Eight alliance members have launched the HALO satellite constellation initiative at the Ankara Summit, marking the most ambitious step yet to end European dependence on American space infrastructure for military operations
A new chapter in alliance space operations opened on 7 July 2026. On the first day of the NATO summit in Ankara, NATO Deputy Secretary-General Radmila Šekerinska announced that eight allies had formally launched HALO, or Hybrid Alliance Layered Operations in Space, a multinational initiative to link sovereign, nationally owned military satellites into a single networked mega-constellation.
The name was chosen deliberately. HALO is not a shared fleet under centralised NATO ownership, but a framework to weave together what individual allies already have in orbit and make the sum considerably more powerful than its parts. The announcement comes at a moment when the vulnerability of space-based military infrastructure has moved from theoretical concern to operational reality, and when the alliance’s dependency on American commercial and government satellites has become a strategic liability it can no longer comfortably ignore.
The framing of HALO begins with a problem Šekerinska stated plainly at the forum. Individual satellite constellations run independently by member countries are vulnerable to cyberattacks, jamming or physical destruction, while also being too slow to relay large amounts of data across different national systems. The limitations are not abstract.
Russia has demonstrated anti-satellite capabilities through direct-ascent missile tests, most recently in 2021, and has developed ground-based jamming systems specifically designed to interfere with GPS-dependent weapons and communications at the tactical level, a capability extensively tested against Ukrainian forces. China has invested heavily in counter-space technologies, including co-orbital satellites designed to manoeuvre alongside and potentially disable adversary spacecraft. In this environment, a single nation’s satellite fleet operating in isolation presents an adversary with a manageable and discrete target set.
HALO addresses this vulnerability by creating interoperability and redundancy across allied space assets rather than relying on any single system or nation. By networking satellites that remain under sovereign national control, the initiative aims to give military commanders across the alliance high-speed communications, continuous intelligence feeds and missile tracking data without the current bottlenecks created by incompatible systems and coverage gaps between national constellations.
HALO did not arrive in isolation. The Ankara forum revealed the breadth of a space agenda NATO is now treating as central to conventional military effectiveness. Spain became the 19th country to join NATO’s Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space initiative, which achieved initial operational capability in December 2025 and is described as the largest multinational investment in space-based capabilities in NATO’s history.
Canada simultaneously became the 15th member of STARLIFT, a parallel initiative building a distributed network of launch facilities across the alliance so that allies can get replacement satellites into orbit rapidly if existing assets are destroyed or degraded. Turkey announced two additional high-resolution observation satellites built by TUBITAK under contracts worth more than 300 million dollars, alongside investment in low-orbital military communications satellites and early warning radar systems.
The cumulative picture suggests an alliance that is systematically building the infrastructure to operate in space as a contested warfighting domain rather than treating satellites as a safe and peripheral enabler of ground and air operations.
Security analysts suggest this shift reflects hard lessons drawn from the war in Ukraine, where Starlink, the commercial satellite internet system operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, became the de facto backbone of Ukrainian communications at the tactical level, an arrangement that exposed both the critical importance of space connectivity and the fragility of depending on a single commercial provider with its own political and business pressures.
Recent assessments from within the alliance’s own planning community point to the technical and political complexity of what HALO is attempting. Integrating sovereign national satellites into a genuinely interoperable network requires resolving fundamental questions about data sharing protocols, classification levels, command authority and the conditions under which one ally’s satellite can relay intelligence collected by another. These are not purely technical questions.
They are legal and political ones that have taken years to resolve in analogous programmes, and the HALO initiative is at an exploratory stage. Military planners increasingly believe that the speed at which Europe can move from launching initiatives to fielding actual operational capability will be the defining test of the current rearmament era.
The membership of the eight founding nations has not been publicly confirmed in full, a detail that will matter considerably when the initiative moves from exploration to procurement and system integration. Watch for whether HALO expands its membership at the next NATO summit, whether it produces a concrete technical architecture for satellite interoperability within the year, and how it relates to the European Union’s own space defence ambitions through the IRIS2 multi-orbit satellite connectivity programme currently in development. NATO has named its new space network. The harder question is how quickly it can make it real.
