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Pentagon: No ‘Space Force’ is planned
‘U.S. Space Command’ would draft war plans, conduct military operations
Plans call for a high-tech military command responsible for fighting in space, but not a new agency.
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon plans to create a new military command responsible for war fighting in space, but it is dragging its feet on building a more ambitious “space force,” a new military service that President Donald Trump has endorsed repeatedly in tweets and campaign rallies.
Trump’s idea for a futuristic space service has raised concerns among military officials and senior Pentagon commanders, especially in the Air Force. They fear losing responsibility for space and the nearly $8.5 billion of its budget that now goes for building and launching satellites, along with other space systems.
Vice President Mike Pence will renew the administration’s call for a space force in a speech at the Pentagon on Thursday. Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan will lay out interim steps, including a new space command and a new joint agency for buying satellites, that the Pentagon plans to create by the end of the year.
According to a Pentagon report to be released Thursday, the new “U.S. Space Command” would be responsible for drafting war plans for space and for conducting military operations in space, much like Central Command draws from all military services and is responsible for fighting wars in the Middle East.
Trump’s broader call for a space force as a new military service — joining the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines — faces an uncertain future. It can be implemented only with the approval of Congress. Senior lawmakers in the Senate have voiced staunch opposition to the idea, which is unlikely to be taken up until next year.
If Congress eventually approves a space force, it would probably have 30,000 to 40,000 personnel, drawn mostly from the Air Force but also from the Army and possibly the National Reconnaissance Office, the little-known intelligence agency responsible for building and launching spy satellites.
That would make the space force by far the smallest military service, behind the Marine Corps, which has an active duty force of 186,100 this year.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis played down the disagreements between the Pentagon and the White House on Tuesday. “We are in complete agreement with the president’s concerns about protecting our assets in space,” he told reporters, adding, “I don’t have all the final answers yet.”
Current and former Pentagon officials say consolidation of space functions now performed by the Air Force, Navy and other military branches into a single independent service would add layers of bureaucracy and might not immediately improve the military’s capabilities.
“The Pentagon is complicated enough,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters in June 2017, when asked about a potential space force. “This will make it more complex, add more boxes to the organization chart and cost more money. If I had more money, I would put it into lethality, not bureaucracy.”
Some current and former Air Force officers cautioned Congress to go slow in reshaping the military’s space operations.
A space force must be “planned and executed deliberately,” retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula and Lt. Col. Michael Martindale, an associate director at the Air Force Academy, said in a statement released Wednesday by the Air Force Association, an independent nonprofit professional military and aerospace group.
“By itself, standing up a U.S. Space Force will not necessarily improve the resource deficiencies” in space operations and “could pull space professionals from the community of warfighters they have worked so hard to integrate with over the past quarter century,” the statement said.
If designed like other military services, a space force would be responsible for training and equipping personnel for warfare in space but would not engage in combat. Instead, its personnel would be assigned to the new space command the Pentagon is proposing, or to existing combat commands.
Trump has never explained why he favors creation of a space force as a fifth military service, but the concept often draws loud cheers at rallies.
Hopes by Pentagon officials that the idea would fade away were dashed in June when Trump during a meeting of the National Space Council, a government advisory body, directed Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to create a “separate but equal” military service for space.
“We got you,” a seemingly uncomfortable Dunford replied.
Trump has not let the matter drop, saying at a campaign rally Saturday for a congressional candidate in Ohio that he had “directed the Pentagon to begin the process of creating the sixth branch of the United States Armed Forces called the space force. Space, very important.”