Vacant chairs popping up at Pentagon’s space policy shop

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department’s space policy shop is facing a bit of a leadership gap — with two more senior officials stepping down following the first-ever assistant secretary for space policy John Plumb, who stepped down in May.

Vipin Narang, who was tapped as acting assistant secretary following Plumb’s departure, is due to exit within a few months, Breaking Defense has learned. He will return to his former position as MIT’s “Frank Stanton Professor of Nuclear Security and Political Science,” from where he has been on “service leave,” in time for the September start of the new school year.

Asked for an exact departure date, a DoD spokesperson said: “We don’t have an announcement to make at this time for Acting Assistant Secretary for Space Policy Dr. Vipin Narang.”

Narang joined as Plumb’s second — which, despite its name, actually is charged with a much broader mission covering space, nuclear weapons, cybersecurity and electromagnetic warfare — in March 2022.

Travis Langster, principal director of space policy, moved on July 1 into the office of top Pentagon weapons buyer Bill LaPlante as deputy assistant secretary for “International & Industry Engagement.”

Langster joined DoD in April 2022 from his position as vice president and general manager of COMSPOC, a provider of space situational awareness and space traffic management data and analysis. In particular, he was charged with shepherding the transfer to the Commerce Department of DoD’s mission to monitor the heavens and and warn commercial and other non-military space operators of potential on-orbit collisions. He also led coordination of DoD’s guidelines for responsible behavior in space, issued by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in July 2021.

The moves will leave John Hill, deputy assistant secretary for space and missile defense, as the senior-most official in the space policy office. Hill has spent nearly two decades at the Pentagon in various positions, including serving as principal director for space policy from 2013-2021 — the senior space policy slot until the creation of the assistant secretary position in 2022 at the direction of Congress.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s overarching office for policy, the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, is also currently operating without several formally nominated and appointed officials at the senior level. The office is being led by acting undersecretary Amanda Dory and acting deputy undersecretary Cara Abercrombie. Further, besides Narang, two more of the seven specialized assistant secretaries are acting, and one is “performing the duties of” assistant secretary.