Centralised monolithic satellite systems have underpinned NATO’s space posture for decades, offering highgain apertures, robust ground segments, and mature command-and-control chains. Yet threat dynamics now include persistent jamming, operational anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities, and rising debris densities that increase conjunction risk. In this environment, large, tightly coupled systems create single points of failure, depend heavily on ground processing, and go through long development and service lives that impede rapid technology refresh. This paper proposes a hybrid space architecture that augments existing GEO/MEO assets with distributed satellite systems (DSS)—swarms of small LEO satellites acting as an on-orbit edge-processing layer for detection, tracking, and interference mitigation. Numerical simulations across two AIS scenarios show higher detection probability and more accurate emitter counting than monolithic baselines, and demonstrate DSS-enabled adaptive beamforming to suppress interference in a contested environment.     «

Centralised monolithic satellite systems have underpinned NATO’s space posture for decades, offering highgain apertures, robust ground segments, and mature command-and-control chains. Yet threat dynamics now include persistent jamming, operational anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities, and rising debris densities that increase conjunction risk. In this environment, large, tightly coupled systems create single points of failure, depend heavily on ground processing, and go through long development an...     »