.
02:17So finding that a number of these space capabilities, as well as imagery, are fundamental, a sort of fundamental backbone to military operations in the current environment.
02:27And are we seeing Russia sort of fight back in any way?
02:31I mean, has this, the battle, you know, what happens in space is impacting the battlefield.
02:35Have we seen the battle sort of moving into space in any way?
02:38Well, there isn't a, let's say, a war in space, but there is things like, and constant efforts of jamming and other kind of what we might call sub-threshold capabilities,
02:51where a state might try to dazzle or to spoof a signal coming from a satellite, so to reduce the efficiency or effectiveness.
03:01That doesn't mean there can't be a shooting war in space or, you know, an all-out confrontation in space, but so far we haven't seen that.
03:07One of the problems is, as soon as you start any kind of confrontation, you risk a kind of shooting war in space, and that creates debris,
03:16and that, of course, doesn't suit anybody, any space operators.
03:19So you have to be very cautious about taking any of those kind of actions in space.
03:23But we constantly see these sub-threshold activities, whether they're cyber attacks or, as I said, spoofing and jamming on a wide scale.
03:32So we've seen GPS signals, for instance, jammed, which is affecting civilian flights across Europe.
03:39So these are a fairly frequent activity that Russia's undertaking.
03:44Do you think that we're going to see more of that, and that it's going to come, and, you know, as you said, it can impact flights?
03:49I mean, there are a lot of satellites floating around in space that have civilian uses.
03:53Do you think it's something that regular people are going to be feeling more impacted by?
03:58Potentially. I mean, I think as we rely more on space, we'll find that any attack on space will fundamentally impact what we do.
04:08Things like the GPS systems, the GNSS systems globally, like Galileo and then GPS, they are so fundamental to so many things that we do,
04:17that any kind of attack on those, disrupting those signals, can have an impact on banking and stock exchanges, things like our electricity grids.
04:24All of these rely on the timing signal that come from these GNSS-type systems, and any kind of attack on those and jamming those can have fundamental effects.
04:36So we may well see, you know, many things that we take for granted all the way through, as I said, from the stock market to your pizza delivery guy.
04:44You know, all of these rely on the signal from space, and it's relatively vulnerable.
04:50So quite possibly we could see further attacks, and that could impact our daily lives.
04:57And as you mentioned, you know, the financing that countries are putting into space, security is increasing.
05:04What do you think of the plan laid out by Emmanuel Macron this week, and how does France compare to other countries?
05:09Well, France has a, you know, a mature capability in terms of many aspects in terms of space, in terms, you know, there's launch, there's a satellite building and ground stations.
05:21But France and Europe more widely doesn't yet quite function at the full level of the major competitors like the US or China or Russia in terms of an integrated space capability.
05:32But we are starting to, the recognition by Macron, and I think the EU generally have looked at space and are recognizing space as a strategic domain.
05:42We're starting to see space, you know, it's always been a bit of a taboo to put weapons in space, and the main treaties try and limit that.
05:50But increasingly, we talk about space as a strategic domain or an operational domain, or even a domain of war fighting.
05:56So we're starting to see this creep in. So there's a kind of reality that we need to take defensive action in space.
06:03And so France, with this recent move, and the European Union, they're starting to recognize a number of ways of looking at space.
06:11In 2023, there was the EU Space Strategy for Security and Defense, which laid out a number of key areas of action.
06:18But one of the problems we have, you know, the French plan, we also have the EU, and of course, then we have NATO.
06:23So there's this fragmentation, and the number of levels, in terms of Europe's space and the defensive space, becomes a problem.
06:33There's many states, there's many different agencies, national programs, there's different priorities, different procurement, and different industrial bases.
06:42And so that can slow down the decision-making process and affect the kind of scale economies that, say, the US, for instance, enjoys.
06:50So from a French-European perspective, there's that capability gap, which is because of the complications of multiple layers, that becomes difficult to amalgamate.
07:01But nonetheless, you know, France and Europe more generally have all the capabilities there.
07:08It's kind of unifying and amalgamating them and making them work is one, I think, is the key difficulty.
07:13And just sort of concretely, what does defensive action in space look like?
07:18I mean, what's this money actually going towards?
07:22Well, there's a number of ways, I suppose, that you have to think of defensive action.
07:27It can be quite broad.
07:28Like, for instance, the sovereign access to space, you're no longer reliant on another actor.
07:33So we've seen the US, for instance, in a number of different ways, change its kind of support for different actors.
07:42So you want to make sure that you have the sovereign access, whether it's launchers, satellites, or ground systems, and minimize the reliance on other players.
07:52But things like hardening satellites and ground infrastructure, so you're protecting against the kind of things I mentioned before, like jamming, or spoofing, or cyber intrusion, or things like directed energy weapons like lasers.
08:07You know, it's notable that in the Ukrainian conflict, the first strike, if you will, was a cyber attack on the Vyasat satellites upon which Ukraine relied for its satellite communication.
08:17So it's hardening against those kind of things.
08:20And other things like what we call space domain awareness is actually just being able to track and see and characterize what's in space.
08:28So we know what's up there, and we know who is maybe doing things that they shouldn't be doing.
08:35And also things like developing redundancy and backup systems.
08:38These are all important.
08:39When we're thinking of defending against space, it's not necessarily blasting someone else's satellite.
08:44You know, there's many, many things that we can do in terms of redundancies to help deter or shake off a kind of attacking space.
08:53It's a fascinating topic, and I'm sure we'll be talking about it much more in the future.
08:57Mark Hilborn, thank you again so much for joining us this morning.
09:00That was Mark Hilborn, a senior lecturer in the School of Security Studies at King's College London.
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