Space Force at two: ‘Still a toddler,’ with all that brings

WASHINGTON: When President Donald Trump stood up the Space Force on Dec. 20, 2019, supporters glowed with the belief that the Pentagon’s longstanding lack of focus on space would finally be solved.

Barbara Barrett, then serving as Air Force secretary, had days earlier summed up the goals of the new military service. “We have to be able to defend what we have there that we count on,” she said. “We need to replace the things that are there that require external defense — put things in space that themselves can be defended. And then we need to be able to use space as an enabler for warfighters in other domains.”

But with the Space Force poised to celebrate its second birthday on Monday, its supporters in Congress and industry observers are feeling somewhat like the parents of a human two-year-old: proud, but also plenty frustrated.

While key lawmakers say some good progress has been made, they, along with a number of industry sources and analysts, worry about lack of movement on fixing space acquisition, which was central to the new military force’s establishment. In particular, policymakers and experts zeroed in on the failure to streamline the Byzantine space acquisition decision-making chain — which in turn has led to a lack of progress on reconfiguring America’s vulnerable satellite networks into a more resilient architecture. 

“I think Space Force — and Space Command, don’t forget there are two new entities here — have made great progress. But they still have a long way to go,” Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), chairman of the House Armed Service’s strategic forces subcommittee, told Breaking Defense in a Dec. 13 interview.

Cooper, one of the congressional “fathers” of the Space Force long before Trump took it up as a political rallying point, noted that the newest military service is “still a toddler,” and suggested that a modicum of patience is required. “Remember that a vast bureaucracy like the Pentagon doesn’t move with the speed of a magazine editor or a newsroom,” he said.

“Looking back on the original reasons why we needed a separate service for space […], there were three: create a professional space cadre, fix space acquisitions and create military space doctrine,” Secure World Foundation’s Brian Weeden said. “At the two year point, it’s hard to tell if the Space Force has made significant progress on solving any of those issues.”

Todd Harrison, long-time space budget guru at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was more blunt.

“I think after two years, the grace period is officially over for the Space Force,” Harrison said. “Everyone understood from the beginning it would take time to stand up the new service and reorganize the military space enterprise, and members of Congress were willing to be patient. But the time for patience is over, and the pressure is mounting on the Space Force leadership to show tangible results.”

Space Force declined to comment for this report.

Cooper ‘Deeply Worried’ About Bureaucratic Resistance

The clearest point of concern on the Hill and among analysts is the sluggishness when it comes to space acquisition reform, hobbled by bureaucracy. 

Cooper said that he was “deeply worried” that the number of officials who can kill an innovative new idea for space actually may have gone up since Space Force’s creation, rather than down. “That’s one of the reasons Mike Rogers and I wanted to stand up Space Force: we thought 60 naysayers were too many. If there are even more today, then that’s truly discouraging — because that’s not reform, it’s deform.”

Cooper was referring to Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) who partnered with him in creating the Space Force.  Rogers told Breaking Defense in a Dec. 15 interview that his “biggest frustration” has been the administration’s slowness to name a new space acquisition executive (SAE) independent from the Air Force — as mandated by the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act — and to come up with a plan to consolidate some of the different acquisition offices and agencies.

“One of the things that we’ve done is, we’ve asked them to give us a written plan so we can work with them, and we haven’t gotten it yet,” Rogers said of Pentagon space leaders. “But that’s what we’re here for: we’re here to aggravate them to make them do right.”

(After a year’s wait, lawmakers’ persistence in pushing the Pentagon on the SAE seems to have partially paid off: the White House on Dec. 15 nominated Frank Calvelli, senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton who served eight years as the principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office under both Presidents Obama and Trump, for the post of assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition.)

While expressing his continued strong support for the Space Force, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Breaking Defense in a written statement that he too is concerned about bureaucratic impediments to faster change.

Noting that “as with any new program, it takes time to get it right,” he said “there has been significant progress in some areas.” But, he went on, “I am not satisfied, though, about the slowness of implementation for warfighting and acquisition, as General Hyten also noted, nor with the infighting between the intelligence community and Space Force as well as other intra-DOD fights. We created the Space Force as the service focused on warfighting in space, but that means that other services and agencies need to appreciate that Space Force is the Pentagon’s provider of space capability.”

Gen. John Hyten, just before his retirement as vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had criticized the Pentagon’s continued failure to update its satellite infrastructure to a more diverse and dispersed architecture based on large numbers of smaller, lower cost satellites.

Hyten told the Defense Writers Group on Oct. 28 the Pentagon has been talking about the need for resilience for “over a decade.” But worryingly, he said, the US still has “a handful of fat, juicy targets.”

Cooper, too, fretted about the need to move faster to build less vulnerable satellites. “We need quality control but we also need speed and boldness,” he said. “The difficulty is changing space architecture. I think what we’re going to end up seeing is augmenting existing space architecture with other designs, and we just need to get them in orbit as soon as possible.”

Doug Loverro, former head of space policy at the Defense Department and a long-time supporter of a separate military space service, gave the Space Force a grade of B on rapidly establishing a lean organization, but noted that there are “holes” — a big one being that Space Systems Command, “is still a mess.”

Less generously, he gave the Space Force a D on doctrine development, and an F on its progress in developing resilient space systems — although on the latter issue, he said that at least service leaders now understand after all the talk about resilience, “they actually need to move there.”

Supporters Urge Patience For ‘Evolutionary Process’

Rogers stressed that despite some concerns he is “pleased” with Space Force’s “growth and development.” And he cautioned that moving too fast could actually result in more problems rather than fixing current ones.

“We made it clear when we stood this up that it is going to be an evolutionary process, and that we just stood up the bare bones in the first year — because it’s hard enough to do that,” he explained. “And we’re putting the flesh on the bones each year trying to mature it in a slow and pragmatic fashion, and do it right.”

Eric Brown, Lockheed Martin Military Space senior director for mission strategy, concurred, saying “I think what people expected to see was this immediate switch in approaches to how things were acquired, what was acquired and so forth. But with all of that fragmentation that existed prior to the Space Force, what was missing was really that top-down umbrella architectural perspective that says, ‘Okay, what we actually need to do’?”

Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, said that “with time and focus, I am confident the Space Force will exceed our expectations,” but that it, like other military branches must “innovate faster, transition technology from concept to a warfighting capability more effectively, and leverage the private sector.”

Raymond and other senior leaders, she stressed, “understand these issues and are focused on how they can work with us in Congress to solve them.”

And those fixes will take time: years, if not decades, according to Weeden, despite what the public may have been led to believe at the beginning.

“The problem is that the political debate on the Space Force created this false notion that simply establishing the Space Force was the solution. In reality, establishing the Space Force only created the conditions where we might be able to solve those problems in the future. And unfortunately, it also meant we needed to spend hundreds to thousands of hours on the bureaucratic stuff (new logo, ranks, uniform, names) before we could get to those problems.”

Chris Bogdan, a senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, pointed out that Raymond faces several constraints that make it hard to get things done at a speedy pace, not the least of which is a lack of people power. In addition, he said in a Dec. 15 interview, “[Raymond’s] got an operational mission he’s currently executing at the same time he is trying to stand up a new force.”

And then are 535 lawmakers to deal with. Christopher Stone, senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Advantage Research Center, more overtly tossed some of blame for the slow going back at Congress. “When it comes to acquisition and operational capability, I think they have moved as fast as they can given the artificial restrictions placed upon them by Congress both in personnel and resources.”

Russia and China have helped shore up that support

All that said, there is no evidence that the widespread and, by and large, bipartisan support within Congress for the Space Force’s existence is threatened. Instead, the recent tests by Russia and China of anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons capabilities has helped to strengthen the perceptions on the Hill about its importance.

“The last few months have proven the Space Force is a national security necessity,” Inhofe said. “While some have failed to take the Space Force seriously, recent missile tests from both China and Russia threaten both our national security and commercial space assets, not to mention other key national security interests.”

“We saw the recent Russian test. Of course, the Chinese had a horrendous ASAT test years ago. There are daily efforts to jam and spoof and dazzle and all sorts of reversible attacks. We’ve got a lot of work to do to avoid a space Pearl Harbor,” Cooper said.

And Granger: “As adversaries like China continue to expand their investments in space, it is critical that Congress supports the mission and development of the U.S. Space Force.”

The big question now is what happens with the fiscal 2023 budget — both the Pentagon’s request, and how Congress reacts.

Loverro fretted there is likely to be an internal Pentagon fight — as well as potential congressional sticker shock — over Space Force efforts to both continue spending on billion dollar legacy programs, but also pump more money into new, more resilient constellations.

Harrison put it bluntly: “The real test will be what they do in the National Defense Strategy and the FY23 budget request.

“If we don’t see a significant shift in the FY23 budget to pursue better protection and more resilient architectures, I expect we will see Congress start to make decisions for the Space Force in the FY23 NDAA and appropriations bills.”