Within the upcoming weeks, Congress will decide whether to support a proposed new armed service for military operations in space. To fully deliberate that choice, they must first define the problem.
Our national security space architecture faces many challenges: a poor track record of space system acquisition; inadequate funding; a lack of focus on developing and managing space personnel; appropriate integration of National Guard and Reserve personnel; and insufficient warfighting attention on the space domain. These issues are framed by the greater operational challenge endangering overall U.S. military capability—our military, intelligence, and commercial space assets are all highly vulnerable to demonstrated and growing threats.
Our national response to this challenge must include two priority objectives: First, the entire national security space community must transition from viewing space as a sanctuary to space as a warfighting domain; and second, the current cadre of space operators must transition from providing support for warfighters inside the atmosphere to also fighting in, from and through space as warfighters themselves. To do this, they must be organized, trained, and equipped specifically for this new purpose. It is one thing to build and operate a support system as a service provider, and quite another to engage as a formidable, effective combatant.
The Senate Armed Services Committee, (SASC) under the leadership of Sen. Jim Inhofe, is asking all the right questions of the Department of Defense (DOD) to get to the root issues at hand. The solution path to the first priority objective above is establishing a new combatant command focused on warfighting in space—U.S. Space Command. The case for forming this new command is widely accepted throughout the national defense community, the White House and both Houses of the Congress; it is on track for implementation.
Yet a new combatant command only addresses half the problem. Combatant commands do the warfighting, but rely on the armed services—the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps—to organize, train and equip the forces they employ. Before we establish a new separate armed service for space, we must first ensure the conditions are in place to assure its success. Those conditions are not in place today. The idea of a separate space armed service will make sense eventually, but only when standing it up actually benefits the U.S. security enterprise.
To be clear, U.S. government policy toward military operations in space has focused for over six decades on developing force enhancement tools to facilitate military operations inside the atmosphere—not on warfighting in or from space. Today, our space assets deliver precision, navigation, and timing (global positioning satellites); missile launch warning; communications; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). The U.S. has no weapons in space. We have no formalized concepts of operation for the employment of any such weapons nor are there any military personnel trained for application of force in or from space.
The development of the Air Force offers an object lesson. Pilots in the Army’s Air Service beginning in World War I dedicated tremendous time and energy to the strategic, operational, tactical, and technical development of air warfare over the next three decades. They proved these ideas in World War II with over 2 million airmen and over 70,000 military aircraft. Only then, after all that, did our nation take the critical step to establish the Air Force as a separate armed service.
Though the United States now has over 60 years of experience in space, we have yet to make a commensurate effort to develop the offensive and defensive military space capabilities inherent for a space armed service. Indeed, until recently, the idea of conflict in space could not even be mentioned in open forums. Space as a warfighting domain remains immature, more like airpower in the first quarter of the 20th century than at the end of World War II.
China’s successful 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test triggered the beginning of a change in U.S. military policy toward space. But even so, it took another eight years before Gen. John Hyten, then U.S. Air Force Space Command commander in 2015, began publicly discussing space as a warfighting domain akin to air, ground, and sea.
Real threats to our space-based enablers continue to grow. While the U.S. did not seek to weaponize space, the decisions and actions of U.S. adversaries have made great strides in this regard. They saw the need to fight in space because space-based enablers are now fundamental to the U.S. way of war—the U.S. military cannot fight effectively without them. Responding to this threat, Air Force Chief of Staff David Goldfein pronounced on Feb 3, 2017, “Our vision is to first normalize space operations as a joint warfighting domain; no different than any other warfighting domain.”
Consequently, the development of U.S. warfighting capabilities in space is woefully behind. Contrary to those who like to portray the Air Force as the culprit of this sad state of affairs, we are where we are today not because of Air Force neglect, but because of a self-limiting U.S. national space policy with respect to military operations in space. That national policy must now change and mature.
As part of that change the Air Force should transition its space cadre in the U.S. Air Force Space Command to organize, train, and equip personnel to both defend our space-based enablers from attack, and to be prepared to fight enemy threats in space—the two fundamental elements of warfare: defense and offense. This means the Air Force must: 1) Cross-train and develop its space personnel for warfighting; 2) Exercise warfighting capabilities in and from space, and; 3) Develop the personnel and facilities to accomplish all of the above. To actualize these changes, today’s U.S. Air Force Space Command should be re-designated as the U.S. Air Force Space Force as a major command within the Air Force hierarchy with the missions of providing forces for the new U.S. Space Command, and creating the conditions to eventually evolve into a separate armed force—the U.S. Space Force. Prior to evolving from the U.S. Air Force Space Force as a major command, to the U.S. Space Force as a separate armed service four fundamental prerequisites will have to be accomplished:
- Adequate numbers of personnel trained specifically for the conduct of warfighting in and from space
- Consolidation of the bulk of U.S. military organizations with roles in space
- Weaponized space capability and development of matured space warfare theory, doctrine, and concepts of operation
- Sufficient resources to enable the entire spectrum of required military activities in space
The first prerequisite is critical. Regardless of the organizational alternatives that are ultimately established for conducting military operations in space, they will require a larger, deeper and more flexible stable of space warfare talent than currently exists. Today there are simply not enough trained personnel to cover all the additional proposed military space organizations—a new combatant command, U.S. Space Command (around a 1000 people based on the previous U.S. Space Command); the Administration’s proposed new and completely separate armed service, U.S. Space Force (around 15,000 personnel); while also retaining a sufficiently sized Air Force component to the U.S. Space Command (just as the other armed service will maintain components to U.S. Space Command). Attempting to accomplish all three simultaneously will guarantee failure in one element or the other—an intolerable risk in the face of space threat conditions. The personnel issue is not only a matter of size; a sustainable space force as a separate service must also have an appropriate distribution of talent across the rank structure and the means to sustain and grow that talent over time.
The second prerequisite is the imperative to consolidate the nation’s fragmented multitude of space organizations. A July 2016 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, prepared at congressional direction, noted some 60 stakeholder organizations in DOD, the Executive Office of the President, the Intelligence Community, and civilian agencies all have a stake in national security space. GAO’s conclusion: Too many cooks are spoiling the broth. Vice President Mike Pence echoed that sentiment on March 1, 2019, saying that spreading the national security space program so thinly has resulted in “a glaring lack of leadership and accountability that undermines our combatant commanders and puts our war-fighters at risk.”
If the Congress is serious about strengthening the U.S. hand in space, it should direct that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) be re-integrated into the Air Force in Fiscal Year 2020. Defending NRO’s critical resources will be the responsibility of the new Space Force major command inside the Air Force. Insisting on the continued segregation of NRO as a stand-alone organization is a throw-back to an era past and smacks of intelligence community parochialism. Unifying the disparate organizations with a role in U.S. military space activities is absolutely necessary to solve the challenges we face. Leaving them disconnected simply perpetuates those challenges, particularly in an era of increasing vulnerability to the Nation’s space assets regardless of function.
Third, crafting a robust and effective space force will require adequate resources to assure the survivability and robustness of U.S. space advantages. Consolidating space organizations will enhance the resource base in ways not possible with smaller organizational entities. For example, two critical space programs, the Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) and the advanced extremely high frequency (AEHF) program were both were very broken programs. The first AEHF satellite was launched on August 14, 2010—four years behind schedule, and the SIBRS program was beset by massive cost overruns on the order of 400 percent. To fix these critical spacecraft programs, the Air Force diverted monies from other programs within the Air Force budget. This would not be possible if a similar situation would arise inside a space force as a separate armed service that as currently proposed by the Administration is smaller than a single Army Corps, a couple of large Air Force wings, and less than half the size of a Marine Expeditionary Force. If a separate space service were established today it would lack the flexibility to make such pragmatic program adjustments.
Finally, constraints to fully-weaponized space capability must be debated and changed by Congress to enable the nascent Space Force major command inside the Air Force to develop and mature space warfare theory. Realistic concepts of operation to hold an enemy at risk in, from, and through space must be considered and debated before establishing a separate space armed service. It is essential that critical thinking and mission demands drive bureaucracy, not the other way around.
With the challenges fully in view and well defined, the launch plan to protect and advance U.S. superiority in the space domain is now unambiguous—and it is urgent:
- First, rapidly establish and fully staff a new combatant command for space—the U.S. Space Command.
- Second, train the current cadre of space operators with a new focus on conducting defensive and offensive military operations in space.
- Third, to actualize this change while still capitalizing on existing space mission expertise, re-designate the U.S. Air Force major command—the U.S. Air Force Space Command—into the U.S. Air Force Space Force.
- Fourth, immediately consolidate the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) back into the Air Force to exploit the numerous successes in space acquisition that they have achieved, and to form a close association with the new space force that will defend their satellites. A goal of this consolidation should also be to assemble the entire defense space acquisition apparatus within one organization—the Space and Missile Systems Center, the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, the Space Development Agency, and all space efforts from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Air Force.
We are at the cusp of a very significant evolution regarding military operations in space. Managed effectively, these changes will result in a fundamental re-vectoring of America’s national security space enterprise with minimal bureaucratic impacts and improved economies of scale. They can be accomplished without risking harm to our established U.S. space architecture. Yet they are significant enough to set in motion the fundamental changes necessary not only to defend our current space assets but also to set a path toward fully realizing space as a warfighting domain.
