Trump renews Space Force plan, but Congress not sold
President Donald Trump relaunched his call for a Space Force on Monday, and at a National Space Council meeting, he directed the Pentagon to create a new command in the Defense Department ASAP.
One problem: Congress needs to sign off on the plan first – and it probably won’t any time soon.
“It is not enough merely to have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space. So important,” the president said.
Trump said he would direct the Pentagon “to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed services.”
“We are going to have the Air Force, and we are going to have the Space Force,” Trump continued.
He instructed U.S. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to carry out the assignment. “Separate but equal. It is going to be something,” the president said.
Several times before and as recently as last month, the president has promoted the idea of a fighting force dedicated to defending the United States and its interests in Earth’s orbit and beyond.
The proposal has languished in Congress. Last month, the House of Representatives rejected a plan that would have carved out space-related combat functions from the Air Force.
The president needs congressional authorization to approve the move and cover the costs of such a realignment.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., a leading voice in Congress on U.S. presence in space, wrote in a tweet shortly after the president’s comments that “now is NOT the time to rip the Air Force apart. Too many important missions at stake.”
There’s general consensus among lawmakers that it’s time to grant special attention to military operations in space – but not how it should be done.
Last year, the House approved a proposal from Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., that would create a Space Corps, which would be the first new military branch since the Air Force was broken out of the Army in 1947.
Rogers contended that the Pentagon’s lack of focus on extraterrestrial priorities eroded the nation’s dominance in space. Military satellites aren’t deployed fast enough because of a bureaucracy that cares more about superiority in the air than space, said Rogers, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on Strategic Forces.
Under Rogers’ plan, the Space Corps’ primary purpose would be to oversee the acquisition, development and deployment of military satellites and the ground stations that control them. The plan would not include intelligence satellites or the National Reconnaissance Office, the government agency in charge of designing building, launching and maintaining intelligence satellites.
The Space Corps would not have direct oversight of missile launches by the military.
At the time, Trump administration officials resisted the idea.
“The Pentagon is complicated enough,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said last year. “We’re trying to simplify. So to make it more complex would add more boxes to the (organizational) chart and cost more money. And if I had more money, I would put it into lethality, not bureaucracy.”