Apparently The Force Is Not With The Space Force
Shanahan downplays disagreements over Space Force structure, Defense News
“Days after the Air Force released a Space Force memo that seemed to contradict a plan laid out by Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, the number two at the Pentagon downplayed any differences of opinion.”
Wilson: $13 billion Space Force cost estimate is ‘conservative'”, Space News
“Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said her initial $13 billion cost estimate to stand up a Space Force and sustain it for five years is likely to be revised upward as more data is crunched. In a detailed memo submitted on Friday to Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, Wilson provided the first glimpse into the potential cost, size and makeup of a military branch for space. The $13 billion projected cost over five years is based on a force of 13,000 people, including a headquarters of about 2,400.”
New Space Force price tag fuels Capitol Hill skeptics, Military Times
“Colorado Republican Rep. Mike Coffman had already decided to lead opposition in the U.S. House to President Donald Trump’s “Space Force” proposal. But a widely leaked Air Force estimate that creating a space force as a new military service would cost $13 billion over the first five years only stiffened Coffman’s resolve. Coffman, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s Military Personnel Subcommittee and sits on its Strategic Forces Subcommittee, was sure other lawmakers agree with him. “A really bad idea is a ‘Department of Space,'” Coffman said in an interview Tuesday, adding, “I feel confident we can block this. The president will not have the votes.”
Prediction: They’re compromise and go with the scaled-down “Space Corps” within the Department of the Air Force, which probably makes more sense until the service matures over a couple of decades.
Or maybe all the services could join together into a single, unified force. What would we call it? What about the “Department of Defense”?
It used to be the Department of War. To the best of my knowledge, only Japan and Germany are constitutional prohibited from non defensive warfare. Other countries calling their military a defense agency are just calling it that for PR value.
There was also a separate Department of the Navy.
Canada tried that in 1968. It eventually got scrapped.
Just to put this in more human units, $13 billion over five years, for a staff of 13,000 people, is $200,000 per person, per year. Including overhead and benefits, that’s fairly modest by the standards of the aerospace industry.
Another benchmark would be the cost of operating the ISS which would be 17.5 billion.
The $13B pricetag has been widely disputed, with suggestions that HAF is trying to make it look more expensive than it actually will be.
Fine, people can dispute the number all they want. I was simply noting that, for an aerospace organization with 13,000 employees, $2.6 billion per year ($15 billion over five years) is not at all unprecedented or unrealistic. It could be off by a factor of two in either direction. (On the one hand, the employees may include people like janitors, who don’t cost anything like $200,000 per year; on the other hand, the costs may include many more things than salary for the staff.)
Amounts of support personnel will depend on a lot of things. Obviously, establishing a Department of the Space Force will imply needing an in-house set of medical personnel, JAGs, etc, etc., whereas if they keep it in-house under DAF, the Air Force can still do a lot of that, following the Navy/Marine Corps model.
But what would actually be done with the money? Is that just an increment that would be added to the current budget, with the assumption that all the existing project funding is to be transferred ftom the agencies that currently control it? If that is the case, the $13B pays only administrative costs.
I do not know what all the initial stand-up costs will be, but things like office space, new GS salaries for civilian officials, uniforms, flags, and such will need to be paid for. Things that Air Force currently contracts for, for space operators will need new contracts, with all the costs that come with that. Near-term, I don’t expect the basic military space mission,with its associate costs to change a whole lot. Long-term, who knows?
Everyone should just quit talking about it and hope that Trump forgets about it (probably fairly likely).