Western militaries are speeding up their use of commercial space services as private firms deliver capabilities in months, not years.
Military space has long relied on a few highly capable, highly protected and expensive satellites. Commercial low Earth orbit communications, imaging, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), radio frequency sensing and analytics are now changing the cost and availability of these services.
“NATO must operate at two speeds: assured military capability where necessary, commercial speed and scale wherever possible,” said Dr Dylan Browne, general manager of the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA). “We must bring those two speeds together in a single resilient operational service architecture.”
“They are delivering new capabilities in months rather than years or decades,” he said. “They are building infrastructure at scale that individual defense organizations would struggle to replicate independently.”
Private investors are pouring money into launch, satellite communications, ground infrastructure, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and software-defined networks.
Browne said NATO’s advantage in space will not be measured by the number of satellites in orbit. He said it will depend on the alliance’s ability to access, integrate and sustain the services those satellites provide.
NCIA has set up two sandboxes, the NATO Digital Foundry and the NATO Software Factory, to fast-track commercial capability.
They help off-the-shelf systems gain accreditation for defense use. Each system is tested for how it performs under stress, what operational dependencies it carries and how far its geographic coverage can scale, along with the contractual and technical arrangements NATO needs to use it.
“For NATO, this creates a fantastic opportunity. We can procure access to commercial products and services that are complementary to military capabilities, but it doesn’t automatically mean it’s militarily suitable,” Browne said.
He said NATO has updated its acquisition policy to act faster and more efficiently.
“Having come from industry 10 months ago, I was sitting on the industry side of the table. I can recognize how defense and government organizations are not the easiest to deal with,” he said.
NCIA brings together communications, imagery and intelligence services for NATO forces around the clock.
Browne was appointed its general manager last December after serving as a senior executive at Amazon, where he worked on its Kuiper satellite program.
Wartime demand gap
He delivered the opening-day keynote “Two Speeds: Military Meets Commercial” on October 27 at the Defence in Space Conference (DiSC) 2026 in London. The two-day conference, now in its fourth edition, is organized by and for the space and defense industry.
“The aim is not to make every service invulnerable. It’s to make the overall operational capability resilient,” he said. “Commercial plus military increases resilience.”
NATO’s peacetime demand has been predictable, with more than 200 exercises a year in a known area.
“We’re coming from an era where we had lots of time and not so much resource. Now we have a lot of resources but no time,” Browne said. “In a conflict, the pace goes from 200 exercises, some tabletop, some real world, into a sustained operation. That has a very different implication for what we buy and how we buy it.”
In a war, deployed users multiply, demand for satellite communications rises sharply and the volume of imagery and intelligence data expands. He said this was seen during Operation Epic Fury, the US campaign against Iran launched in February.
Dedicated military capacity is essential, but keeping enough in reserve is costly. Commercial capacity is not guaranteed in a crisis either, as it is limited by geography, shared with other customers and exposed to weak points in ground infrastructure, networks and cloud services.
“During the crisis, multiple allies may end up competing for the same resources,” he said. “NATO does not simply need more bandwidth or imagery. We need a stronger dialog, and this is the difference between commercial availability and operational assurance.”
Browne said NATO’s contracts for space-enabled services must set out:
How much capacity it may need tomorrow, not just today
How quickly extra capacity can be switched on
How access is prioritized
How service levels hold up under contested conditions
He also wants deployed communications to work more like commercial networks.
A NATO command post today still needs a lot of physical equipment, specialist staff and manual setup, and NATO has opened a new signals battalion to support it. Industries such as energy and automotive rely on automation and centralized tooling instead. Commercial technology offers software-driven provisioning, automated network management, dynamic capacity and real-time monitoring.
“Why should deployed military communications remain fundamentally different? My ambition is to make deployed NATO communications as simple to access as they are resilient to operate,” he said.
Browne said future systems should configure themselves or centrally select a communications path using policy rules. Drawing on lessons from Ukraine, NCIA plans to implement zero-trust security that authenticates users by location and role, checking who needs access, how, when and where.
Integration over platforms
He said NATO risks building an extraordinary collection of capable services that cannot work together.
“A satellite image that arrives too late is of limited value. An intelligence product that cannot be shared across security domains may never reach the commander who needs it at the moment it’s needed,” he said.
Services often come with different interfaces, data formats and security arrangements, so he called for open interfaces, documented application programming interfaces (APIs), common data standards and automated service orchestration. NCIA has created a chief data officer role that builds on NATO standardization agreements (STANAGs).
By 2028, NCIA will support more than 50 operational sites across the alliance, and its own workforce will reach 5,000.
The former Amazon executive urged suppliers to team up, making it easier for end users to get results. He said NATO, in return, must give industry a clearer demand signal so companies can justify the cost of bidding.
“Don’t come to NATO for just a satellite terminal, a sensor or a particular platform. I want you to come with an operational service mindset that thinks about integrated architecture,” he said. “NATO must become a better customer. We must communicate requirements clearly, reduce complexity and make faster decisions.”
He asked companies to hold NATO to that in pre-solicitation materials and bidders’ conferences, saying technology will not slow down to accommodate its procurement processes.
Browne tied the push to NATO’s “block, blunt, break” theory of victory.
Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) Gen. Alexus Grynkewich set out the theory at the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12. He said space services support each step:
Block: intelligence, surveillance and early warning help NATO anticipate a threat and stop an initial attack
Blunt: resilient communications and positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) help commanders sustain operations and blunt an advance
Break: integrated intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), communications and data services support operations against the enemy’s warfighting system
Space is also increasingly contested. Communications can be jammed, navigation spoofed, ground stations attacked and digital services disrupted by cyberattacks, as the war in Ukraine has shown.
“We cannot achieve this through exquisite military capabilities alone. We need the commercial sector,” Browne said.
NCIA will host NATO Edge 26, its flagship industry conference, in İzmir, Türkiye, on November 17 to 19, where Browne expects industry delegates to work with the agency.