Why Space is so Important to Defence Now
Space has long mattered to defence, but its significance now extends far beyond the military use of satellites alone. Modern societies depend on space-enabled systems for communications, navigation, timing, financial networks, transport, emergency response and critical infrastructure. Armed forces rely on many of those same services to operate effectively across every domain. That shared dependence has changed the nature of the issue. Space is no longer simply a source of military advantage. It has become part of the wider civil and strategic foundation on which both national resilience and defence readiness rest.
NATO now explicitly describes space as essential to the Alliance’s deterrence and defence, while the European Union’s space strategy frames space as critical to security, defence and strategic autonomy.
Ukraine made the lesson impossible to ignore
Ukraine did not create this trend, but it made it undeniable. A recent RAND study for U.S. Space Command and the U.S. Space Force found that the war highlighted the value of satellite communications, PNT and ISR, while also exposing vulnerabilities such as GNSS jamming and cyberattacks against commercial satellite providers. It concluded that future conflicts are likely to feature disruption of key space services, and that commercial space services bring both value and vulnerability. The lesson from Ukraine is not simply that space helps. It is that the side able to secure access, exploit commercial capability and continue operating through interference gains a significant advantage.
That is why defence organisations now talk less about access alone and more about assured access, resilience and freedom of action. The UK Space Command keynote at DSEI 2025 put it bluntly: passive resilience is no longer enough. The speech argued that defence now requires persistent domain awareness, credible protection of assets, faster acquisition and much stronger use of the commercial industry. A few years ago, that language would have sounded unusually assertive. Today, it reflects the reality that space systems are both mission-critical and vulnerable.
The orbital environment itself is becoming a risk
There is a second reason this debate has sharpened. The space environment is becoming harder to operate in safely. ESA’s 2025 Space Environment Report states that about 40,000 objects are now tracked in orbit, while the estimated number of debris objects larger than 1 centimetre exceeds 1.2 million. In 2024 alone, several fragmentation events added more than 3,000 tracked objects in a single year. This is not just a sustainability issue for civil regulators. It is a mission-assurance issue for defence, insurers, satellite operators and governments alike. Any force that depends on orbital services must now care deeply about congestion, debris and responsible behaviour in orbit.
That concern is already feeding into policy and procurement. In July 2025, the UK Space Agency launched a £75.6 million tender for an active debris removal mission, framing it as a step toward protecting the infrastructure supporting GPS, weather forecasting, and emergency communications. That matters because it shows how quickly orbital sustainability has moved from a technical issue to a strategic capability. Defence and commercial actors are increasingly operating in the same risk environment and will need to invest together in keeping it usable.
Commercial space has moved from supplier to strategic actor
The most important change for both defence and industry may be this: commercial space is no longer adjacent to defence. It is now embedded in it. NATO endorsed a Commercial Space Strategy in February 2025 to improve how it leverages commercial data, products and services. The UK Strategic Defence Review similarly argues that resilience in military space systems will increasingly be delivered through commercial systems and that space should be treated as a priority dual-use technology portfolio. The House of Lords Space Committee made a related point from an industrial perspective, urging the UK to focus on technologies that meet defence needs while also supporting commercial growth.
That carries a practical message for both sides of the market. Defence ministries and primes should stop treating space capability as a small number of exquisite platforms procured on decade-long cycles. They need hybrid architectures, proliferated systems, faster contracting, stronger ground-segment security and credible plans for operating in a degraded environment. Commercial firms, meanwhile, should stop pitching performance alone and start pitching assurance. The companies that will matter most to defence are those able to offer resilience, interoperability, trusted supply chains, secure data handling and delivery at pace. That is now where strategic relevance sits.
The real question now
The real question is no longer whether space matters to defence. It does, decisively. The question is whether defence institutions, governments and commercial providers are reorganising fast enough around that fact. Those that treat space as a central layer of warfighting, resilience and industrial strategy will be better placed to deter, absorb disruption and recover at speed. Those who still treat it as a niche will find themselves strategically exposed. The time for admiring space from a distance has passed. The task now is not to recognise the importance of space, but to organise around it; which is precisely why focused forums such as Counterspace will matter in the years ahead.