The European Union has for a long time avoided any reference to the military dimension of its first initiatives in space because some of its member states have a neutral status and because others are concerned about not upsetting Washington. But that particular taboo has gone by the wayside now. Of course, the Europeans are not yet (if they ever will be) at the stage of undertaking together, in the name of an ambitious common defence strategy, to set up a space ‘shield’ or an array of satellites for attack and defence. However, the explicit recognition of military and civilian dual use for programmes and space tools is certainly a significant step.

Officially, the door was pushed ajar in 2003. On 19 May, meeting in Brussels, “considering that the different political and security challenges that the European Union must increasingly face make an autonomous European space policy a strategic necessity,” the Foreign Affairs Council recognised the “importance of the space applications and functions needed in order to enhance the EU capabilities to carry out crisis management operations”.

Partly urged on by bold statements from the European Parliament, the EU27 would then make slow but steady progress up until 2007. Under the Germany Presidency of the EU, the Competitiveness Council (single market, industry, research) then recognised that “space technologies are often common between civilian and defence applications and that Europe can, in a user-driven approach, improve coordination between defence and civilian space programmes, pursuing in particular the synergies in the domain of security”.

Highlighting that the space sector “is a strategic asset contributing to the independence, security and prosperity of Europe and its role in the world […] considering that the lack of a common approach of space policy between the member states entails overly high programme costs, considering that crisis management operations as part of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) suffer from a lack of interoperability between the space assets exploited by the member states of the EU,” the Council notes that it is important to allow the use of the Galileo and GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) systems “for security and defence purposes”.

In their June 2008 report to the European Assembly of the Western European Union, Edward O’Hara, the chairman of the Technical and Aerospace Committee, and Giannicola Sinisi, think that this formulation “pretty clearly opens the door to dual applications” of the future European satellite navigation system (Galileo) and the future European Earth and security monitoring system (GMES). They think that that is so even if, in this resolution, the Council of the EU recognises that “the uses made by any military users of Galileo or GMES must be consistent with the principle that Galileo and GMES are civil systems under civil control, and consequently that any change to this principle would require examination in the framework of Title V-TEU and in particular Articles 17 and 23 thereof, as well as in the framework of the European Space Agency Convention”.

As for Galileo, it is true that this is a civil system managed by civilians. However, as one of the specialists, François Barlier, points out, there are strategic, scientific and technical stakes, adding that one of the five signals offered by Galileo, the PRS (public regulated signal), encrypted and protected from interference, “is of great interest to the military”. But the UK has dug in its heels, arguing that it does not want to complicate military cooperation within NATO, whose navigation system is GPS. It is true that, for a long time, the US has made considerable direct and indirect efforts to prevent the birth of Galileo. Some high level US military officials, says Jean-Paul Baquiast on his website, “have even threatened to destroy Galileo satellites (with a now tested technique) if it seemed that they could harm US security, a definition that has a wide range of potential interpretations”. The negotiations with Washington over the PRS frequencies and on the interoperability of the two systems have largely defused these confrontations and eased the concerns of other capitals, such as Paris and Berlin, which tend to want to open up to military forces the possibility of using this ‘encryptable’ signal by the Europeans only. The information offered by satellite navigation is, stresses Barlier in his book, “the most precise and economic way” to ensure the positioning, navigation and synchronisation of all the weapons systems.

The savings, he explains, can be made on two levels – on the cost of equipment on board these weapons systems (planes, boats, tanks, cruise missiles) and on the number of systems needed to accomplish a mission due to the precision obtained. The GPS receivers, he notes, are compulsory in the US on most types of weapons, including the least expensive, such as air-to-ground missiles, guided bombs and ‘smart’ bombs.

The same dual use may apply to GMES, where ‘S’ refers to security. Alongside protection of the environment, the second aspect of GMES, stress O’Hara and Sinisi, “concerns security in its widest sense”. As part of its Petersberg tasks and the implementation of the CFSP (Common Foreign and Security Policy), they explain, “it is vital for the EU to equip itself with an autonomous and precise surveillance capacity for areas in crisis situation areas (humanitarian crisis, environmental disaster, armed conflict)”. In their eyes, “security nowadays has a global dimension. It covers issues such as climate change (and in particular global warming), health and the fight against terrorism”.n

One of the five signals offered by Galileo, the PRS (public regulated signal), “is of great interest to the military”