SPACECOM basing in limbo as heated HASC hearing resolves nothing

WASHINGTON —  The years-long dispute between lawmakers from Alabama and Colorado over the location of US Space Command’s permanent headquarters erupted today during a House Armed Services Committee hearing, stoked in part by political attacks on President Joe Biden over his choice of Colorado Springs — leaving the final result, and the some 1,000 personnel involved, in limbo.

Biden’s move in July overturned former President Donald Trump’s January 2021 decision by President Donald Trump to move SPACECOM HQ to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala. — a decision that also became embroiled in political maneuvering at the time.

HASC Chair Rep. Mike Rogers, R.-Ala., at the conclusion of today’s hearing made clear that he will continue to block any effort to make Peterson SFB in Colorado Springs ready to support the command’s permanent home, pending additional investigation, including a new one he said he’ll request from the Pentagon.

“I’m going to ask the Inspector General for the Department of Defense to investigate this. In the meantime, I intend to work to make sure that no funds are authorized or expended… in Colorado Springs for the building of a permanent headquarters,” he said.

Rogers already has asked the Government Accountability Office, in an Aug. 24 letter, to open a separate investigation, and GAO spokesperson Chuck Young told Breaking Defense today that the agency is doing so.

“We officially accepted the latest request and are just getting the review started,” he said. “It’s too early to have a projected completion date.”

And while the political fight has been out in the open, today Kendall revealed that he and fellow hearing witness, SPACECOM Commander Gen. Jim Dickinson, disagreed internally about what was best for the headquarters, with Kendall saying his vote was for Alabama while Dickinson pushed to stay in Colorado.

“Ultimately, my view was the decision came down to a judgement about the operational risk associated with relocating versus a reduced cost of leading alternative of Huntsville, Alabama,” Kendall said. “My assessment was that the projected cost savings together with the availability of potential mitigation measures outweighed the operational risks that have been identified. As the combatant commander, however, for SPACECOM Gen. Dickinson assessed these considerations quite differently.”

Dickinson noted earlier in the hearing that a SPACECOM assessment had found that some 88 percent of the civilian workforce at the temporary HQ — who he said make up 60 percent of the 1,000 personnel vice the 40 percent that are military — would not be willing to move to Huntsville, thus meaning time lost to training of new people.

Rogers, along with both Republican and Democratic lawmakers from Alabama, have hammered on the fact that the Air Force’s internal basing study put Huntsville as the top choice and Colorado Spring as fifth — with several noting during the hearing that the review found that a new HQ building at Peterson would cost $426 million more than at Redstone.

The Colorado congressional delegation, including Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn who chairs the HASC strategic forces subcommittee responsible for overseeing military space, has focused on Dickinson’s view and that of the top military brass that the very act of moving would impose on operational readiness.

Both the GAO and IG last year concluded investigations, finding that Trump’s decision was reasonable, but also that the technical process had been significantly flawed — recommending that the Department of the Air Force review the criteria involved.

The finding on the review process was the only thing that the warring parties at the hearing could agree upon.

“This has been a horrible process. And one of the things that I think everyone on this committee, and everyone in Congress for that matter, is owed is an explanation for that: How exactly we bollixed up a decision to build a command headquarters?” said HASC minority leader Rep. Adam Smith, D.-Wash. “It’s not that we’re talking about a multi-billion dollar weapon system here.”

For their part, Kendall, Dickinson and Space Force chief Gen. Chance Saltzman were forced to keep their collective cool in the face of sometimes downright nasty grilling — including about their views on DoD’s and the Biden administration’s abortion policies that hard-right Republican lawmakers claim was at the heart of the HQ choice, given that Colorado is a blue state that supports abortion rights.

For example, Rep. Mark Alford, a Republican from Missouri with no direct skin in the HQ fighting game, accused Biden of taking “punitive action” against Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville for holding up nominees for top DoD civilian and military officials because of his objections to the Pentagon’s abortion rights rules.

“This was not about selecting the best location. It was purely politics, the politics of abortion in America,” said Alford.

Kendall pushed back: “This the basing decision to my knowledge was never affected in any way by considerations about abortion. That was never discussed in any conversation that I had.”

Instead, Kendall detailed the decision process and timeline, explaining that it came down to two key questions.

“In my judgment, the two most important factors and basing action ultimately proved to be: one, the cost to the taxpayer of constructing and operating a new permanent headquarters facility at any of the six reasonable alternative locations; and two, the operational risks associated with any transition from the provisional headquarters in Colorado to another location,” he said.

At one point Rep. Scott Dejarlais, R.-Tenn., quizzed Kendall about his statement to the HASC in April that he “had no indication” that Biden would take over the decision process, and asked when it became clear that the issue had been taken out of his hands by the White House.

Kendall in his opening remarks told lawmakers he’d kept Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan apprised of the Air Force review of the OIG and GAO findings, but he told Dejarlais that he didn’t know Biden was taking over the basing call until “shortly before the president made the decision.”

Perhaps the most telling fact of the hours-long hearing, however, was that despite a large part of the dispute being focused on whether a move would impact readiness, not a single member of Congress asked about the potential effects of the looming government shutdown on SPACECOM operations and Space Force capabilities to support them.

Which lends credence to to the famous quip by the late, great House Speaker Tip O’Neill: all politics is local.