Prague: While progress has been made toward better transatlantic cooperation, top brass from Europe’s four largest military space operators say there is still a ways to go in working out how Europe and the United States will jointly respond to growing threats from Russia and China.

“I think that we are in the right path, creating synergies and optimising systems and capabilities together,” Col Giuseppe Gentile, chief of the Space Policy and Innovation Branch, Space Policy Office, at the Italian Defence General Staff, said on June 17 during the 7th Annual Prague Space Security Conference.

“What we should do better is try to define a way [toward] collective response to the new kind of threat that could develop,” he said. “We should agree also on some important definitions of what is the threat, what is our responsibility? Once we are agreed on that, then we can move forward to a collective response.”

Another concern, he said, is to avoid wasting time and money on duplication in building new military capabilities.

“We need to … be synchronised in what we are aiming to develop for the future. We have to synchronise the effective operations,” Gentile said.

Maj Gen Paul Tedman, who has been chief of UK Space Command for only about three weeks, agreed that the end goal must be a cohesive set of operational plans for how the Western allies will fight together in space, including for command and control (C2) of forces.

“I think we need an integrated plan that we will recognise, we need simple and clear C2, so we know how we’re going to fight with who, and we do need to exercise or test those plans regularly so that we can build trust. I think trust is an important word that I will leave you with,” he told the conference sponsored by the Prague Security Studies Institute.