“Clearly, this is not what Congress intended,” said one former DoD official. “They wanted one person in charge, and made it the new Assistant Secretary of the Air Force — and even strengthened that position to merge the SAE (legal authority to put things on contract), with a mandate to fix Architecture and Integration.”
Response to the re-organization plans from former DoD officials, acquisition experts and sources close to Congress ranged from confusion to frustration to skepticism. Some, for example, said it doesn’t seem to do much more than change the nameplate on the Space and Missile System Center’s door in Los Angeles.
“It’s not clear that this is streamlining anything,” said Victoria Samson, Washington office director of the respected Secure World Foundation.
Indeed, given that the primary goal of Congress in setting up the Space Force was to fundamentally overhaul how DoD does space acquisition, some lawmakers now may try to force matters in the 2022 defense budget cycle. For example, congressional committees could decide to push up the October 2022 deadline for the Air Force to nominate a new space acquisition czar.
To be fair, a key reason that the proposed redesign does not address the bottom-line question of the space acquisition chain of command is simply that Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond does not have the legal or institutional authority to do so.
The Air Force secretary does, say former DoD officials, congressional experts and outside acquisition mavens. But there is no one in that position; John Roth is currently serving as acting secretary. The Biden administration has also not yet nominated an Air Force assistant secretary for acquisition and integration (SAF-AQ); Darlene Costello is the acting.
The Air Force further has yet to establish the civilian position of assistant secretary for space acquisition and integration, clearly mandated in both the 2020 and 2021 versions of the National Defense Authorization Act.
Indeed, as Raymond noted, the Space Force and Air Force have not finished their long-delayed plan, which was due to Congress last March, to craft a new unified space acquisition structure under that new civilian post.
“On the space acquisition report — we did the report. We are still coordinating that through to be able to release it to Congress,” he told reporters yesterday. “We’re going to continue to coordinate that report. But what we’ve also done is we’ve started implementing; we haven’t sat still, we have to move out.”
That report, drafted last May and including a number of proposed reforms to increase flexibility for space acquisitions, was sent to Congress then but was then recalled by the Office of Management and Budget. In a briefing in January, Shawn Barnes, who currently serves as the Air Force’s de facto space acquisition lead, said that while his office has been reorganized, the authority to make those decisions is in the hands of SAF-AQ. And the Air Force civilian leadership has been discussing the issue with congressional staff on an ongoing basis.
A number of experts pointed out this begs the question of why the re-organization — which, as long anticipated, re-designates SMC as a Space Force field command called Space Systems Command — is being announced now. More than one source, in fact, speculated that the move is an attempt by the Space Force uniformed leadership to “bake” something into place before the new space acquisition czar is on board. (Or, in other words, bureaucracy abhors a vacuum.)
However, “people forget that the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space will outrank Gen. Raymond,” said one former DoD official. “So all of this is subject to 100% change.”
Further, the nominal organization chart shows that the Space Development Agency (SDA) will be brought directly under Raymond by Oct. 1, 2022, per the 2021 NDAA, section 9084.
“The ’21 NDAA had in it provisions for the Space Development Agency to report directly to the CSO beginning 1 October 2022, and that is an organize, train and equip superior, subordinate relationship,” SMC director Lt. Gen. JT Thompson told me during a press briefing on the new command yesterday.
The plan also would create a “limited administrative control, or limited ADCON” link between SSC and SDA, as well as with the Space Rapid Capabilities Office and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
“We also are expanding our partnerships and tightening our relationships with the Space Development Agency and the Space RCO,” Thompson said, as well as AFRL. “We’re trying to tighten those relationships, and so you’ll see a dotted line on the chart — that depicts a concept that we call “limited ADCON. Limited ADCON is: ‘what can we take off your plate, Space Development Agency, AFRL and space RCO, to help you better manage and enable your mission without getting in the way of your unique skills’?”
However, one former DoD official said, the term “limited ADCON” has no official meaning in either the Air Force or the DoD acquisition bureaucratic system.
Almost as confusingly, the org chart doesn’t show a direct “line” of reporting from the SDA director, currently Derek Tournear, to the SAE — something also required in the 2021 NDAA. Instead, an SMC spokesperson explained yesterday that that relationship is signified on the org chart by a small yellow star. This is, again, because the aim of the chart was to explain the organize train and equip chain of command, according to the spokesperson.
As for the “limited ADCON” relationship between SDA and SSC, the spokesperson said that those terms will be sorted out later through a memorandum of understanding between the two separate organizations. In other words, SDA is not becoming part of SSC — a question that has been hotly debated since it first was raised in the 2020 NDAA. So, these two organizations will still be legally independent space acquisition authorities.
Further, the planned reorganization does not explain what acquisition authorities, if any, the three-star SSC commander will have.
Under the current SMC structure, Thompson has acquisition authority over the various program executive officers (PEOs) who directly manage contracting. That SMC structure is referred to by Space Force leaders as SMC 2.0, and was declared fully operational in 2019.
But, as Thompson himself explained in the press conference, under the reorganized SSC, each of the three PEOs — for the Development, Production and Enterprise Corps — will report directly to the SAE not to the SSC commander. UPDATE BEGINS. But until the SAE is appointed, those Space Force PEOs will continue to report to the Air Force acquisition assistant secretary. UPDATE ENDS.
Thompson cited the change in the PEO reporting structure as one piece of evidence that the new structure was not just a name change, because it will help speed decision-making. Raymond concurred: saying it will push “authorities down to the lower levels and empowering decision-makers.”
The other big change from the current SMC structure is the consolidation of launch oversight — whether via the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program or via commercial services — under the SSC deputy.
“Perhaps the most interesting part of the new organization is that we’ve brought together the entire launch enterprise, and we brought them underneath one leader, who also happens to be the deputy commander of the Space Systems Command,” Thompson said. “That launch enterprise includes everything from the acquisition program offices that are doing everything from acquiring small launch capabilities and working with National Security Space Launch launch service providers, all the way through the operations functions that currently exist at the 30th Space Wing at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and the 45th Space Wing at Patrick Space Force Base. All of those entities will directly report to this single leader, who happens to be the deputy commander of the SSC, and we’re referring to that function as the ‘assured access to space office’.”
At the same time, the SSC commander (presumably Thompson himself) will maintain undefined integration responsibilities” as chairman of a new Program Integration Council (PIC).
“One of the things that we did post the SMC 2.0 re-architecture in November of ’19 that I think is important to highlight is that we established the Program Integration Council, which is a collaborative interagency leadership council for cooperation and deconfliction between all of the different organizations that require space assets for our warfighters,” Thompson said. “It ensures that our planning alignment execution and delivery are integrated for the capabilities that we provide.
“It’s made up of a number of different acquisition organizations, including SMC, the NRO, the DAF, for Department of the Air Force, the Rapid Capabilities Office, Space Rapid Capabilities Office, the Missile Defense Agency, and the Space Development Agency,” Thompson went on. “And it also includes a user’s group that’s led by the other United States Space Force field command that’s been stood up, our Space Operations Command, as a user representative to the group.”
UPDATE BEGINS. The SMC spokesperson explained that “the SSC Commander will not have direct acquisition authorities.” Instead, that person will chair the PIC, which the spokesperson described as “a collaborative interagency leadership council that facilitates cooperation and deconfliction” between the various other space acquisition organizations. “This council ensures the planning, alignment, execution, and delivery of integrated end-to-end capabilities across all mission areas.”
Further, the spokesman said, “the SSC Commander will ensure ‘unity of effort’ in acquisition activities across the Field Command, which is a priority of the USSF.” UPDATE ENDS.
But the 2020 NDAA also charged the Air Force to set up a Space Acquisition Council, to be led by the new Air Force space acquisition czar, that would include most of the same agencies. How that council will relate to the new PIC is anyone’s guess.