Sept. 24—Two conferences convened over the last two weeks to discuss military presence and operations in orbital space. Though there was apparently no direct connection between them, there was a common theme expressed at both events: Space is now considered, at least by Global NATO, to be a war-fighting domain.

“The rule-based international order in space is nearly over,” Brig. Gen. Jürgen Schrödl, a division head with responsibility for space at the German Ministry of Defense’s strategy and operations department, declared at the Space Defense and Security Summit in Paris Sept. 16, reported Defense News. “We have to accept that space is a tested domain, is a war-fighting domain, is becoming a war-fighting domain.”

According to Defense News, the consultancy Novaspace, the organizer of the Paris conference, has assembled data that show governments spend more money on military space than they do on civilian space activities. Of the $73.1 billion in global government spending on space defense and security in 2024, more than a third was classified, the consultancy says. “What you see is that it is now the military domain that is leading,” Hermann Ludwig Moeller, director of the European Space Policy Institute, told Defense News. “This is really clear compared to last year; the language and what is behind the language has shifted.”

All of this is being blamed on Russia and China. “Space is a really fully operational domain, we talk about warfighting in space,” said Maj. Gen. Vincent Chusseau, commander of French Space Command. Chusseau claimed Russia has a full range of capabilities, from satellites for rendezvous and proximity operations and orbiters that pack smaller satellites like a Russian doll, to anti-satellite missiles, electronic warfare, laser dazzling, and cyber-attacks. Meanwhile, China is accelerating its space activities to achieve superiority there, according to Maj. Gen. Isaac Manuel Crespo Zaragoza, space commander for the Spanish Air and Space Force.

Half a world away, Gen. Chance Saltzman, U.S. Chief of Space Operations, speaking Sept. 17 at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference, was complaining that the military’s space surveillance systems are struggling to keep pace with the explosive growth in satellites and space debris, as well as the deployment of anti-satellite weapons by rivals like China and Russia. “We cannot be satisfied if it takes us hours to detect on-orbit activity, and we definitely cannot be satisfied if full characterization of on-orbit events takes weeks and months,” he said, reported SpaceNews. “The longer it takes to update the catalog, the more problematic the issue, the less domain awareness we have.”

“Much of our SDA [space domain awareness] mission set was built for a different era, an era where space was not a war-fighting domain,” Saltzman said. Military and civilian Space Force personnel “are expertly working hard to maintain our awareness of the space domain every single day,” but “we need to increase our manpower, update our training, enhance our tools, rewrite our policies and procedures and do a better job of leveraging our domain data.”