USSPACECOM Change of Command

Gen. James Dickinson (Department of Defense photo by Lewis Carlyle)

WASHINGTON — Perhaps the most striking thing about US Space Command’s fiscal 2024 wish list for funds not included in the Defense Department’s annual budget request is its full-throated call for lawmakers to back Indo-Pacific Command’s bold bid for $3.5 billion in extra FY24 cash.

In a March 23 letter conveying his own command’s “unfunded priorities” list to the Senate Armed Services Committee, obtained by Breaking Defense, SPACECOM head Gen. Jim Dickinson expresses “strong support” for INDOPACOM’s ask.

“The space capabilities captured within USINDOPACOM’s submission are critical to ensuring that the Department of Defense’s integrated deterrence posture extends to the space domain, and, if called upon, will enable USSPACECOM to fully support USINDOPACOM’s efforts to defeat aggression,” he wrote.

While INDOPACOM Commander Adm. John Aquilino’s list is heavily concentrated on missile defense of Guam and strike capabilities clearly aimed keeping China in check, it also includes $275 million for “the next generation of national defense space architecture to enable U.S. military operations and responses to emerging multi-domain threats and adversaries,” according to a March 24 report in Defense One.

Dickinson’s move is unusual, because in the scramble to cajole Congress to throw extra dollars at their “unfunded priorities,” combatant commands are in de facto competition for finite resources — one that may be more fraught than normal this year. First, far right Republicans are pushing to slash Pentagon spending, joining the (usually fruitless) yearly efforts by the Democrat’s progressive wing. Another is the campaign led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to end the practice of unfunded priorities lists altogether, arguing that if the lists represent real warfighting priorities then the funds should be included in the Pentagon’s formal budget submission in the first place.

RELATED: US Indo-Pacific Command seeks $15.3 billion in new, independent budget request

The exact amount Dickinson would like to see Congress add to SPACECOM’s own budget is unclear, as the funding for five of the six wish list requests is restricted to a classified annex. His letter, however, argues that the funds would enhance current capabilities to “directly monitor the space domain and defend our nation’s vital assets.”

The six priorities are:

  • Space Control Program, the space control mission includes space domain awareness;
  • Capability to Counter On-orbit Threats;
  • Space-based Ground Moving Target Indicator capability;
  • Red Cloud, an undefined effort that may or may not be a follow-on to an early 2000s effort called “Talon Spectrum Red Cloud” with the National Reconnaissance Office to directly inject data from non-traditional sensors into SPACECOM’s database of on-orbit objects;
  • Strategic Capabilities Office program; and
  • Space Warfighting Terrain, which the letter explains is a multi-pronged initiative to improve command and control networks for which Dickinson is asking an extra $20 million.

Meanwhile, the Space Force is asking to add a total of $477.3 million in its own FY24 wish list to its $30 billion budget request. The vast bulk is targeted at six classified programs which are not even named in the public list. A seventh program, called Defense Cyber Ops – Space, and for which the service is asking an additional $43 million to top up its official $76 million request, is aimed at speeding delivery of software for sniffing out cyber threats.