Air and space chiefs from more than 50 nations are gathering this week at IET London: Savoy Place for the Chief of the Air Staff's Global Air and Space Chiefs' Conference, an event whose agenda reads like a checklist of the hardest problems in modern deterrence: orbital warfare, nuclear posture, and the increasingly blurred line between air and missile defense.
The conference, running Wednesday and Thursday of this week — July 15-16, 2026 — brings together the United States, the United Kingdom, and delegates from 50 overseas Heads of Air and Space Arms, alongside Royal Air Force officers, UK government representatives, and figures from industry and academia. It is, by design, one of the largest recurring gatherings of senior military aviation and space leadership in the world.
Two names anchor the keynote lineup: General Kenneth Wilsbach, Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, and General Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations for the US Space Force. Their joint presence signals how thoroughly the "air and space" framing has become literal rather than aspirational — the two services now show up together at the highest levels of allied strategic discussion, not as separate tracks.
Why It Matters
This year's conference lands just days after a contentious NATO summit in Turkey, where President Trump criticized Spain's defense spending levels and made pointed comments about Greenland and Denmark — a dispute that has left transatlantic unity looking more fragile than usual heading into a week explicitly designed to project it. That backdrop gives this year's conference a role beyond its stated technical agenda: organizers and attendees are using the conference to reaffirm coordination among allied air and space forces at a moment when public friction over burden-sharing threatens to overshadow substantive military cooperation.
The three named theme areas — space, nuclear deterrence, and integrated air and missile defense — are not abstract policy categories. Space has become contested terrain where allied forces increasingly depend on shared domain awareness and resilient satellite architectures. Nuclear deterrence discussions carry immediate weight given ongoing modernization programs across NATO's nuclear-capable air forces. And integrated air and missile defense sits at the center of how the alliance plans to counter advancing missile threats that don't respect old distinctions between air-breathing and ballistic systems. A conference that puts all three on one agenda, in one room, with more than 50 nations represented, is effectively taking the temperature of allied cohesion on the exact issues where cohesion is hardest to fake.
A Recurring Forum With Growing Stakes
The Global Air and Space Chiefs' Conference is not a one-off. US Space Force's own newsroom maintains an ongoing tag for the event, reflecting a pattern of Space Force leadership participation and remarks on integrated defense at past editions of the same recurring conference. That continuity matters: it means this year's sessions build on established relationships and prior commitments rather than starting cold, even as the geopolitical backdrop shifts year to year.
What's notably different this time is the emphasis on nuclear deterrence discussions tied to a concrete capability shift. The UK's return to an airborne nuclear role, driven by its procurement of F-35A aircraft, is set to be a specific discussion point at the conference. Publicly available conference materials describe a dedicated first session, titled "Nuclear – Back to the Future?", in which senior defence officials and an international chief are set to share insights on airborne nuclear capability, alongside an Indo-Pacific expert and an industry figure — reflecting how the RAF's return to a nuclear-capable posture after roughly three decades is drawing allied attention.
What's Actually on the Table
- Space operations: With Gen. Saltzman keynoting, expect the Space Force's role in this conversation to extend beyond satellite operations into how allied nations coordinate space domain awareness and respond to threats against orbital assets.
- Nuclear deterrence: The UK's F-35A-enabled return to an airborne nuclear mission gives this year's nuclear track a concrete anchor point, discussed in a dedicated session on airborne nuclear capability.
- Integrated air and missile defense: Framed alongside the other two themes, this track addresses how allied forces plan to knit together air defense and missile defense systems that have historically been managed separately.
Notably, none of the publicly available conference materials detail specific technical outcomes, agreements, or communiqués expected from the two days — the event is structured as a forum for senior-leader dialogue rather than a venue for formal treaty-style announcements. Speaker identities for individual sessions are described as available only to registered attendees. Any concrete policy shifts stemming from these conversations would likely surface later, through national defense ministries or NATO channels, rather than from the conference itself.
The Bigger Picture
Coming so soon after the NATO summit friction in Turkey, this year's conference functions as something of a pressure test. A conference built around space, nuclear deterrence, and missile defense — three areas where allied technical and operational coordination genuinely cannot be improvised — will show whether more than 50 nations' worth of air and space chiefs can maintain working-level unity even as their political leadership airs disagreements in public. The presence of both the US Air Force and Space Force chiefs, engaging directly with UK counterparts and other allied delegations on nuclear posture specifically, suggests the substance of allied deterrence planning is proceeding on its own track, largely independent of the spending-dispute headlines generated a week earlier.
Whether that holds under further political strain is a question for the next summit. For now, the fact that the conversation is happening — with the space and nuclear pieces treated as inseparable from conventional air power planning — is itself the story.
