The New French Space Military Command

Article by Jean-Claude Vecchiatto                                                January 11 2021                                               (lexology.com)

• France, as most nations of the world, duly ratified the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which propounds that space exploration shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes. Today, however, space plays a central role in all human and economic activities – with satellites controlling civil or military data, GPS, telecommunication and observation. Several nations, including the US, the UK and Italy now consider space to be a distinct military domain.

• Seeing how technological assets in space are now vulnerable to cyber threats, electromagnetic jamming, kinetic (anti-satellites missiles) and more, and with recent hostile actions in space – from the destruction of a foreign satellite with a ballistic missile to an unfriendly approach of a French satellite by a space object of another country – France has decided to recognize space as a distinct domain too, just as land, sea, and air.

• On September 11, 2020, the French Air Force became the French “Air and Space Force”, incorporating a Space Military Command that will work in ‘close coordination’ with the French space agency, CNES, to provide space service support, operations support, and active space defense. The new organization will fall under the French Ministry of Defense, and operate at the direction of the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces.

• The French MoD plans to assign 500 military and civil personnel to the Space Military Command, and to eventually build a ‘Space Lab’ to foster innovation and international cooperation in space.

• The French Space Command joins other emerging nation’s military space commands such as the US Space Force and the UK Space Command (see previous ExoArticles here and here). The Italian military will soon unveil its own space command.

The defense sector has always been at the forefront of technological developments: national Air Forces were created in most countries at the beginning of the 20th Century, soon after the first flight of an heavier-than-air machine by the Wright Brothers, and just before WWI.

Several nations (including the United States, which created the United States Space Force in 2019, the UK (see below) and Italy) now consider that space should become a separate military command.

On 11 September 2020, the French Air Force has become the French “Air and Space Force”. This name change has been accompanied by a modification of the logo of the Air Force and by the implementation of a new organisation of the Ministry of Defense (MoD).

The creation of a Space Military Command has been initiated to react to several hostile actions in space recorded in the recent years, from the destruction of a satellite with a ballistic missile to the unfriendly approach of a French satellite by a space object of another country.

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