At the dawn of the new space age, the United States is racing to form a multinational space military alliance on a scale comparable to that of Operation Enduring Freedom or even the Western bloc. The United States uses different levels of means to deal with a wide variety of countries, and as more and more spacefaring nations are seeking technical and strategic cooperation with the United States, a U.S.-led military alliance in space is taking shape, and it is likely to achieve breakthroughs with the qualitative change in U.S. space situational awareness.

Royal Australian Air Force personnel at the Joint Space Operations Center, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California

There are many ways to cooperate with the United States in space.

The most basic of these is a space situational awareness agreement to share data from decommissioned satellites and other objects orbiting the Earth. Signing a space situational awareness agreement opens the way for the United States to fully snoop on a country's orbital assets. So far, at least 26 countries have signed these agreements with the United States, in addition to about 100 intergovernmental organizations, academic institutions, and commercial companies.

But it's not perfect. Even with these agreements in place, more needs to be done to ensure that signatories share information in a file format that everyone can read, and even then, there are secrecy barriers that often prevent further cooperation.

Another approach is to send liaison officers to the United States to provide that country's perspective on day-to-day operations. According to Space Command and Space Force warfighters at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, liaison officers rely on unclassified information such as carefully organized training exercises and other publicly available information to accomplish their missions.

The highest ranking recipient of US space information sharing is a coalition member of the Olympic Guardians, a formal, comprehensive international group aimed at deterring hostilities in space made up of a small group of Western nations, including the UK, Australia and Canada, which are allowed to operate US assets. All three countries, along with New Zealand, are members of the "Five Eyes" intelligence-sharing alliance.

Other countries, such as France and Germany, have been invited to take part in Olympic Defenders but have yet to formally sign up. Members of the Olympic Guardian send exchange officers to the United States as part of the Pentagon's chain of command. They are responsible for tasks such as tracking space debris and have more secrets than liaison officers from other countries or organizations in the United States.

At an appropriate level, the USAF can authorize data as unclassified and share it with specific countries. For countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, the United States is happy to share data on navigation and other constellations, with information passing back and forth between Allies as they act together as a coalition at the operational level.

The United States and its Allies also seek to strengthen cooperation through military exercises and joint exercises such as Global Sentinel, a space situational awareness exercise established by U.S. Strategic Command and conducted by U.S. Space Command, and AsterX Space military exercise organized by France, among others.

The United States is looking for ripe opportunities to build new partnerships or consolidate existing alliances around the globe, including in Latin America and Africa. For example, foreign countries are invited to study at the Pentagon's space school and participate in space defense exercises. The United States has been pursuing a space alliance for decades. Some countries are moving in the same direction as the United States, launching their own military space organizations, such as the United Kingdom's Space Command and France's space Force. Some companies are also nurturing early-stage investments in civil and commercial space projects.

While the creation of these new organizations does not fundamentally change the nature of international military space cooperation, it does change what other countries can bring to the table as they recognize the role of space in national security. Most of these discussions have to do with the norms of behavior on the track, such as what is acceptable and what is not, and how to react.

Not all space partnerships are created equal. Wealthier nations may have more established national security needs in space, while others may only have the budget or desire to pursue civil and commercial space programs. But what can be seen is that the United States has gradually learned to deal with a variety of countries, more and more space-faring countries are seeking to cooperate with the United States in technology and strategy, a US-led space military alliance is being formed, and is likely to achieve breakthrough progress with the qualitative change of the United States space situational awareness