Phil
Pennington, Reporter
New Zealand is
becoming increasingly involved in operations designed to
benefit the US Navy in its space race against China, even as
the defence force denies its tentative steps into space have
anything to do with military operations.
The New
Zealand Defence Force says the only two launches into space
it has been involved with have nothing to do with military
operations.
But official reports in the US call that
into question, with NZ joining Project Overmatch – the US
Navy’s highest priority project to boost cutting edge
communications – a few weeks ago.
The NZ government’s
new defence capability plan says up to $600m could be spent
by 2029 on space systems, mostly to “plug into partner
networks”.
The NZDF already has two “plug-in” space
experiments running with the US. It has also integrated a
radar station near Auckland into a new “federated” Five Eyes
space system, and joined Project Overmatch six weeks
ago.
Project Overmatch has already upgraded at least
three aircraft carrier strike groups in the Pacific “to
enhance fleet warfighting capabilities”.
The New
Zealand space experiments – dubbed Tui and Korimako – were
the primary payloads on satellites launched by the US’s spy
satellite agency, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
in 2024 and 2025.
The NZDF has denied the payloads
could be used in any way to support military operations, and
downplayed any national security use.
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However,
scientists in the NZDF generated 2850 files working on the
payloads, documents obtained under the Official Information
Act showed.
The US Navy said the overall project that
included Tui and Korimako was to improve maritime
communications to advance “the warfighting advantage of the
naval service”.
The second experiment was launched in
January.
New Zealand and the other Five Eyes partners
joined the largely secretive Project Overmatch a month
later, official US reports said.
The Pentagon called
this a “historic milestone”, but the NZDF and government did
not announce it.
Project Overmatch is rolling out
space-enabled communications systems as the Navy’s
contribution to the Pentagon’s top priority – ‘CJADC2’, or
Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control.
Its
mission was to “revolutionise naval warfare through advanced
digital technology and allied cooperation”, the navy
said.
“Overmatch has really focused much more directly
on the near-term operational problems faced by commanders
dealing with China,” one commander said.
US Defence
Secretary Pete Hegseth has been outspoken on the threat of
China in the Indo-Pacific since he took the job this
year.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters recently just
met with the Commander of US Indo-Pacific Command
(INDOPACOM) in Hawaii, as part of a crossparty delegation
tour of the Pacific.
‘Critical capabilities for the
next war’
The big picture involves the US Navy, Air
Force, Space Force, Missile Defense Agency and NRO spy
satellite agency – along with allies -integrating command
and control, while “increasing kill chain speed and
lethality by 2027”, a leading general told a space symposium
last week.
Defence and Space Minister Judith Collins
also spoke at that event.
The integration is the
Pentagon’s number one priority, and the $1.2 billion Project
Overmatch is the US Navy’s main contribution to
it.
Overmatch carries the slogan and badge: “Decide
first, win.”
“Simply put, Project Overmatch will
provide us a decision advantage over our adversaries and
help us deliver a more lethal and better-connected fleet far
into the future,” said a commander when it first came to
light in 2021.
Official US reports have linked the New
Zealand satellite experiments with cutting-edge research on
naval communications, but the NZDF has denied
this.
The project was outlined in a short US naval
publication last year headlined: “Critical capabilities for
the next war”.
The tech “adds sensors in the space
layer to be able to see what’s going on in the water”, said
California’s Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), that is
running the two-year project.
The technology was vital
for command, control, reconnaissance and targeting
long-range missile firing.
But in a short statement to
RNZ last week, the Defence Force repeatedly distanced the
launched from military operations.
“The payloads
cannot be used for military operations,” it said last
week.
“The Tui and Korimako payloads cannot be used to
support military operations and have no national security
aspects that would require the involvement of the GCSB or
the NZSIS.
“The goal of this research, distinct from
military operations, is to help evaluate benefits,
weaknesses, opportunities and risks,” said the
NZDF.
It tested Five Eyes interoperability “using
practical systems that are separated from military
operations”, it added.
But in February, in response to
an OIA not lodged by RNZ, the NZDF said: “These experiments
will generate NZDF knowledge to drive future military space
operations.”
Tui and Korimako are the primary payloads
on NRO satellites – the NRO operates hundreds of spy
satellites – in a project run by the NPS. Both satellites
were launched by Rocket Lab, one from Mahia Peninsula in
March 2024, one from Virginia in January.
While the
NZDF said Tui and Korimako did not include free-space
optical communication components, the NPS said: “The
long-term effort seeks to advance… research into
free-space optical communications for CubeSats and small
satellites.”
The world’s rival navies are in a race to
develop free-space optics (FSO), very fast laser
communications that are hard to intercept, in place of
current slow radio frequencies – “fighting at the speed of
light”.
Federated Five Eyes in space
Tui and
Korimako are part of a move to set up a “federated” space
system by 2025.
Under it, the Five Eyes intelligence
group – the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand – will
pool resources and cut costs.
The aim is to enhance
“coalition advantages in an increasingly contested space
environment”.
The federated system already includes
some small satellites, and 13 ground stations worldwide – 10
in the US and one at Whangaparāoa, in the international
smallsat command control network (ISC2N). This network taps
into the Pentagon’s own MC3 – Mobile CubeSat Command and
Control – ground station network.
The Five Eyes
nations have done joint space research for more than a
decade, and in 2018 each nation defined a priority research
area.
Some are military and some are civilian. Others
are both – dual-use – such as ‘Phantom Echoes’ in 2019-21,
that worked to improve sensors to help keep coalition
satellites out of trouble.
The collaboration has
received a new boost from them all signing up to Project
Overmatch.
“Together, we are working to deliver
resilient communication tools and decision-making advantages
to the hybrid fleet and warfare commanders,” said a rear
admiral who is the director of Overmatch and also commander
of NAVWAR.
NAVWAR (navigation warfare) and ‘Square
Dance’ are arrangements that hold bimonthly meetings that
NZDF is part of, an OIA showed.
A Pentagon chief
information officer said about Overmatch: “Any data,
anywhere, any time that is needed. And the vision, when I
start to spin this out, is coalition warfare.
“You
have a US Marine Corps [High Mobility Artillery Rocket
System] getting a firing solution from an Australian
[intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] capability;
maybe you have a Japanese frigate that’s also going to hit
the same target there; you’ve got multinational F-35s coming
on station to provide combat air-support capability. All of
this is going to have to happen quickly.”‘
Defence
and space meetings
In speech notes for the world’s
biggest space symposium last week in Colorado, Defence and
Space Minister Judith Collins did not mention military
projects.
She instead stressed science projects with
NASA and others, and business opportunities in the world’s
third busiest country for rocket launches.
“I look
forward to seeing the progression of existing relationships
and the development of new relationships between New Zealand
and US organisations and businesses,” she said in the
notes.
“I see our relationship with the US as a key
driver in developing New Zealand’s space
sector.”
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