The Pentagon is nearing the final touches on a new strategy focused on international space cooperation, with the department’s lead policy official citing increased work with allies and partners on space efforts as a “game changer” to “raise the deterrence threshold.”
John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told reporters on Friday the new strategy is “at least a month” away from being completed, and would hopefully be released “in the next few months.”
“Most of our space systems are, in many ways, intermingled. So if you have allies working together and you have geography working together and you’re cooperating, then the question is can you make it so you can’t just attack one country but rather you’re attacking a number of allies, even with the same attack. That is a very different problem set. So we’re trying to make it more complex to try to avoid that conflict,” Plumb said during a Defense Writers Group discussion.
Plumb earlier this week rolled out the Pentagon’s first Commercial Space Integration Strategy, which outlined priorities for pursuing commercial solutions and described the national security space mission areas where these capabilities have a role (Defense Daily, April 2).
The strategy aims to bolster ongoing efforts within DoD to better leverage commercially-developed capabilities for space missions, particularly noting commercial industry’s ability to support areas such as space access, mobility, and logistics, and potentially in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing.
Of the forthcoming international space cooperation strategy, Plumb said his office is “putting some final tweaks on it,” to include incorporating recent feedback from Space Force.
“I do think it’s on the right track. And I think it will be very useful and hopefully a tight set of overarching directives to the department on what to go after to try to get some priority lists so that people understand this is a big deal,” Plumb said. “But it’s not like on the deputy [defense secretary’s] desk or anything, but it’s getting closer.”
Plumb was asked on Friday whether connecting a growing number of space systems together with more allies and partners could increase the potential for an adversary to take out more capabilities with a single attack.
“So I don’t want to confuse cooperating with reducing resilience. What we do want is to be resilient. I think adding allies and partners makes us more resilient…but that also makes adversary planning more complex because you now have more targets,” Plumb said.
Plumb cited Japan as a specific case of the U.S. growing space cooperation with an international partner, noting that Tokyo joined the Combined Space Operations Initiative in December.
“Our depth of cooperation with Japan on space continues to increase,” Plumb said. “We need to work deeper. I will say, with Japan, on information sharing, we do have classification issues and we have to make sure that the more sensitive information can be better protected…And so we are working on that together. But there is no question in the minds of really any space leaders in the department that Japan is part of that future.”
Plumb noted the classification issue is not unique to Japan and has to be worked across the board with other countries, and also cited cyber security as “almost a bedrock requirement” when it comes to deepening cooperation with international partners.
“One of the limiting factors with doing allied cooperation in space is the ability to share classified information,” Plumb said.
After serving as the inaugural assistant secretary of defense for space policy, Plumb is set to step down from his role next month and told reporters on Friday he does not have a set plan in place yet for his next role after leaving the Pentagon.