Sovereign Satellite Networks: Strategic Necessity or Costly Political Redundancy?

Key Takeaways

• Shared sovereignty often makes more economic sense than parallel national constellations.
• Ukraine and Starlink turned political trust into a live procurement issue.
• For many states, sovereign satcom means control of access, not total ownership.

A market has appeared because trust broke before capacity did

The fastest-growing argument in space communications is no longer about coverage maps or download speeds. It is about political dependence. Governments that were once content to lease bandwidth from commercial operators are now asking harsher questions. Who controls access during a war? Who can switch a service off? Whose legal system governs the operator? Where are the keys, the gateways, the command systems, and the people who can override a network in a crisis? That shift is why sovereign satellite networks have become one of the liveliest market segments in the space economy. Yet the market is being described too loosely. For a small number of states and regional blocs, sovereign networks are a real strategic need. For many others, what is being sold as sovereignty is edging into political duplication, industrial theatre, or both.

The strongest position in this debate is not that sovereignty is fake. It is that sovereignty has grades, and the most expensive grade is being marketed far beyond the group that actually needs it. A government can gain meaningful control over communications without building and owning a full low Earth orbit constellation from scratch. It can buy assured access, domestic gateways, national encryption layers, protected government terminals, priority service contracts, or a pooled multinational system whose rules it helps shape. That is still sovereignty in an operational sense. What looks far less persuasive is the rush toward multiple overlapping national constellations inside the same alliance system, each justified in the language of independence while relying on many of the same suppliers, launchers, chips, software stacks, and standards.

Sovereignty is being stretched until it means almost anything

The word sovereign now does a great deal of work in government and industry presentations. Sometimes it means sovereign ownership. Sometimes it means sovereign control. Sometimes it means domestically hosted ground infrastructure. Sometimes it means the right to decide who gets service, at what priority, and under what legal authority. Those are not the same thing. The European Union is open about this distinction in practice even when the political language sounds more sweeping. Its GOVSATCOM service pools existing capacities and adds commercial capacity that meets strict security requirements, while IRIS² is designed as a multi-orbit system with the EU as anchor customer for both governmental and commercial services. That is not sovereignty as isolation. It is sovereignty as governed access.

The United Kingdom has used the term differently for years. SKYNET 6 is explicitly described as the UK’s sovereign military satcom capability, yet the service structure includes outside industry partners and reciprocal use with allies. The current service model under Team Aurora includes Babcock, Intelsat, GovSat, and SES. That does not weaken the UK claim. It clarifies it. Sovereignty in this case is about assured military communications under British defence authority, not autarky. That distinction gets lost when newer national programmes imply that only a wholly national constellation counts as sovereign. It usually doesn’t.

That is where skepticism starts. Once sovereignty is defined too broadly, almost any politically attractive satellite project can be rebadged as a sovereign necessity. Domestic industry wants work. Defence ministries want assured links. Politicians want to show independence from the United States, from Elon Musk, or from neighboring governments. Those motives are not trivial. They just do not all justify a new constellation. Sometimes they justify procurement rules. Sometimes they justify shared systems. Sometimes they justify a backup contract. The difference matters because orbital communications is one of the most capital-hungry ways a state can express its feelings.

Ukraine changed the market by turning vendor dependence into a live security risk

Nothing accelerated this segment more than the war in Ukraine and the political drama around Starlink. Starlink became a practical military and civil communications tool at a speed that legacy procurement systems could not match. It also showed how much operational dependence could accumulate around a single commercial service. Public reporting documented the tension that followed when SpaceX limited certain uses in the war and when European governments began openly seeking alternatives.

That episode changed the logic of sovereign-network procurement. The issue was no longer simply whether a commercial service worked. It was whether a government would still fully trust that service when the owner’s political incentives, government relationships, and public statements became part of the operating environment. Italy’s debate made the point in plain form. Rome considered Starlink for encrypted communications between officials in risky areas, tested Starlink antennas in four embassies, faced fierce opposition criticism over handing such a role to a foreign businessman close to the U.S. administration, and then pursued work on a national low-orbit alternative. The shift was not produced by a sudden lack of bandwidth. It was produced by discomfort with dependence.

That matters because it reveals what the market is actually selling. Sovereign satellite networks are being bought less as pure connectivity products than as insurance against political leverage. A government that worries service might be restricted, repriced, deprioritized, or entangled in another country’s politics will pay more to reduce that risk. This is a real market signal. It is also one that can lead to overspending, because trust shocks are powerful and can make even inefficient duplication look wise for a while. What is harder to call, and harder than the slogans admit, is where prudent backup stops and prestige spending begins.

Europe is trying to build pooled sovereignty and national sovereignty at the same time

Europe is the best place to watch this tension because it is attempting both models at once. On one side is GOVSATCOM, which became operational in January 2026 and is designed to provide secure access to pooled governmental and commercial satellite capacity through a dedicated hub managed under EU rules. On the other side is IRIS², the EU’s larger secure connectivity constellation, for which the European Commission signed a 12-year concession contract in December 2024 with the SpaceRISE consortium. The official programme description says IRIS² will comprise 290 satellites, combine low Earth and medium Earth orbit, and deliver both governmental and commercial services, with the EU serving as anchor customer. That is a serious regional strategy. It is also expensive, large, and already carrying the burden of multiple policy hopes at the same time.

The interesting part is that this pooled model is not standing alone. Germany has been pursuing a separate national military satellite network involving Rheinmetall, OHB, and Airbus, while the EU’s IRIS² system already carries a multibillion-euro budget. Germany’s plan envisions 100 low Earth orbit satellites for exclusive military communications. European lawmakers have warned that the move could lead to duplicate structures, fragmented standards, and weaker strategic impact for more money, even as German backers defend redundancy as a valid security requirement. That argument cuts to the center of the whole sovereign-network market. Europe is not just asking how to gain autonomy. It is asking whether autonomy should be shared or repeated.

The same tension can already be seen at the margin with Italy. Italy has explored its own dual-use low Earth orbit constellation of more than 100 satellites, while also saying the concept is meant to work with existing constellations rather than completely apart from them. That is a revealing detail. Even when governments speak the language of national independence, the engineering and budget logic keeps pushing them back toward interoperability and layered dependence. Europe, in other words, is not moving toward one sovereign model. It is drifting toward three at once: shared EU sovereignty, national overlays, and continuing reliance on large commercial players.

IRIS² is strategically sensible and commercially awkward

The strongest case for IRIS² is geopolitical, not commercial. Europe wants a secure communications system it can shape through European institutions, industry, and security rules. It wants less dependence on foreign providers, stronger support for government users, and a platform that can serve both public missions and some commercial demand. In political terms, that makes sense. In business terms, the programme is carrying a contradiction that has already become public. Even some backers have warned that the system will have to meet buyer expectations on price and performance and that Europe should avoid fragmentation and align behind a single competitive solution.

It says the market side of the programme cannot be taken for granted. Europe’s public rationale for IRIS² rests on sovereignty and secure access, but the project is also supposed to support commercial services. Buyers will still compare it to Starlink and to Project Kuiper when those services are available. Inside Europe, the benchmark is being set by networks whose scale was built under different political and financing conditions. That does not make IRIS² a bad programme. It means it is being asked to serve state-security logic and market logic at the same time, and those do not always pull in the same direction.

This tension creates a deeper problem. The more the sovereignty case dominates, the easier it becomes to excuse weak commercial competitiveness. The more the commercial case dominates, the harder it becomes to justify the public spending and the governance constraints that come with a sovereign project. A network can serve one master cleanly. Serving two is harder. Europe is trying to do exactly that. The project may still succeed, but the goal posts are moving. If the system is judged mainly by security and autonomy, it may be defensible even with limited commercial uptake. If it is judged as a market challenger to Starlink-class services, the bar is much higher.

Germany’s solo move is the clearest warning sign

Germany’s proposed network is valuable as a case study because it shows the point at which sovereign logic starts to consume itself. Berlin has considered a military-only constellation in parallel with a European project that exists partly to answer the same strategic question. Supporters say that is not duplication but reserve capacity. Critics say it is fragmentation wrapped in the language of prudence. Both sides have a case. Yet the simple scale is hard to ignore. A national network beside a major EU network is not a marginal adjustment. It is a second megaproject.

The political attraction is obvious. A German system would serve German military requirements first. It would deepen domestic industrial work for Rheinmetall, OHB, and Airbus. It would reduce reliance on EU-level schedules and compromises. It would let Berlin shape performance parameters around its own defence doctrine instead of waiting for a 27-member bargain. From a national-security planner’s desk, that can look entirely rational. From a bloc-wide economic view, it looks like Europe paying twice to say it trusts itself.

This is the point on which the article takes a firm position. For most European states, and likely for Europe as a bloc, pooled sovereignty is the stronger answer than repeated national constellations. Shared governance is slower and messier, but communications constellations reward scale, coverage, terminal ecosystems, launch cadence, replenishment planning, and standards alignment. Fragmenting those gains across multiple public networks will make Europe feel more sovereign while leaving it with more interfaces, more procurement overlap, more industrial lobbying, and more bills. Redundancy is valuable. Parallel megaconstellations inside the same alliance are a very expensive form of redundancy.

Italy shows how sovereignty can become a political contest before it becomes a technical programme

Italy’s case is less advanced than Germany’s, but it is politically revealing. Rome weighed Starlink, Eutelsat, and a home-grown low Earth orbit constellation involving national players such as Leonardo. Italy’s stated target was secure communications for government, diplomats, and defence officials in risky areas. That is a real use case. It is also exactly the kind of use case that can be met by more than one procurement path.

The debate became contentious because the symbolic meaning of the choice mattered almost as much as the service itself. Choosing Starlink could look fast, technically mature, and politically dependent. Choosing Eutelsat could look more European, less mature, and strategically safer from a sovereignty standpoint. Building an Italian constellation could look patriotic and forward-looking, but slower and far more expensive. Those are not engineering categories. They are political ones. That is why the sovereign-network market is so attractive to industry and so dangerous to budgets. It lets governments convert a procurement decision into a statement about identity.

Italy’s proposed constellation would likely be interoperable with existing constellations rather than fully separate. That detail is almost the whole story. Even a country leaning toward a sovereign system is still planning around coexistence with larger outside networks. The market segment is not replacing dependency. It is rearranging it. The badge on the system may change. The underlying reality remains layered, contractual, and interdependent.

The United Kingdom proves that a narrower version of sovereignty can work

The UK offers the strongest European example of a sovereign satcom capability that is easier to defend economically because its mission is tight and long established. This is not a rush project built in reaction to a single political shock. SKYNET is a long-running military communications system, and the government says more than £5 billion is being invested in the SKYNET programme over the next ten years. The programme is explicitly military. It is tied to defence operations, allied interoperability, and global communications for the armed forces. That narrower definition helps. It is easier to justify sovereign spending when the use case is persistent, government-only, and central to defence operations.

Even here, the structure is not a fantasy of total national self-reliance. The programme notes reciprocal use with NATOmembers and allied integration by design. The current service mix includes outside commercial and allied inputs. Airbus said in May 2025 that Skynet 6A had completed a major integration milestone, would enter service in 2027, and would deliver three-and-a-half times the capacity of the current Skynet 5 satellites. The British model shows that sovereignty can be operationally real without being industrially pure. That is a useful lesson because many of the new sovereign-network sales pitches imply the opposite.

The UK case also shows why narrowness matters. The system is not being sold as a consumer broadband answer, a commercial challenger, a universal civil network, and an industrial policy instrument all at once. It has one main job. That discipline keeps the economic case cleaner. The more a sovereign constellation tries to serve everyone, the less convincing its sovereignty logic becomes and the harder its economics become to track. What works for dedicated military satcom does not automatically scale into a persuasive argument for a giant dual-use national low Earth orbit network.

Geography can justify a sovereign system more cleanly than politics can

Space Norway provides another example of a project that looks easier to defend because it addresses a real geographic gap. The Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission launched in August 2024 and is designed to deliver continuous broadband coverage to aircraft, ships, research vessels, fishing vessels, expedition traffic, and troops operating in the Arctic through highly elliptical orbit. That is a specialized problem tied to latitude, sparse terrestrial infrastructure, and growing strategic interest in the High North. It is not a prestige project searching for a purpose after the fact.

This kind of case is worth separating from the broader sovereign-network rush because it shows a more disciplined path. A state or regional operator may have a strong reason to build or co-build a dedicated system when geography is unusual, commercial service is patchy, or public missions have requirements that the main consumer constellations do not fully satisfy. The Arctic is a good example. Polar coverage, maritime use, scientific work, and defence presence create a combination that does not map neatly onto standard commercial broadband economics. A focused system can make sense here even if a general-purpose national constellation elsewhere does not.

The lesson is not that every public satellite programme with a niche mission is wise. It is that specificity improves honesty. The ASBM case looks more grounded because its backers are solving a concrete coverage and mission problem. They are not claiming to replace the whole connectivity market. Sovereign-network projects become much harder to assess once they inflate their mandate into something like digital independence, industrial revival, defence resilience, rural broadband, and commercial competitiveness all at the same time. That is when skepticism stops being fashionable and starts being fiscally necessary.

The United States is pursuing sovereignty through commercial dependence

The American approach is different and, in some ways, more honest. The United States is not pretending that state authority requires the government to own every satellite in every sovereign system. Instead it is increasingly building military and intelligence capabilities on top of commercial-scale industrial platforms. Starshield is the clearest example in public view. SpaceX describes it as a secured satellite network for government entities that leverages Starlink technology and launch capability.

That model has obvious risks. It concentrates power in a private supplier and ties state capability to corporate execution, corporate leadership, and contract management. It also has obvious strengths. It captures scale, manufacturing tempo, and launch integration that pure government programmes often struggle to match. In practice, it treats sovereignty as a matter of control rights, priority access, and classified mission layers built on top of a commercial industrial base. That may not satisfy every political definition of sovereignty. It is a serious answer to the question of how to get sovereign capability without waiting a decade to recreate an entire industrial stack inside government.

The American case should unsettle simple rhetoric in Europe. If the largest military power in the world is willing to secure sovereign functions through commercial architecture plus government contracts and classified overlays, it becomes harder to insist that every European state needs its own standalone constellation to be truly sovereign. The U.S. model does not erase vendor risk. It does show that sovereignty can be contractual, layered, and mission-specific rather than fully nationalized in hardware.

A satellite is the easy part to draw

What a sovereign network actually costs is often understated in public debate because politicians and even some executives speak as though the satellites are the programme. They are not. The programme also includes replenishment cycles, launch contracts, gateway infrastructure, security accreditation, user terminals, spectrum rights, network management, encryption handling, integration with national command systems, cyber defence, training, maintenance, and the plain fact that commercial rivals are not standing still. Eutelsat has secured major export-credit financing, backed by a French state guarantee, to procure hundreds of additional OneWeb satellites from Airbus. That financing was needed just to help extend and upgrade an existing commercial low Earth orbit network.

That should cool some of the easier rhetoric around national constellations. Even Europe’s only operational low Earth orbit alternative to Starlink outside the U.S. orbit is still leaning on state-backed finance and a massive replenishment effort. Building a sovereign network that is smaller than the market leader is possible. Building one that is smaller, newer, more expensive per unit of coverage, and slower to replenish is a harder business.

This is why the article takes a skeptical line on national duplication. Scale matters in low Earth orbit communications. Terminal ecosystems matter. Cadence matters. Public programmes can succeed despite those pressures when the mission is narrow and the state is willing to pay. They struggle when they are presented as if they will also become broadly competitive commercial networks. Too many sovereign-network proposals blur those categories. The result is a market segment where the strategic rationale may be real but the economic case often arrives in a fog of patriotic language and borrowed assumptions from much larger private systems.

Industrial policy is part of the story, whether governments admit it or not

Sovereign-network programmes are not only about communications. They are also about keeping domestic space industries busy, politically connected, and technically relevant. Germany’s proposed constellation would feed work to Rheinmetall, OHB, and Airbus. Italy’s studies are tied to national players including Leonardo. The UK’s SKYNET 6A has been promoted as a milestone for Britain’s own industrial base because it is the first large geostationary communications satellite to be fully designed, built, and tested in the UK. None of this is hidden. It just tends to sit a half-step behind the security language in official presentations.

Industrial policy is not a vice. Governments are allowed to care about domestic production, skilled jobs, and strategic supply chains. The problem begins when the industrial motive is folded into the sovereignty argument so completely that nobody can tell how much capability is actually being purchased for the money. A country may decide it wants a sovereign network partly to create domestic demand for its space companies. That can be a legitimate political choice. It is not the same as saying the network was the most efficient answer to the communications problem.

This distinction matters more in Europe because public budgets are now under pressure from defence, energy, industry, and debt. In that context, every constellation will be sold as doing more than one job. It will promise security, technology leadership, autonomy, jobs, and export potential together. A few projects may deliver on that bundle. Many will not. When sovereign-network discussions become too loaded with autonomy language, the industrial subsidy component becomes harder to debate openly. That is bad economics and bad procurement practice, even when the security concern itself is real.

Redundancy is real, but it can become a slogan that hides waste

Supporters of parallel sovereign systems usually reach quickly for one word: redundancy. In military planning, that word has force. A state does not want to depend on a single network that can be jammed, disabled, politically constrained, or technically compromised. Some spare capacity is not a luxury.

But redundancy has limits. A second network can be a backup. A third can start looking like an industrial earmark in orbit. The relevant question is not whether more than one system is useful. It is what form the second layer should take. For many governments, the most rational second layer will not be another home-grown megaconstellation. It will be a contracted alternative provider, shared alliance capacity, cross-certified terminals, or a pooled sovereign service like GOVSATCOM that can switch between trusted underlying assets. That kind of redundancy is less glamorous, but it is usually cheaper and available sooner.

The seductive mistake is to treat every sovereignty gap as a constellation gap. Often it is a governance gap, a contracting gap, a terminal gap, or a key-management gap. Fixing those problems can deliver real control without launching hundreds of satellites. Once that is understood, part of the sovereign-network boom begins to look like a response to the visibility of satellites rather than the invisibility of better procurement design. That is how expensive redundancy drifts toward expensive symbolism.

What governments are really buying in this segment

The emerging market segment is broader than satellites. Governments are buying sovereign packages. Those packages can include priority service rights, secure gateways on national territory, hard rules on data jurisdiction, military-grade terminals, integration with defence networks, service continuity clauses, government override rights, and reserved bandwidth during emergencies. The EU’s GOVSATCOM design reflects that logic by pooling capacity and controlling access through a dedicated hub. The UK’s SKYNET 6 reflects it by focusing on assured military communications under British defence authority while still using a mixed service architecture. Starshield reflects it by selling a government-facing service layer on top of a commercial industrial base.

This is why the most persuasive commercial opportunities in the sovereign-network market may sit below the level of full constellation ownership. Ground systems, encryption and network management, trusted terminals, sovereign cloud links, secure software, and mission-specific service contracts may turn out to be better businesses than trying to persuade every medium-sized state to build its own low Earth orbit constellation. The real bottleneck is often control and integration, not orbital hardware alone. That does not make satellites less important. It does suggest the market’s center of gravity may settle in services and architecture rather than in a rush of national fleets.

That possibility also makes some current rhetoric look dated. Sovereignty used to imply vertical integration. The market now points toward layered sovereignty, where a government secures the functions it cannot afford to lose while still relying on outside industry for much of the underlying system. That is a less dramatic story than national independence through a national constellation. It may also be the form of sovereignty most countries can actually afford.

For a few actors, the necessity case is strong

Some sovereign-network projects are plainly justified. Large military powers with global operational requirements have a good reason to secure communications under national authority. The UK’s long-running SKYNET system fits that category. Specialized missions in demanding geography also make sense, as shown by Space Norway’s Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission. A regional bloc with security ambitions and uneven trust in foreign commercial providers also has a defensible case for a pooled system, which is why IRIS² and GOVSATCOM are more persuasive than some of the national overlays now proposed beside them.

The necessity case also strengthens when the alternative is dependence on a provider whose political alignment or service continuity cannot be taken as stable in a crisis. Europe’s reactions to the Starlink debate around Ukraine were not irrational overreactions. They were signals that communications sovereignty has moved from a theoretical concern to a budgeting priority. In that sense, the market is not hype. It is a delayed procurement response to a problem that was already visible but easier to ignore when geopolitics felt calmer.

Yet necessity does not erase the need for discrimination. A strong case for one pooled bloc-wide system does not automatically create a strong case for multiple national systems inside that bloc. A strong case for military satcom does not automatically justify a much broader dual-use constellation sold as a commercial challenger. A strong case for backup access does not automatically justify a second megaproject. This is the line that policy debates keep blurring, and it is where costs can spiral fastest.

The likely future is not pure sovereignty. It is layered control

The most realistic end state for this market is not a world in which every serious state owns a national Starlink equivalent. That vision is too expensive, too slow, and too indifferent to the economics of scale. The more likely outcome is layered control. Some governments will keep or expand legacy sovereign military systems in higher orbits. Regional blocs will build shared secure layers. Commercial operators will sell government-dedicated services and terminals. National governments will insist on domestic gateways, trusted integration, emergency priority rights, and legal control over service continuity. Full constellations will be reserved for the actors with the largest budgets, the strongest military case, or the sharpest geographic need.

That model is less romantic than the current slogans, but it fits the evidence far better. The European Union is already building pooled services. Germany and Italy are exploring national overlays. Eutelsat is backed by state-linked financing while trying to remain commercially relevant. The United States is using commercial industrial scale for sovereign purposes through projects such as Starshield. The common thread is not full independence. It is controlled dependence.

That may disappoint political narratives that prefer the cleaner image of a national constellation flying under a national flag. It is still the more persuasive destination. States do not need to own every layer of a communications system to be sovereign enough for real operations. They need dependable authority over the layers that decide access, priority, security, and continuity under stress. The governments that learn that lesson will likely spend less and gain more. The ones that do not may discover that the costliest part of sovereignty was trying to perform it in public.

Summary

Sovereign satellite networks are neither a passing fashion nor an all-purpose answer. They are a serious response to a real political and military problem: dependence on outside providers whose incentives may shift in a crisis. The war in Ukraine, the debate around Starlink, the rise of Starshield, the EU’s move with GOVSATCOM and IRIS², and national moves in Germany, Italy, and the UK all show that secure connectivity has become a front-line state concern.

The skeptical judgment is narrower and sharper. For a few powers, a few missions, and a few geographies, sovereign networks are a strategic necessity. For many governments, especially those inside larger alliance structures or regional programmes, the stronger answer is not a parallel national constellation. It is pooled sovereignty, layered control, and better contractual authority over commercial systems. Once sovereign rhetoric is separated from genuine operational need, much of the current rush looks less like independence and more like expensive duplication with patriotic branding.

Appendix: Top 10 Questions Answered in This Article

What is a sovereign satellite network?

A sovereign satellite network is a communications system that gives a government dependable control over access, security, and continuity. That control can come from ownership, contracts, domestic gateways, encryption authority, or a shared system governed by trusted rules.

Why has this market become more important so quickly?

The market accelerated because governments became more worried about depending on outside providers during crises. The war in Ukraine and disputes around Starlink turned that concern from theory into active procurement.

Does sovereignty always require a country to own its own constellation?

No. A government can secure meaningful sovereignty through priority access, secure terminals, national gateways, and service-control rights without owning every satellite. Ownership is only one path to control.

What is the European Union trying to build with IRIS²?

IRIS² is the EU’s secure connectivity constellation, designed as a multi-orbit system with 290 satellites and the EU as anchor customer. It is meant to deliver governmental and commercial services with a stronger European role in secure communications.

What is GOVSATCOM and why does it matter?

GOVSATCOM is the EU’s operational secure satcom service that pools existing governmental and approved commercial capacities. It matters because it shows sovereignty can be delivered through governed access rather than through a wholly new constellation alone.

Why are Germany’s plans controversial?

Germany’s proposed military satellite network is controversial because it would sit alongside the EU’s own IRIS² programme. Supporters call that redundancy. Critics call it duplication, fragmentation, and a costly split in European effort.

Why is Italy’s debate so revealing?

Italy’s debate exposed the full menu of choices governments now face: buy from Starlink, buy from a European provider such as Eutelsat, or build a national system. The controversy showed that sovereignty decisions are as political as they are technical.

What does the UK’s SKYNET programme show?

SKYNET shows that a narrower sovereign military satcom model can be durable and defensible. It also shows that sovereignty does not require industrial purity, because allied integration and commercial partners can still sit inside a sovereign service framework.

Are sovereign satellite networks good business?

They can be good business for firms selling secure services, terminals, ground systems, and government-facing network layers. They are a much harder business when governments try to justify full constellations that duplicate existing alliance or regional systems.

What is the most likely long-term model?

The long-term model is likely to be layered sovereignty rather than total national ownership. Governments will keep seeking control over the most sensitive functions while still relying on commercial industry and shared systems for much of the underlying capacity.