NATO military leaders and others attending a summit in Paris said their approach to space defense has shifted from strategy to tactics as prospects increase for warfighting in the domain, according to news accounts from the September 2025 Space Defense and Security Summit.
Maj. Gen. Vincent Chusseau, commander of French Space Command, told the second annual summit in Paris that “things are accelerating very fast,” according to Defense News. “Space is a really full operational domain. We talk about warfighting in space.”
He provided no details, but Brig. Gen. Christopher Horner, commander of 3 Canadian Space Division, said more than 200 anti-satellite weapons are now on Earth orbit, presenting a “shocking number of capabilities.”
One point of discussion was that global space defense spending has exceeded civil space budgets for the first time, according to a January 2025 report by summit organizer and France-based space consultant Novaspace.
Government space investments reached some $135 billion in 2024, with defense spending accounting for 54% at
$73 billion, Novaspace said. The report highlights the increasing number of countries ramping up investments in space. While the U.S. continues to lead global government spending on the domain, its share has declined from over 75% in 2000 to 59% in 2024, reflecting rising investments from the Chinese Communist Party and other nations, the report said.
“What you see is that it is now the military domain that is leading,” Hermann Ludwig Moeller, director of the European Space Policy Institute, told Defense News during the summit. “This is really clear compared to last year. The language and what is behind the language has shifted.”