IRIS², the EU’s Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite, is the Union’s clearest attempt to close that gap. It adds the sovereign secure communications layer that neither Galileo nor Copernicus was built to provide. This paper argues that IRIS² gives access to this sovereign layer but does not bind them to adoption. Nothing in its legal architecture obliges a Member State to route its communications through the system once it becomes operational by 2030. Drawing on the Regulation establishing the European Union Secure Connectivity Programme, and on comparisons with GOVSATCOM and PESCO, where voluntary participation has clustered around a handful of states rather than spreading across all twenty-seven, the paper examines this gap between entitlement to the programme and use of it for defence coordination. It concludes by arguing that EDSTAR offers the most realistic near-term mechanism for aligning IRIS² with NATO’s emerging HALO constellation.
About the author
Lucia Ruiz Yunta is a research trainee at Finabel.