BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 24
By Leman Zeynalova – Trend:
The US wants to work with likeminded nations in the use of space, General John Raymond, Chief of Space Operations, U.S. Space Force said in response to Trend’s question about the prospects for cooperation between the US and Azerbaijan in the space industry.
“We want to work with likeminded nations. As I said, partners are important to us, and there are opportunities for likeminded nations that are committed to the peaceful use of space and for operating in a safe and professional manner to partner with us. We’re interested in partnering with likeminded nations and working with a broad community of partners, like we do today,” he said during the special briefing via telephone.
He pointed out that Combined Space Operations Center is a really important center for the United States. “It’s the center where we provide command and control of – operational command and control of our capabilities. Its focus, its main focus, is on keeping the domain safe for and having the awareness of the domain, the space domain awareness, necessary to keep the domain safe. We are also focused on making sure that our joint and coalition forces stationed around the globe have the space capabilities that they need to accomplish their mission. There’s nothing that we do today as a joint or coalition force that isn’t enabled by space. The thing that we did back in 2019, we made it – we transitioned it from a joint force to a combined force, and that, again, is because it’s an organization that has partners embedded into it, and that provides us great advantage. So although the challenges are great, the opportunities that we saw, as I mentioned earlier, was to make this a combined operations and to capitalize on the partnerships that we enjoyed, had shared data broadly across all of our partners, and it’s providing – it’s providing us great advantage. I’m really pleased with the progress that they’ve made.
So I see way more opportunities than I see challenges. But the domain is challenging. I mean, obviously, as I’ve talked about throughout this conversation, the domain is changing. It’s transitioned from a peaceful, benign domain – that’s based on the results of largely China and Russia – to a domain that is contested. And this center provides critical capabilities to allow us to operate the capabilities that are so necessary for – and not just our military in the United States and around the globe, but also for the average citizen of the world who, for example, relies on GPS. And so we’re committed to keeping this domain safe and the Combined Space Operations Center is a critical linchpin for us to be able to do that,” added Raymond.
The audio file is available at the following link: https://app.box.com/s/pe6jtp115m62mwh08e555hq9gm0aysno
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