For decades, military SATCOM sovereignty was straightforward. You own the entire stack, from satellites to ground infrastructure. However, that definition is becoming more difficult to maintain and is an approach that adapts slowly to quickly evolving technologies and threats. Today, military operations rarely take place within purely national architectures, but rather across hybrid ecosystems, contested environments, and between coalitions leveraging each other’s core strengths. With owning and sustaining independent end to end systems no longer a realistic or optimal goal, states are being hit with a second driver of interdependence driving the need to update infrastructure at the speed of need which, in the AI era where data must be available at the right place, at the right time in the right format, is a matter of months, not years.
These conditions lead to a more practical understanding of sovereignty. It is determined by how much of the architecture a government controls rather than how much of the stack it owns. This distinction is reshaping how defense organizations think about the next generation of military SATCOM.
This shift was made clear by Keith Blanchet, Vice President of International Government and Defense at ST Engineering iDirect, during the Space Defense & Security Summit in Paris. Speaking on the panel “Next-Generation Military Satcom: Capabilities, Architectures, and Sovereignty,” he outlined what is increasingly becoming a core principle of modern strategic planning: interoperable architectures that allow a nation to choose and control multiple services are the key to achieving modern sovereignty.
Beyond the Single “Best” Orbit
Achieving modern sovereignty only means something if the underlying architecture can actually deliver it. Here, the conversation is moving past the ongoing debate about which orbit, HEO, GEO, MEO, or LEO. Blanchet’s perspective is that there is no single ideal orbit and that the mission should determine the transport. Each orbital regime has complementary strengths, and the real engineering challenge is making them work together, transparently. Common terminals, flexible modems, interoperable waveforms, and orchestration governed by policy rather than by the satellite are all necessary for this. When we overlay the expected fast pace of threat evolution, the need for highly adaptable SATCOM networks is compounded.
Turning Ground Infrastructure Into A Strategic Asset
In practice, sovereignty is increasingly exercised in the ground segment. Satellites provide transport, but it’s the terminals, waveforms, modems, security architecture, and orchestration layer that determine how effectively a defense organization can draw on various space assets to drive a successful mission execution in complex and dynamic coordination of ground, sea and/or air domains while maintaining control of its network. Orchestration specifically stands out because it enables dynamic path selection and network reconfiguration as mission requirements, network conditions, or threats change.
This is where software-defined ground infrastructure becomes strategically significant. Sridhar Kuppanna, CEO of ST Engineering iDirect emphasized this during his panel “The Software-Defined Ground Segment” at World Space Business Week saying, “Software-defined ground systems give operators the flexibility to scale resources up or down instantly, adapt services as requirements change, and deploy new offerings faster. That agility delivers immediate operational benefits, accelerates time to revenue, and drives a faster return on investment.” That same agility directly translates into sovereign control for defense organizations, the ability to reconfigure a network’s behavior without waiting for a hardware refresh cycle.
AI as an Assistant, Not a Decision Maker
Although Blanchet was careful to frame AI’s role narrowly, it is increasingly playing a critical role in managing these complex hybrid networks. AI should support mission execution and adaptability through decision-aids rather than make them on its own. He explained that this has been proven in other similar life-or death applications such as in the medical robotics domain where human-in-the-loop implementation of AI ensured build-up of trust and let experts determine if AI algorithms where ready for automation over time. In the SATCOM domain, its current value is for forecasting network conditions, identifying anomalies and interference, optimizing resource allocation, and helping orchestration systems choose the optimal orbit path… enhancing human judgement rather than replacing it.
Moving Forward
All together, these point toward a military SATCOM landscape that differs significantly from today’s satellite-by-satellite procurement model. By 2035, the vision is of an ever-complexifying, orchestrated network of networks that is multi-orbit, software-defined, increasingly autonomous, distributed across geographies, and sovereign by design. In order to get there, both industry and defense organizations must stop focusing on which orbit or satellite is best and instead start considering how all available assets can be orchestrated into a single network that answers, unambiguously, to its rightful authority.