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NATO’s agreed to open its wallet wider, and space and defense players are likely lining up to benefit. The military coalition’s brand-new commercial space strategy adds the cherry on top.
Now inked, at the vocal behest of U.S. President Donald Trump, is a pledge to more than double alliance members’ defense expenditure from 2% to 5% of their gross domestic product by 2035. Some 3.5% of that funding should be funnelled toward “pure” defense, while the remaining 1.5% should be slated for security-linked infrastructure, such as cyber warfare capabilities and intelligence.
Notably, NATO recognized space as one of five “operational” domains alongside air, land, maritime and cyberspace back in 2019. Two years later, it concluded that offensives to, from or within space can be a threat to the alliance and trigger the infamous Article 5 prescribing an attack on one member as an attack on all. Going into the fine print, the military coalition is expected to publish its new Space Doctrine 2026.
Whether allies — especially a reluctant Spain — can or will actually meet a 5% target is in the air. Glancing over NATO’s numbers, only Poland came anywhere close to allocating that slice of its GDP to defense purposes last year, at 4.12%, while Washington itself devoted only 3.38% of its economic output to that purpose. Across the board, there’s ground to cover. In Europe, the writing’s been some months on the wall, after the 27-member European Union bloc proposed to mobilize 800 billion euros ($936 billion) for defense spending back in March, while Germany relaxed its fiscal debt rules to facilitate more security-linked purchases. The U.K. started the year with a pledge to hike defense expenditures to 2.5% by April 2027, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer has since rushed to pledge a 5% goal will be hit by 2035.
