In a future coalition operation, allies may arrive in the same contested theater with shared intent – but without a way to rapidly pool and control the satellite communications capacity needed to operate together. Will coalition architectures allow them to fight as a single force when timing matters most?
The Space Force’s International Partnership Strategy, released in July 2025, formalized what the service has been building for several years: a coalition force that is Allied by Design. At the Space Symposium last month, U.S. military officials assured allies that international military space cooperation remains a pillar strategy. Lt. General Douglas Schiess, U.S Space Force deputy chief of space operations, was quoted as saying:
“One of the things we have to communicate with our allies is that whatever we are doing together, we are building resilient architectures that can withstand our adversaries. We want redundant capability to go from one to the other.”
What has lagged behind the strategy is a concrete answer to a practical question: how do sovereign allied nations – each with their own national security requirements, management processes, and budget cycles – actually share satellite communications capacity in a crisis? And then swiftly and cleanly separate when the crisis has ended?
That question now has an answer, and it is one worth examining in detail.
Three nations with a common challenge
Looking at what three of our closest Five Eyes partners are navigating right now in space, a clear pattern emerges:
Australia canceled its JP 9102 GEO SATCOM program in November 2024, citing a strategic determination that a single-orbit geostationary system could not meet the resilience demands of a contested space environment. The program, valued at approximately A$7 billion, was not canceled because the requirement went away. It was canceled because the architecture no longer aligned with the mission. Australia is now working through SPA 9102, a market exploration effort aimed at a multi-orbit, sovereign communications capability.
The United Kingdom is investing more than £5 billion in the Skynet 6 program — the largest single government investment in the UK space industry. The program’s stated goals align closely with the Allied by Design philosophy: next-generation UK military SATCOM is explicitly designed to provide services to UK forces, allies, and NATO partners, with member nations offering reciprocal satellite access. Skynet has always operated as a sovereign capability with allied reach, and Skynet 6 is designed to extend that reach further.
The United States Space Force is managing the transition from legacy GEO-wideband capacity while defining what comes next. Two documents Gen. Saltzman released at Space Symposium, the Future Operating Environment 2040 and the Objective Force 2040, answer that question in clear terms. The future force will center on what the documents call a “hybrid by design” architecture: one that is proliferated, resilient, and built to integrate military systems, commercial services, and allied capabilities into a coherent warfighting whole.
Each of these programs is a sovereign decision being made in Canberra, London and Washington. But together, they point to the same architectural conclusion: distributed, resilient, LEO-capable systems that can support coalition operations without sacrificing national sovereignty over critical space capabilities.
What a truly allied LEO architecture looks like
The challenge with allied satellite communications has never been a lack of willingness. It has been one of structure. How do you give each nation sovereign ownership and operational control of its own capacity, while also enabling those capacity pools to be aggregated and managed collectively when a contingency demands it?
A LEO constellation with dedicated sovereign capacity pools can solve this in a way that GEO systems never could. Because LEO coverage is inherently global and dynamic, capacity can be reallocated across geographies in near real time. A nation that holds a dedicated capacity pool on a shared LEO network maintains sovereign control and assured access in peacetime.
When a contingency arises – whether in the Western Pacific, the Arctic, or the Strait of Hormuz – allied partners can bring those individual pools together under a coordinated operational construct, surge capacity toward the area of need, and manage the combined resource as an integrated whole for the duration. When the operation concludes, each nation’s capacity returns to sovereign governance.
This is precisely the kind of operational outcome envisioned by the Allied by Design framework.
Military Ka-band as the interoperability layer
For this construct to work operationally, the underlying network must speak the same language as allied military systems. Military Ka-band (Mil-Ka) spectrum has been used by allied defense organizations for decades and can continue to be leveraged for sovereign capability and coalition compatibility.
In March 2026, Telesat announced that it is adding 500 MHz of Mil-Ka spectrum to its Telesat Lightspeed constellation. This creates a substantial, dedicated military layer integrated directly into a commercial LEO network that was designed from inception to meet defense security, resilience, and performance requirements.
This matters because interoperability at the waveform level is what makes the sovereign capacity pool concept operationally executable, rather than just conceptually appealing. Allied forces arriving at the same network with compatible terminals and shared spectrum standards can begin operating together without the weeks of integration work that have historically complicated coalition communications.
The right industry response – right around the corner
Gen. Saltzman asked the commercial industry to review his blueprint documents and return with productive ideas. My response is this: the Allied by Design framework already has a commercial architecture ready to support it.
A single LEO provider offering dedicated sovereign capacity pools, built on Mil-Ka-interoperable spectrum, with global coverage including the Arctic, gives each Five Eyes partner a sovereign stake in a shared network. Australia’s SPA 9102 assessment, the UK’s Skynet Enduring Capability, and the U.S. Space Force’s evolving wideband capacity requirements are not competing programs. They can be complementary sovereign investments underpinned by a common allied network architecture.
Spacepower, as Gen. Saltzman put it, is the ultimate team sport. The domain is too large and too contested for architectures designed around national isolation. Building the connectivity layer that allows allies to fight together and govern separately is not an undesigned ambition. With the right LEO architecture, it is an option already scheduled to launch soon.
