Congress Shrinks Space Force
House Armed Services strikes agreement on Trump’s Space Force, Roll Call
“Democrats and Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee have agreed to language that would create a streamlined Space Force — a top priority of President Donald Trump’s — and plan to insert it as an amendment to the fiscal 2020 defense authorization bill on Wednesday…. The bipartisan agreement calls for a single four-star general in charge of Space Force, compared with the three four-star generals the administration envisioned. It would also have fewer personnel transferred from other services into the Space Force, Smith said.”
It doesn’t really “shrink” it, just delays the transfer of non-USAF personnel for a couple years, and doesn’t split the Chief of Staff/SPACECOM billet until 2021.
Wonder who gets the best people?
It sounds like the Space Force will be the size of a single Army division, with potential to grow later. This, in my opinion, is just adding administration and so with any luck this will all be reversed after the next Administration comes into office.
It’s really not. Every warfare domain requires a dedicated service for force generation. The Air Force has proven that it’s not up to the task for providing forces for two domains. Cyber will follow.
“I don’t trust the Air Force, on its own, within its existing structure, to properly prioritize space,” he said.
This does not seem to me like anything approaching a sensible reason to create an entirely new service branch with a whole new bureaucracy. what happens to SAC missile forces? Tactical missiles? The helicopters and aircraft that support human spaceflight? Congress itself can prioritize defense funding, and within the DOD every task has to be prioritized. I just do not think the argument that the Air Force is unable to accomplish the space mission is credible. Just within the Air Force the vast increase in drone and UAV forces has created a shift away from human pilots that has to be accommodated within the culture. If the DOD cannot work together on a unified mission we have already lost the next war.
SAC (which went out of business in 1992) missile forces do not constitute a warfare domain. None of the other things that you mention are warfare domains, either. Space, however, is one. You can pretend that the Air Force is up to the task, but history has proven otherwise. It has nothing to do with diluting unity of command or effort (which, judging from previous posts, you don’t seem to understand), it in fact enhances it, by providing the necessary force generation for unified forces.