Space Force Nears Year Mark, Acquisition Remains A Quagmire

WASHINGTON: With Space Force approaching its first birthday, DoD and the Air Force so far have done little to rationalize the byzantine space acquisition decision-making process — one of the central problems the new service was created to fix.

The stakes are impressive.

While it is almost impossible to assess exactly what the US spends on space systems because much of the annual budget is classified, in 2020 the Pentagon asked for slightly more than $11 billion in unclassified R&D and procurement spending (out of a total request for space activities of $14.1 billion), according to the Congressional Research Service. In 2021, DoD asked for a total space budget (including O&M) of $18 billion — $15.4 billion for the new Space Force, and the rest for Army, Navy and Missile Defense Agency space activities.

Those sums do not include the budgets for satellite programs developed and operated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). If the past is prologue, traditionally NRO’s budget has equalled or surpassed the unclassified space budget.

And the system for deciding what programs get first dibs on all that money is incredibly complex. Despite decades engendering sharp criticism by Congress, industry and host of experts, it also has proven incredibly difficult to change.

“I don’t think we’ve completely straightened out the acquisition pieces yet,” former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said in a webinar last night with George Mason University’s National Security Institute.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond has vowed to “go after that bureaucracy.” But yesterday, Gen. DT Thompson, newly confirmed as vice chief and a four-star, told Defense One that the Space Force is still in the planning stages for its new acquisition unit, Space Systems Command. The new command is meant to serve as an umbrella organization for (not, mind you, to actually absorb) the central space acquisition organization, the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), the Space Rapid Capabilities Office (SpRCO), the Air Force Research Laboratory’s space vehicles directorate, and, by law, DoD’s Space Development Agency (SDA). It also will eventually fold in some of the Navy and Army organizations responsible for space acquisition, he said.

Thompson reiterated that, while he sees Space Systems Command as standing up “sooner rather than later” in 2021, SDA won’t be part of it until “not later than Oct. 1, 2022.” (Shawn Barnes, who currently is spearheading space acquisition reorganization for Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett, told reporters in July that the idea bouncing around then was to delay SDA’s transfer until the beginning of fiscal year 2023.)

One of the reasons Space Force is taking time to stand up Space Systems Command is that leaders are making an effort to “more thoughtfully develop” how to tie SDA, SMC and all the other organizations together.

“We absolutely want the right approach, and part of the consideration for the right approach is how all of these organizations, and what they do today and how they do it today, fit together — how they complement each other, how they don’t duplicate each other, how they they support each other; but in some ways, perpetually, how they compete with with each other in certain ways to come up with new approaches, new operating concepts and new ideas about meeting space capability,” Thompson said. 

SDA was created by the Office of Secretary of Defense in March 2019 at the urging of then-Undersecretary for research & engineering Mike Griffin. The agency has been controversial since it was first suggested. Griffin argued strongly for keeping SDA independent, and raised hackles in Congress by moving development of a new missile tracking sensor (the “Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor,” formerly “SpaceSensor Layer”) from the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) to SDA.

“There are seven different entities in the Pentagon that buy space equipment. The last thing we need is one more. They came up with this Space Development Agency concept in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, mostly because if somebody there who thought it would be really cool,” Wilson said last night. “It had nothing to do with the efficiency of procurement, or effectiveness of the force. And I think that that piece of bureaucracy could easily die away without anybody missing it.”

In addition, as Breaking D readers were first to know, there continues to be debate about how to handle the space-related programs now in the portfolio of MDA and whether to fold them into the Space Force. Not to mention a discernible increase in the boiling rate of the long simmering black-white space debate over control of the NRO’s space budget.

As a stopgap measure, as colleague Sandra Erwin first reported last week, the Space Force has set up a new “program integration council” led by the Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center to bring together officials from space acquisition entities outside the service, including MDA, NRO, SDA, and SpRCO. (This should remind old space wonks of the ill-fated National Security Space Office, established in 2004 and disbanded in 2010.)

Meanwhile, the Air Force still has not turned its space acquisition report in to Congress, which was due March 31.That report, required by the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, is supposed to explain how the service will establish a new, independent space acquisition authority within the Space Force.

The NDAA requires the Air Force to appoint a Senate-confirmed assistant secretary for space acquisition and integration, who “will synchronize with the Air Force Service Acquisition Executive on all space system efforts, and take on service acquisition executive (SAE) responsibilities for space systems and programs effective on October 1, 2022.”

But as Breaking D readers know, the Air Force (especially current service acquisition czar Will Roper) have been seeking ways to avoid that mandate. Instead, the service has been treating the report (dubbed the Space Force Alternative Acquisition System in its most recent draft) instead as a mandate for upending what it sees as burdensome oversight provisions — causing some criticism even from Space Force supporters.

The failure to shake down both the acquisition organization and the financial process for space acquisition as a first order of business in the stand up of the Space Force is ironic, given all the hoopla over the roll-out of a new uniform, a motto, a Capstone Doctrine touting the centrality of ‘spacepower’ to winning the nation’s wars, and even a streamlined command structure.

A seminal report on space acquisition by the Government Accountability Office found that 65 DoD entities had fingers in the space acquisition pie and called for extreme streamlining. (One might note that GAO in March 2019 repeated those concerns and presciently warned that Space Force might not fix them.)

That report was one of the spurs for the big congressional effort by Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Jim Cooper  to create a Space Corps within the Air Force — a concept that for the most part is reflected in how Space Force has been set up. (Cooper, peeved that the idea was being touted as the brainchild of President Trump, quipped following its standup last December: “What’s the difference between a Space Corps and a Space Force? One word.”)

Cooper and Rogers were not only concerned with the slow pace of space acquisition, they also were concerned that the Air Force itself wasn’t sharply focused on the growing threats to US military space assets from Russia and China — including funding for improved capabilities. (A number of congressional and outside critics for years decried the Air Force’s tendency to use money appropriated for space programs to backfill shortfalls and cost overruns in fighter programs.)

The GAO report also helped spark the 2018 launch of SMC’s internal overhaul, dubbed SMC 2.0, designed to streamline and speed development and procurement processes. That overhaul, which Wilson said would “blow our socks off,” was completed last November, just before Space Force’s stand-up.

Indeed, the new service’s tendency to breathlessly announce each “first” — despite the fact that most efforts were began before its inception — has inspired much cynical commentary among long-time space analysts.

“Has anyone else noticed that there’s a ton of hype around anything the Space Force does, even if it’s exactly the same thing that was done by Air For Space Command for years/decades prior?,” tweeted Brian Weeden, Secure World Foundation’s head of program planning and a former Air Force officer, earlier this month. The fix for space acquisition will hopefully be trumpeted soon.