Diplomats at the multinational body have revealed the revolutionary decision will be made in a December summit in London, which US President Donald Trump will attend. The shock announcement is thought to be an attempt to show a sceptical President Donald Trump how NATO remains relevant. The new policy will formally acknowledge battles can be waged not only on land, sea, air and online, but also in space.
A senior Nato diplomat involved in the discussions, said: ”There is agreement that we should make space a domain and the London summit is the best place to make it official,”
If you don’t control space, you don’t control the other domains either
Former NATO official Jamie Shea
They added the caveat by cautioning that technical policy work is still underway.
NATO diplomats deny the alliance would be on a war footing in space, but admit declaring space for a domain warfare will trigger a debate over whether NATO should eventually use space weapons that can shut down enemy missiles and air defences or shoot down satellites.
NATO currently owns 65 percent of satellites, but China has ambitions for commercial satellites offering everything from high-speed internet on the move to tracking missiles and deployed armies.
Diplomats hope that recognising space as a domain of warfare would perhaps convince Trump that NATO retains an in dispensable role in deterring China’s rise as a military power.
Russia, once a strategic partner for NATO but now viewed as a hostile power, is also a force in space and is one of the few countries able to launch satellites into orbit.
Jamie Shea, a former NATO official and now an analyst at Friends of Europe think-tank, said: “You can have warfare exclusively in space, but whoever controls space also controls what happens on land, on the sea and in the air.
“If you don’t control space, you don’t control the other domains either.”
NATO defence ministers are expected to agree to a broad space policy next week at a regular meeting in Brussels.
However there will be no decision yet to declare space an operational domain of defence.
A second diplomat admitted that while the decision was weighty and had real consequences, it would likely be “a gift to Trump”.
Trump signed a plan earlier this year to create a US Space Force.
The controversial US President used the more recent NATO summit to chastise European allies over defence spending and accused Germany of being a prisoner of Russian energy.
The diplomats hope that the announcement will stave off some of Mr Trump’s anti-Nato anger.
Most important of all will be to decide whether an attack on an allied satellite constituted an assault on the alliance and whether to trigger NATO’s Article 5 collective defence clause.
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