The Defense Department wants to establish “regular dialogue” with China on space, Gregory Schulte, deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told reporters Tuesday in Washington, D.C. China already agreed in principle to the discussions during the US-China security and economic dialogue meeting in May, he said. “We are waiting to pick up a date for that first discussion, but we are ready to go in and talk about [the US National Security Space Strategy], to talk about what we think the responsible use of space looks like, to talk about ways to create rules of the road, and to talk about ways to reduce the risk of miscalculations,” said Schulte. International partnerships are a key part to the NSSS, a joint DOD and intelligence community strategy, he said. As such, the United States recently completed security dialogues with Australia, Canada, and France. “All of those countries are willing to talk about the sharing of space situational awareness,” he said. US Strategic Command also is looking to turn the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg AFB, Calif., into a combined operations center that would include staff members from allied nations, said Schulte.
The defense intelligence community has tried three times in the past decade to build a “common intelligence picture”—a single data stream providing the information that commanders need to make decisions about the battlefield. The first two attempts failed. But officials say things are different today.