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The U.S. Space Force's budget for FY2024 is requesting $30 billion.     FATHIA SALAH

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The U.S. Space Force's budget for FY2024 is requesting $30 billion.     FATHIA SALAH

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Cost of budget:
If we breakin  down, for an example more than 60% of this budget, which amounts to about $19.2 billion, is dedicated to research, development, testing, and evaluation. This is similar to someone investing a significant portion of their income in improving their skills, buying new tools, and conducting experiments to stay ahead in their profession.

However Imagine you're a taxpayer, and you learn that the U.S. Space Force is requesting a budget of $30 billion for FY2024, which is an increase of $3.9 billion compared to the previous year. You might be concerned about how your hard-earned money is being allocated, especially when there are other pressing needs like healthcare and education.

Even more disheartening is the fact that over 60% of this budget, around $19.2 billion, is earmarked for research, development, testing, and evaluation. It could feel like a significant portion of your tax dollars is being funneled into what appears to be a never-ending cycle of weapon development.

This might raise questions about whether this level of investment in military space capabilities is necessary, given the many domestic and social challenges that need funding.

And also it's important to remember that budget decisions impact people's lives, and taxpayers often want to see their money used for purposes that benefit society as a whole. The allocation of resources can be a subject of debate, with some arguing that more should be spent on other essential areas like healthcare, education, or infrastructure.

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The U.S. Space Force's $30 billion budget request for Fiscal Year 2024 is about $3.9 billion over what was enacted for the service in FY2023. More than 60% of the Space Force budget, about $19.2 billion worth, is aimed at research, development, testing and evaluation.

Testifying yesterday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman explained the challenges he sees in a contested space domain and how the Space Force aims to ready itself to meet those challenges.

"When describing space threats, it is important to account for two kinds: first, threats from space assets and second, threats to space assets," Saltzman said.

Threats from space, the general said, include both China's and Russia's robust space-based capabilities which allow them to find, target, and attack U.S. military forces on land, at sea and in the air.

The U.S. also has assets in space - satellites that it relies on for communications and navigation, for instance - that are put at risk by the nation's adversaries.

"Both China and Russia continue to develop, field and deploy a range of weapons aimed at U.S. space capabilities," the general said. "The spectrum of threats to U.S. space capabilities includes cyber warfare activities, electronic attack platforms, directed energy lasers designed to blind or damage satellite sensors, ground-to-orbit missiles to destroy satellites and space-to-space orbital engagement systems that can attack U.S. satellites in space."

To meet the challenges posed by adversaries, Saltzman told lawmakers that Space Force efforts in FY2024 will focus on fielding combat-ready forces, amplifying the Guardian spirit and strengthening the partnerships the Space Force relies on to accomplish its mission.

"My first priority is to build resilient, ready, combat-credible space forces," Saltzman told lawmakers. "To do this, we are accelerating the pivot towards resilient satellite constellations, ground stations, networks and data links."

The general said the Space Development Agency's "Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture," or PWSA - previously called the "National Defense Space Architecture" - is a prime example of that effort.

The PWSA includes hundreds of satellites, delivered in "tranches" every two years, with each tranche providing more capability than the last. That total system involves a "mesh network" of hundreds of optically interconnected satellites in orbit that make up its "transport" layer. The PWSA also includes six additional layers: tracking, custody, deterrence, navigation, battle management and support.

Also part of building a resilient, ready and combat-credible force, Saltzman said, is emphasizing cybersecurity and preparing Space Force Guardians to detect and defeat cyber-attacks against networks, systems, ground stations, datalinks and satellites.

The U.S. Space Force stood up in December 2019, just over 3 years ago. Developing talent to staff the new service is a priority, Saltzman said.

"My second priority is to amplify the Guardian spirit by embracing a modern talent management process that recruits the best talent, develops and retains an elite workforce and empowers Guardians to succeed," he said.

An example of that is the service's constructive service credit program which allows experienced professionals from key fields to directly commission into the Space Force at ranks appropriate to their civilian experience.

"Over the last year we have also deployed space-centric curriculum for basic military training, Reserve Officer Training Corps and Officer Training School," the general said.

The Space Force is also looking to a concept that allows personnel to more easily move between full-time and part-time military service - without causing damage to their careers - so that they can pursue enriching opportunities outside full-time military service. This concept is something Congress can help the service accomplish, Saltzman said.

Since taking over as chief of space operations, just four months ago, Saltzman said he has visited multiple combatant commands and also met with space chiefs in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

"U.S. allies and international partners are eager for expanded collaboration with the Space Force, especially in areas that strengthen the effectiveness of coalition space operations and reinforce norms of responsible behavior," Saltzman said.

Strengthen partnerships, he said, is the third priority for Space Force, Saltzman said.

"The Space Force will strive to eliminate barriers to collaboration, including overclassification, so we can build enduring advantages with our partners," he said. "To date, personnel from over 50 countries have participated in training, education and exercise events hosted by the Space Force. We are also leveraging allies and partners to expand our warfighting capability."

Saltzman also said that commercial partners and the technologies developed there, such as advanced power and propulsion, artificial intelligence and machine learning and in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing, are also a focus for increased partnerships for Space Force.

"The Space Force is the preeminent military space organization in the world," Saltzman told senators. "Our adversaries seek to surpass the United States and challenge our advantage. We cannot and will not allow this to happen. Our Guardians will out work, out innovate and out compete our adversaries to ensure that we succeed."

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Space Force Focuses on Partnerships, Spirit, Combat Readiness

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The Space Force's $30 billion budget request for fiscal year 2024 is about $3.9 billion over what was enacted for the service in fiscal 2023. ,

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The Cost: With wanting to create a space force the cost of the new service is projected to range from $11.3 billion to $21.5 billion under the three options considered. 96 percent brought over from existing budget accounts within DoD. Withing these totals, $0.30 billion to $0.55 billion would be new funding ($1.5 to $2.7 billion over five years).

Not Necessary- A space force is not a crucial part for United States as it involves a lot of time, planning, and money.

It disrupts military relationships-sending the military into space can create conflict, as of currently there has not been any. This can cause tension with other nations and lead more conflict in space.

Space Force is starting to train its soldiers
to fight… in space? (phys.org)

Resources-When creating the space force it is becoming to be a waste of resources as there are a lot of parts that is needed to make it. Although it will be the smallest branch it is creating more waste.

Can lead to militarization in space- with the space force being created it has the use of space for military advantages, but we would want to avoid space debris and disrupt the exploration and scientific research of what goes on up there. Militarization in space can involve deploying weapons and satellites for spying, this can lead to conflict between nations.

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The proposed creation of a new military service for space, known as the Space Force, is likely to be a hotly debated issue in the FY 2020 legislative cycle. One of the central questions about this proposal is how much it will cost and what the overall size and scope of the Space Force will be. This brief provides rough estimates for the number of military and civilian personnel, the number and locations of bases, the budget lines that would transfer to the new organization, and the additional personnel and headquarters organization that would be needed for the new military service.
Introduction

The size and budget of a new military service for space depends on how broadly its charter is defined and which existing space-related organizations it would incorporate. The three options evaluated in this analysis are: a Space Corps within the Department of the Air Force; a limited but independent Department of the Space Force ("Space Force-Lite"); and a more expansive Department of the Space Force ("Space Force-Heavy"). The Space Corps option is limited to the space-related organizations, personnel, programs, and bases currently within the Air Force, similar to the legislation that passed the House on July 6, 2017, as part of the FY 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The Space Force-Lite option includes everything in the Space Corps plus the space-related organizations, personnel, programs, and bases in the other Services. The Space Force-Heavy option includes everything in the Space Force-Lite option plus some missile defense activities and programs in the Army and Missile Defense Agency that could be considered space-related under a broader definition.

None of the estimates provided include the space capabilities resident in the intelligence agencies, such as the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). This is not intended as a judgment on whether such organizations should or should not be included in a new space service but rather reflects the fact that little data is publicly available on the budgets and numbers of personnel in these organizations. The analysis also does not include the additional personnel and funding that may be needed to stand up a new combatant command for space (U.S. Space Command) or a Space Development Agency because these are separate policy decisions, and both could be created with or without a new military service. Moreover, this analysis does not assume any change in the current activities, acquisition programs, or capabilities of existing space forces as part of the reorganization. A detailed discussion of the assumptions and methodology used for the cost estimate and the specific funding lines that would be transferred to the new service can be found in the Appendix.

This analysis finds that the total annual budget of the new service would range from $11.3 billion to $21.5 billion under the three options considered, more than 96 percent of which would be transferred from existing budget accounts within DoD. Of these totals, only $0.30 billion to $0.55 billion would be new funding (or $1.5 to $2.7 billion over five years).

The Space Corps option includes all the components of the 14th Air Force. The main bases and organizations included are: the 21st Space Wing at Peterson Air Force Base (AFB), ¹ the 30th Space Wing at Vandenberg AFB, the 45th Space Wing at Patrick AFB, ² the 50th Space Wing at Schriever AFB, and the 460 th Space Wing at Buckley AFB, ³ as well as the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) at Los Angeles AFB. It does not include 24th Air Force (Cyber), which was reassigned from Air Force Space Command to Air Combat Command in July 2018. ⁴ Smaller units would transition to the Space Corps but remain as tenants on Air Force bases in other locations, such as the 20th Space Control Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base and the Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland AFB. This option would result in the transfer of approximately 12,100 active duty, 1,600 guard and reserve, and 11,900 civilian personnel from the Air Force to the Space Corps. An additional staff of approximately 1,700 personnel would be needed for headquarters and overhead functions, for a total workforce of 27,300.

Table 1: Estimated Annual Budget of the Space Corps Option

Option 2: Space Force-Lite

The Space Force-Lite option includes everything in the Space Corps option above plus the Army 1st Space Brigade as a tenant unit at Fort Carson, the Navy Program Executive Office Space Systems as a tenant unit at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego, and the Navy Satellite Operations Center at Naval Air Station Point Mugu. It would also include Army and Navy personnel assigned to liaison or support Air Force Space Command units. This option would transfer approximately 16,700 active duty, 1,900 guard and reserve, and 14,600 civilian personnel from the Air Force, Army, and Navy to the Space Force. An additional 2,600 new personnel would be needed for headquarters and secretariat functions for a total workforce of approximately 35,800.

Table 2: Estimated Annual Budget of the Space Force-Lite Option

Option 3: Space Force-Heavy

The Space Force-Heavy option includes everything in the Space Force-Lite option plus the Army's 100th Missile Defense Brigade that operates Ground-Based Mid-Course Defense (GMD) systems at Fort Greely and Vandenberg AFB and part of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). The MDA activities and programs included in this option are those related to sensors, tracking, and target discrimination capabilities that can be used for space situational awareness and mid-course intercept capabilities that can be used as anti-satellite and defensive counterspace weapons. It also includes a small contingent of personnel from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) that work on satellite communications-related activities. This option would transfer approximately 18,300 active duty, 2,800 guard and reserve, and 24,300 civilian personnel from the other Services and defense agencies to the Space Force. An additional 3,100 new personnel would be needed for headquarters and overhead functions for a total workforce of approximately 48,500.

Table 3: Estimated Annual Budget of the Space Force-Heavy Option

As this analysis shows, the size and budget of a new military service for space can vary considerably depending on the scope of the reorganization. It can range from a total workforce of 27,300 people and an annual budget of $11.3 billion to a workforce of 48,500 and an annual budget of $21.5 billion. As previously noted, these figures do not include the space-related personnel and programs in the intelligence agencies, which could be added in whole or in part to any of these options. While many other hybrid options are also possible, the three options considered here provide a broad range for policymakers to consider. Importantly, in all the options shown here, more than 96 percent of the budget is transferred from other parts of DoD and would not add to the topline defense budget. The new funding required for a Space Corps or Space Force ranges from $0.30 billion to $0.55 billion annually, less than one-tenth of a percent of the total national defense budget.

When compared to the other Services, as shown in Table 4, the Space Force-Heavy option would be similar in size to the Coast Guard in terms of the total workforce, although the funding level would be nearly double that of the Coast Guard. This is mainly due to the expensive technology used in space systems and the large Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) budget a space service would require. The Space Corps option would have roughly half the total workforce of the Coast Guard but would command a similarly sized budget. One notable difference from the other Services is that under all three options considered, more than 50 percent of the full-time workforce for a space service would be civilians, compared to 29 percent for the Army, 36 percent for the Navy, 10 percent for the Marine Corps, 35 percent for the Air Force, and 17 percent for the Coast Guard.
Todd Harrisonis the director of Defense Budget Analysis and the director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. The author would also like to acknowledge the research support provided by Nigel Mease, a Defense Budget Analysis intern at CSIS. This brief is made possible by general support to CSIS. No direct sponsorship contributed to this brief.

Table 4: Comparison to the Other Military Services

Many organizational options are available, and each has advantages and disadvantages. ⁷ While the cost of a space service would largely be budget neutral, except for the additional staff needed for headquarters and secretariat functions, this means that the existing military services would stand to lose personnel and budget from such a reorganization. The Air Force would lose the most under all three options, giving up more than $11 billion in annual budget authority. The creation of a new military service for the first time since the Air Force was created in 1947 is a monumental decision, and ultimately, Congress must decide if and when to create a Space Force.

Appendix: Methodology and Cost Assumptions Used

For transparency and completeness, this appendix documents the methodology, data sources, and assumptions used in this paper. While this analysis is based as much as possible on publicly available data sources, it inevitably involves subjective assessments about what organizations, bases, and activities to include or not include and how to estimate quantities that are not publicly known. For example, the Space Corps option includes all the Air Force personnel at Peterson AFB (except the Air National Guard Airlift Wing), but it could also be argued that many of these personnel are not doing space-related jobs and would therefore not need to transfer to the new service.

Personnel Numbers

The numbers of active, guard, reserve, and civilian personnel are estimated using the personnel data contained in the FY 2017 DoD Base Structure Report for the bases and facilities that are most closely associated with space-related activities under each of the options analyzed. ⁸ The total number of personnel at bases are adjusted as needed to remove personnel belonging to units that would not transfer to the new service, such as flying wings co-located at bases that predominantly perform space missions. For predominantly space bases, all of the base support personnel are assumed to transfer to the new service, along with the costs of maintaining the base and associated facilities. However, a detailed assessment of the billets and job functions at each location would be needed to determine precisely how many positions would need to transfer, which is beyond the scope of this assessment. Below are the numbers of personnel assumed for each of the options.

Table 5: Space Corps Personnel Estimates

Table 6: Space Force-Lite Personnel Estimates

Table 7: Space Force-Heavy Personnel Estimates

Figure 1: Locations and Numbers of Personnel in the Space Corps Option

Figure 2: Locations and Numbers of Personnel in the Space Force-Lite Option

Figure 3: Locations and Numbers of Personnel in the Space Force-Heavy Option

Personnel Costs

Personnel costs are calculated by using an average cost per person in each of the Services and components. The average cost per service member includes all associated military personnel (MILPERS), family housing costs, and Medicare Retiree Health Care Contribution costs for each of the services in the FY 2019 budget request. It does not include the Defense Health Program (DHP) costs since this activity is not paid for by the services and therefore would not transfer to the Space Force. ⁹ The average cost per DoD civilian employee is calculated using the total civilian pay for DoD ($85.0 billion) divided by the number of full-time civilian equivalents (776,000) as contained in the DoD Green Book for FY 2019, which comes to $109,600 per person. The cost of additional headquarters personnel is handled separately since these are new personnel that would not be drawn from the existing force and would likely be higher in rank on average than the overall force. The average cost per headquarters personnel is assumed to be $175,000, consistent with the Air Force's cost estimate from September 2018. ¹⁰

Table 8: Personnel-Related Costs in the FY 2019 Budget Request (in thousands of FY 2019 dollars)

Military Construction (MILCON)

The annual cost of MILCON is estimated using the plant replacement value (PRV) from the FY 2017 Base Structure Report for the bases and facilities (and portions of facilities) that would transfer to or be used by the Space Force. ¹¹ The PRVs used for each option are shown in the table below. The annual MILCON funding required is estimated as 1/67th of the total PRV, which corresponds to a composite expected life of 67 years for the various structures and other improvements at each location.

Table 9: Plant Replacement Value of Space Force Bases and Facilities (in millions of FY 2019 dollars)

Research, Development, Test, & Evaluation (RDT&E)

The estimated RDT&E costs are calculated by identifying which existing funding lines within the FY 2019 budget request would transfer to the Space Force under each option. RDT&E funding can vary significantly from year to year as new programs are started or completed, so the annual RDT&E funding of the Space Force would vary accordingly. For example, funding for the development of the Space-Based Infrared System follow-on constellation is projected to grow by nearly $300 million from FY 2019 to FY 2020. The table below lists the space-related RDT&E funding lines and the FY 2019 level of requested funding used in the estimated costs for each option. ¹²

Procurement

Similar to RDT&E costs, the estimated procurement costs are calculated by identifying which existing funding lines within the FY 2019 budget request would transfer to the Space Force. Procurement funding can also vary significantly from year to year as programs ramp up or down in production, and the annual procurement funding of the Space Force would vary accordingly. For example, funding for the Global Positioning System (GPS) III space segment is projected to increase by more than $700 million from FY 2019 to FY 2020. The table below lists the space-related procurement funding lines and the FY 2019 requested funding used in the estimated costs for each option. ¹³

Recruiting and Training

The costs of recruiting and training personnel are calculated using a weighted average of the existing recruiting and training costs per active duty servicemember in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. This includes basic training, specialized skills training, Professional Military Education (PME), and the costs associated with the military academies and Reserve Officer Training Corps. It is calculated by totaling the training and recruiting operation and management (O&M) budget activity for each of the Services, minus flight training funding, and dividing by the active duty end strength of that Service. ¹⁴ The resulting cost per servicemember is then multiplied by the number of personnel that would transfer to the Space Force to arrive at a total estimated annual cost of recruiting and training under each option. An implicit assumption in this methodology is that retention rates in the new service would be similar to current retention rates in the other Services, and thus a similar proportion of new recruits would be needed each year to replace servicemembers that are separating. Moreover, it assumes that rather than creating a new military academy, war college, and other educational institutions for the Space Force, personnel would instead attend one of the existing schools in the other Services and the Space Force would reimburse the other Services for the fully burdened cost of educating these students.

Table 10: Training and Recruiting Costs (excludes flight training, in thousands of FY 2019 dollars)

Operating Forces

The cost of operating forces is estimated from the existing space-related operating forces budget lines in each of the Services. ¹⁵ Where a partial budget line is used, an estimate is made for the proportion of that budget line that is space-related. Where no specific budget line is identified, as in the case of the Army Missile Defense Battalion, an estimate is made using the generalized cost of force structure of similar size.

Table 11: Operating Forces Costs (in thousands of FY 2019 dollars)

Headquarters/Secretariat Staff Size
Todd Harrison is the director of Defense Budget Analysis and the director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. This brief is made possible by general support to CSIS. No direct sponsorship contributed to this brief.
The primary new cost from the creation of a new military service for space is the additional headquarters and secretariat staff that would be needed. Estimating this overhead burden is difficult because the amount of staff needed is ultimately a policy and management decision. In the past, Congress has set statutory limits on the size of headquarters staffs to limit their growth. The size of a headquarters staff should, in theory, scale with the size of the force it oversees but with a somewhat fixed minimum level of personnel. The Space Force-Lite and Space Force-Heavy options would arguably require a larger minimum headquarters staff level because they would involve the creation of a new Secretary of the Space Force position and associated secretariat staff. This analysis assumes a fixed minimum staff of 500 for the Space Corps option and 1,000 for the Space Force-Lite and Space Force-Heavy options in addition to a variable staff of 5 percent of the non-headquarters full-time staff. To be conservative, it does not assume that any existing Headquarters Air Force Space Command positions would be transferred to the new headquarters staff in the Pentagon, although this would significantly reduce the number of new positions that would be needed. The table below shows the assumed headquarters staff sizes compared to the other Services. The staffing levels for the Army, Navy/Marine Corps, and Air Force shown below are the authorized levels for FY 2013, and for comparison, the workforce for these Services is also for FY 2013. ¹⁶The staffing and workforce levels for the Coast Guard are for FY 2019. ¹⁷

Table 12: Comparison of Headquarters/Secretariat Staff Sizes

CSIS Briefs are produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

© 2018 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved.

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This CSIS Brief provides rough estimates for the number of personnel, annual budget, and additional funding that would be needed for a Space Force.

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2. It creates high-level pollution events.
We must consume fossil fuels when we launch rockets into space, which means we’re creating a significant level of pollution every time we expend fuel for exploration purposes. Even on a light load, it costs about $300,000 to fuel a rocket. Larger models could hold a half-million gallons of fuel that would be used during an entire mission. That means we are creating roughly 4 million pounds of carbon pollution with every action that we take to reach space. Then we must find a way to place these fuels safely into orbit to make our exploration efforts useful, creating even further potential problems for our atmosphere.

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President Donald Trump announced his desire in 2018 to create a sixth branch of the U.S. military that he colloquially called the Space Force. Although Congress has yet to act on this desire to take the armed forces beyond the atmosphere of our planet, in February 2019, Trump signed Space Policy Directive 4 to have these forces organize underneath the umbrella of the U.S. Air Force.

The directive formally allows the Air Force to organize, train, and equip a corps of military space personnel for actions that take place in space. "Today I'm thrilled to sign a new order taking the next step to create the United States Space Force," Trump said during the signing ceremony. "It's so important. When you look at defense, when you look at all of the other aspects of where the world will be some day. I mean, this is the beginning. This is a very important process."

The initial version of the Space Force will be overseen by a civilian undersecretary and a four-star general serving as the Chief of Staff. Although this structure is not as ambitious as having a separate branch of the military, space exploration experts feel like this is a step in the right direction.

The pros and cons of exploring space are complex simply because we have limited knowledge of what lies beyond our solar system. There are still mysteries to discover about our own planet! These are the key points to consider when we begin to look at what life might look like in the vastness of space.

List of the Pros of Space Exploration

1. It is an opportunity which is available to anyone.
If you have a telescope, then you have an opportunity to start exploring space. For more than 300 years, we have looked to the stars with this technology as a way to learn more about our planet and ourselves as a species. When the Hubble space telescope was launched in 1990, it gave us our first views without atmospheric interference on what the vastness of our universe was like.

With millions of images taken and tens of thousands of papers written based on the observations made from simple telescope technologies, we have learned more about the structure of our universe, its age, and the composition of our solar system in the last 20 years than our ancestors would have ever dreamed was possible.

2. It gives us an opportunity to foster genuine cooperation.
Because we are a world of nation states, the investments that we make in space exploration tend to have a patriotic feeling to them. Some efforts in this scientific area are still nationally-based, but for most projects there is a spirit of cooperation between the countries of the world who have made this realm of science a top priority. We work together as the human race to operate the international space station, fund research projects, and look outward beyond the stars to see what is there. It is one of the few areas in our lives today where we set aside our boundaries to work together toward a common good.

3. It is an effort which requires us to become innovative.
The 100-year Starship Program has the ultimate goal of creating a technology that will allow us to explore space. No idea is off-limits with this project. What we have found in our quest to achieve specific goals in this area of science is that there are numerous discoveries which become possible to improve our lives here at home. Everything from athletic shoes to water purification systems came about because of our push to look beyond our planet. By tackling the technological needs to stay safe in space, we can make life better for everyone down on our planet at the same time.

4. It is an opportunity to explore something new.
Although there are still regions of our planet that we rarely study because of technology limitations, the vastness of the universe is a much more significant prize. Only the Voyager spacecraft have gone beyond the first boundaries of our solar system. The information they provide us nearly four decades after their launch continues to enlighten our knowledge of the universe. There are so many unanswered questions when we think about space, especially now that scientists can determine which stars have planets orbiting around them.

Is there life somewhere else in the universe? If so, would those beings look like us? There are numerous technological barriers we must cross before we could travel for long distances in the vacuum of space, but we are getting one step closer every day.

5. It creates numerous employment opportunities in a variety of fields.
There are more than 18,000 people employed in the United States by NASA, along with countless contractors, freelancers, and specialists not counted in those figures. The private company SpaceX provides about 7,000 full-time high-skill positions that support the economy. Then there are the astronauts, engineers, and flight specialists who manage the actual mechanisms of space flight to consider.

Numerous indirect employment opportunities are possible because of our efforts at space exploration too. We need caterers, designers, nutritionists, personal trainers, astronomers, scientists, and many other positions to support these activities. Even though the budget for NASA is $21 billion for FY 2020, the economic returns can be five times greater because of these activities.

6. It allows us to understand our planet better.
When we can observe the full scale of our planet from a high orbital position, then we can see changes that are not always possible from the ground. It gives us a way to track the changes to our environment, study ozone depletion, and measure the impacts of a warming planet. We can provide accurate prediction models for weather patterns, observe troop movements, and install safety equipment that guards against an attack. When we take full advantage of this benefit, it becomes possible to create a place in the universe that is healthier for many years to come.

7. It gives us a new perspective on our place in the universe.
It took several centuries for the scientific world (back by religious zealots) to accept the fact that the Earth was not the center of the universe. When we saw that first picture from a distance of what our planet looks like from a distant point in our solar system, it became clear to see that a small, pale blue dot in the middle of the vastness of our universe puts our daily issues into a new perspective. Until we discover otherwise, this is the only home that we have. It is up to each of us to share resources, reduce conflict, and work toward a common good.

8. It allows us to identify potential dangers before they strike.
The asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars is only one source for these deadly rocks in our solar system. There may even be threats that travel through the universe to interact with our region of space from time-to-time. It would only take one significant impact to change life on our planet forever, which is why space exploration makes threat identification a top priority. If we can locate and move threatening asteroids or comets before they threaten an impact, we could stop the apocalypse before it ever gets a chance to begin.

9. It would give us access to new minerals, precious metals, and other useful items.
Thanks to the asteroids which occasionally make it to the surface of our planet, we know that many of them contain iron and carbon. We also know that there is nickel, cobalt, silicon, magnesium, calcium, and several other elements present. Some might have water or oxygen contained beneath their surface. There may even be gold, platinum, and other precious metals there. We might even discover something that we've never encountered before.

Space exploration gives us an opportunity to access new mineral resources, allowing for the privatization of this venture. It would also give us an opportunity to start building in space because the raw materials are easy to haul and transport.

10. It gives us an opportunity to see what lies beyond in the final frontier.
Unless circumstances change somehow, there will come a point in time when our species will outgrow our planet. We must begin to look for colonization opportunities in our solar system and beyond to help support the future of our race. As our scientific and technological discoveries begin to open up opportunities to visit distant stars, we can start to discover even more mysteries that will help us to answer the meaningful questions in life.

11. It could change our approach to medicine.
Discovering new organic elements in space could help us to discover cures for some of our worst diseases. We really don't know what is possible in our universe beyond the scope of basic physics. There could be untold treasures just waiting beyond our solar system to discover. Although there is always an element of risk to any exploration venture, there are great rewards often waiting for those who embrace their courage to start pressing forward. At the rate of development that we've seen in the 21st century, we could be looking at a very different human race in our children's lifetimes based on the possibilities of discovery.

List of the Cons of Space Exploration

1. It could cause us harm or provide harm to other species in space.
We know from experience what happens when one group of humans comes into contact with another group after generations of isolation. The diseases that transferred back and forth between Europe and the New World devastated some cultures. There were times that smallpox would kill over 90% of the local population by itself. If we encounter life on a different planet (or if they visit us), the threat of disease transmission is real. Their viruses, bacteria, and potentially unknown invaders could do as much damage to us as we could to do them. First contact would be an exciting experience, but it could also be a deadly one even though no one has any ill intent toward the other.

2. It creates high-level pollution events.
We must consume fossil fuels when we launch rockets into space, which means we're creating a significant level of pollution every time we expend fuel for exploration purposes. Even on a light load, it costs about $300,000 to fuel a rocket. Larger models could hold a half-million gallons of fuel that would be used during an entire mission. That means we are creating roughly 4 million pounds of carbon pollution with every action that we take to reach space. Then we must find a way to place these fuels safely into orbit to make our exploration efforts useful, creating even further potential problems for our atmosphere.

3. It gives us more ways to be paranoid about what others are doing.
There are only five treaties which currently govern how we operate in space. Our original goal as the human race was to make it so that no one could claim a territory in orbit or our solar system that could give one nation a distinctive advantage. The creation of a Space Force could work to upset the balance that we've worked to create for the last 50 years. We're already using satellites to spy on one another, monitor communications networks, and potentially target cities with weapons.

This paranoia will only increase as we push further into the stars. The only real solution to this disadvantage is to start thinking of ourselves as a planetary nation instead of one that is built on nation-states alone.

4. It will create a large amount of garbage that we must manage.
Did you know that NASA tracks over a half-million pieces of space junk that orbits our planet right now? Unless we physically remove these items in some way, this garbage will linger until it falls into our atmosphere to burn up. Every item we leave behind creates a future risk for someone else. If we are going to start exploring space, then we must begin to look at ways to clean up our act before we get going. It's bad enough that we've polluted our oceans with microplastics. Should a spaceship encounter that debris, it could be a deadly experience.

5. it may cause our planet to face unknown perils.
A common theme in many science-fiction novels, shows, and movies is the idea that an alien race is hostile towards us. It is widely believed that water may be one of the scarcest commodities in the universe, but here we are with a planet that is more than 70% water. If we start venturing out beyond our solar system, it is entirely possible that we could encounter a species who decides that our resources are ripe for the taking. We assume that an advanced culture who could invent real-time space travel would be peaceful, but there are no guarantees. Exploring space could become an invitation for interstellar war.

6. It will always entail risk.
Human beings were not meant to be in the vacuum of space. We must wear extensive protective gear to survive those conditions. Even one small leak or crack in a helmet or suit would be enough to create an adverse health condition. This issue applies to the planetary environments which we know of right now as well. Then there are the health issues to consider when the human body experiences a lack of gravity for an extended time.

NASA studied identical twins Scott and Mark Kelly when Scott took a long trip to space. Scientists monitored their bodies to see how being in a weightless environment could change the physical chemistry of a person. They discovered that genomic instability occurs, including gene expression changes, and spending a year in that environment caused a thickening of the carotid artery, DNA damage, and reduced cognitive abilities.

7. It is expensive to start exploring space.
Even though the budget for NASA has not changed that much in recent years, we are spending about $200 billion per decade on our current space exploration efforts. Privatization of the industry has helped to reduce some costs, especially as SpaceX continues to work on a recoverable rocket. When you add in the costs from other countries and their space programs, our planet spends about $60 billion per year on this effort. In comparison, the United Nations suggests that it would only take half of that amount to end global hunger permanently. Should exploring space be our top priority if we're struggling to take care of ourselves here at home?

When we examine these space exploration pros and cons, there is a certain nobleness to the idea of seeking what lies beyond the next horizon. Our society was built on the desire to explore the planet where we live. Now our culture has the itch to start pushing beyond the next boundary. Whether that means we colonize the moon, establish a community on Mars, or push toward Alpha Centauri, there is something waiting to be discovered. We're closer than ever before to finding out what that might be.

Author Bio
Natalie Regoli is a child of God, devoted wife, and mother of two boys. She has a Master's Degree in Law from The University of Texas. Natalie has been published in several national journals and has been practicing law for 18 years.

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18 Biggest Advantages and Disadvantages of Space Exploration

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President Donald Trump announced his desire in 2018 to create a sixth branch of the U.S. military that he colloquially called the Space Force. Although Congress has yet to act on this desire to take the armed forces beyond the atmosphere of our planet, in February 2019, Trump signed Space Policy Directive 4 to have these forces organize underneath the umbrella of the U.S.

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1. Will take resources from more productive projects.  The cost of starting Space Force will cost billions of dollars, those dollars coming from other projects that are needed sooner.
2. It is replicating capabilities that already exist.  The air force already has cyber capabilities that the Space Force would want to do. Instead of the Air Force giving over theirs, Space Force would have to create their own.
3. Cost: Let's face it, this country is in enough debt as it is. Instead of trying to create a new military branch that isn't currently needed, the US should start to work on its infrastructure.
4. Increased tensions between countries: It has happened before with the race to the moon. As soon as one country tries to do something new, the other superpowers tend to do the same. Having a Space Force would just create more possibility for war.
5. This was created as a joke: President Trump brought this up as a joke and somehow it ended up a very real possibility. This does not have a good foundation because it was not thought out properly.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/08/27/ten-ways-a-space-force-will-make-america-weaker/?sh=2cec27ca34b0

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke.

It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore. Despite widespread opposition to creating a sixth branch of the military, the president on reflection decided it was a "great idea" and directed defense officials to begin preparations for the new service. On August 9 the Pentagon released a preliminary report laying out plans for establishing a space development agency, a space operating force, and a unified space command. The next budget request sent to Congress will seek legal authority to separate the Space Force from other military organizations.

Congress should reject that proposal. It is a poorly conceived, wasteful undertaking that will weaken the joint force. America's military needs in space would be far better served by retaining the existing organization of the joint force and making modest adjustments to assure space challenges are met in a timely fashion.

Most experts already know this. The president, who isn't an expert, does not. So for the benefit of those who have not been paying close attention and might be captivated by rhetoric untethered to reality, here are ten reasons why creating a Space Force would be a really bad idea.

1. It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.

2. It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Organizations have boundaries that get in the way of cooperating with other organizations -- particularly when they are competing for missions and resources. One reason the 9-11 attacks succeeded was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not share information because they were protecting their bureaucratic turf. A great deal of effort has been invested in tearing down those walls. But standing up a Space Force would create new barriers to cooperation.

3. It will lack the resources to be a co-equal service. President Trump says he wants the Space Force to be "separate but equal" with the Air Force. But the entire space workforce in the defense department and intelligence community -- 27,500 people according to Sandra Erwin of Space News -- represents less than 1% of the personnel employed by the Pentagon. The budget for all national security space activities totals less than two days' worth of federal spending per year. So a Space Force will not be "separate but equal" with other services.

4. It will be too dependent on industry. When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. However, private industry is not driven by the same priorities as public agencies, and thus reliance on its advice would tend to distort the judgment and objectivity of a Space Force.

5. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits. The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently told an audience that anyone who thinks creating a Space Force will be revenue-neutral is "naive." A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today. Deputy defense secretary Pat Shanahan says this will cost billions of dollars, and much of the money will likely come from more important activities.

6. It will replicate capabilities already resident elsewhere. A Space Force wouldn't just receive functions transferred from other military services. It would share responsibility for missions like joint networking and cybersecurity that would continue to exist in those other services. For instance, the Air Force isn't going to give up its cyber capabilities just because a new service is created. So the Space Force will have to stand up mirror organizations and compete for scarce technical talent, creating wasteful redundancy.

7. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand that every time Washington creates a major new organization, it gives birth to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. That is what will happen with the Space Force. It won't just replicate what already exists in other places, it will find new functions to perform and new positions that need to be filled -- often by highly paid personnel who could be better deployed elsewhere.

8. It will reduce incentives for other services to support space. Once a Space Force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain. Having lost their organic space communities, they will shift focus to areas still considered within their core competencies. The perverse effect will be to reduce expertise in space across the joint force by concentrating it in one place that is isolated from other military organizations.

9. It will be defenseless without the help of other services. The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services. So calling space a warfighting domain is a stretch.

10. It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success. In fact, other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US. model. If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.

You might say that the U.S. Air Force has helped bring on this danger by exaggerating the notion that space is becoming a warfighting domain. All that has really happened is that Russia and China have figured out how vital orbital assets are to our terrestrial warfighting capabilities. But that's an argument for keeping space expertise spread across the joint force, not creating a new federal bureaucracy that drains missions and money away from other military services. Creating a Space Force today is premature at best, and will likely make America weaker.

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Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke. It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore.

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1. It will Drain Resources
It is to expensive because it requires a lot expensive equipment that no longer exist. It could cost billions of dollars.
2. It will make the world's best air force less effective
Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.
3. Will Make Space Dangerous
Creating the Space Force sets up structural changes and reinforces approaches that could hasten a costly and destabilizing arms race in space.
4. Vulnerable for Attack
The U.S. military depends on satellites for everything including intelligence, surveillance, navigation, communications, even for the guidance of its weapons.
5. It will be too dependent on industry
An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight.

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https://defense360.csis.org/bad-idea-disestablishing-the-space-force/

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Bad Idea: Disestablishing the Space Force | Defense360

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Despite criticism, the creation of the Space Force as an independent service was a timely, strategically-important decision. It would be a bad idea to roll it back into the Air Force.

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https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/28452/why-the-trump-space-force-will-make-space-more-dangerous

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When President Donald Trump signed the latest National Defense Authorization Act last month, he brought into existence the United States Space Force, the sixth branch of the country's military. The name likely appeals to Trump for the same reasons that it appalls others: It is attention-grabbing and frames the issue of space in terms of American military dominance.

At least initially, the new Space Force represents only a modest organizational change, one that is essentially neutral in terms of personnel and budgetary impact. A skeptical Congress appropriated only $40 million of its $738 billion military budget for the new endeavor. At the same time, it would be a mistake to dismiss the move as a lot of bluster over bureaucratic reshuffling. Creating the Space Force sets up structural changes and reinforces approaches that could hasten a costly and destabilizing arms race in space. ...

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The New U.S. Space Force Will Make Space More Dangerous, Not Less

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Last month, President Donald Trump brought into existence the Space Force, the sixth branch of the U.S. military. At least initially, it represents only a modest organizational change. But it also sets up structural changes and reinforces approaches that could hasten a destabilizing arms race in space.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/08/27/ten-ways-a-space-force-will-make-america-weaker/?sh=16b4695f34b0

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke.

It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore. Despite widespread opposition to creating a sixth branch of the military, the president on reflection decided it was a "great idea" and directed defense officials to begin preparations for the new service. On August 9 the Pentagon released a preliminary report laying out plans for establishing a space development agency, a space operating force, and a unified space command. The next budget request sent to Congress will seek legal authority to separate the Space Force from other military organizations.

Congress should reject that proposal. It is a poorly conceived, wasteful undertaking that will weaken the joint force. America's military needs in space would be far better served by retaining the existing organization of the joint force and making modest adjustments to assure space challenges are met in a timely fashion.

Most experts already know this. The president, who isn't an expert, does not. So for the benefit of those who have not been paying close attention and might be captivated by rhetoric untethered to reality, here are ten reasons why creating a Space Force would be a really bad idea.

1. It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.

2. It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Organizations have boundaries that get in the way of cooperating with other organizations -- particularly when they are competing for missions and resources. One reason the 9-11 attacks succeeded was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not share information because they were protecting their bureaucratic turf. A great deal of effort has been invested in tearing down those walls. But standing up a Space Force would create new barriers to cooperation.

3. It will lack the resources to be a co-equal service. President Trump says he wants the Space Force to be "separate but equal" with the Air Force. But the entire space workforce in the defense department and intelligence community -- 27,500 people according to Sandra Erwin of Space News -- represents less than 1% of the personnel employed by the Pentagon. The budget for all national security space activities totals less than two days' worth of federal spending per year. So a Space Force will not be "separate but equal" with other services.

4. It will be too dependent on industry. When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. However, private industry is not driven by the same priorities as public agencies, and thus reliance on its advice would tend to distort the judgment and objectivity of a Space Force.

5. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits. The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently told an audience that anyone who thinks creating a Space Force will be revenue-neutral is "naive." A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today. Deputy defense secretary Pat Shanahan says this will cost billions of dollars, and much of the money will likely come from more important activities.

6. It will replicate capabilities already resident elsewhere. A Space Force wouldn't just receive functions transferred from other military services. It would share responsibility for missions like joint networking and cybersecurity that would continue to exist in those other services. For instance, the Air Force isn't going to give up its cyber capabilities just because a new service is created. So the Space Force will have to stand up mirror organizations and compete for scarce technical talent, creating wasteful redundancy.

7. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand that every time Washington creates a major new organization, it gives birth to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. That is what will happen with the Space Force. It won't just replicate what already exists in other places, it will find new functions to perform and new positions that need to be filled -- often by highly paid personnel who could be better deployed elsewhere.

8. It will reduce incentives for other services to support space. Once a Space Force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain. Having lost their organic space communities, they will shift focus to areas still considered within their core competencies. The perverse effect will be to reduce expertise in space across the joint force by concentrating it in one place that is isolated from other military organizations.

9. It will be defenseless without the help of other services. The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services. So calling space a warfighting domain is a stretch.

10. It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success. In fact, other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US. model. If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.

You might say that the U.S. Air Force has helped bring on this danger by exaggerating the notion that space is becoming a warfighting domain. All that has really happened is that Russia and China have figured out how vital orbital assets are to our terrestrial warfighting capabilities. But that's an argument for keeping space expertise spread across the joint force, not creating a new federal bureaucracy that drains missions and money away from other military services. Creating a Space Force today is premature at best, and will likely make America weaker.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke. It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore.

# data[].attributes.body
It is a poorly conceived, wasteful undertaking that will weaken the joint force. America's military needs in space would be far better served by retaining the existing organization of the joint force and making modest adjustments to assure space challenges are met in a timely fashion.

It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.

It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Organizations have boundaries that get in the way of cooperating with other organizations -- particularly when they are competing for missions and resources. One reason the 9-11 attacks succeeded was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not share information because they were protecting their bureaucratic turf. A great deal of effort has been invested in tearing down those walls. But standing up a Space Force would create new barriers to cooperation.

It will drain resources from more productive pursuits. The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently told an audience that anyone who thinks creating a Space Force will be revenue-neutral is "naive." A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today. Deputy defense secretary Pat Shanahan says this will cost billions of dollars, and much of the money will likely come from more important activities.

It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success. In fact, other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US. model. If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/08/27/ten-ways-a-space-force-will-make-america-weaker/?sh=652e04d934b0

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke.

It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore. Despite widespread opposition to creating a sixth branch of the military, the president on reflection decided it was a "great idea" and directed defense officials to begin preparations for the new service. On August 9 the Pentagon released a preliminary report laying out plans for establishing a space development agency, a space operating force, and a unified space command. The next budget request sent to Congress will seek legal authority to separate the Space Force from other military organizations.

Congress should reject that proposal. It is a poorly conceived, wasteful undertaking that will weaken the joint force. America's military needs in space would be far better served by retaining the existing organization of the joint force and making modest adjustments to assure space challenges are met in a timely fashion.

Most experts already know this. The president, who isn't an expert, does not. So for the benefit of those who have not been paying close attention and might be captivated by rhetoric untethered to reality, here are ten reasons why creating a Space Force would be a really bad idea.

1. It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.

2. It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Organizations have boundaries that get in the way of cooperating with other organizations -- particularly when they are competing for missions and resources. One reason the 9-11 attacks succeeded was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not share information because they were protecting their bureaucratic turf. A great deal of effort has been invested in tearing down those walls. But standing up a Space Force would create new barriers to cooperation.

3. It will lack the resources to be a co-equal service. President Trump says he wants the Space Force to be "separate but equal" with the Air Force. But the entire space workforce in the defense department and intelligence community -- 27,500 people according to Sandra Erwin of Space News -- represents less than 1% of the personnel employed by the Pentagon. The budget for all national security space activities totals less than two days' worth of federal spending per year. So a Space Force will not be "separate but equal" with other services.

4. It will be too dependent on industry. When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. However, private industry is not driven by the same priorities as public agencies, and thus reliance on its advice would tend to distort the judgment and objectivity of a Space Force.

5. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits. The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently told an audience that anyone who thinks creating a Space Force will be revenue-neutral is "naive." A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today. Deputy defense secretary Pat Shanahan says this will cost billions of dollars, and much of the money will likely come from more important activities.

6. It will replicate capabilities already resident elsewhere. A Space Force wouldn't just receive functions transferred from other military services. It would share responsibility for missions like joint networking and cybersecurity that would continue to exist in those other services. For instance, the Air Force isn't going to give up its cyber capabilities just because a new service is created. So the Space Force will have to stand up mirror organizations and compete for scarce technical talent, creating wasteful redundancy.

7. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand that every time Washington creates a major new organization, it gives birth to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. That is what will happen with the Space Force. It won't just replicate what already exists in other places, it will find new functions to perform and new positions that need to be filled -- often by highly paid personnel who could be better deployed elsewhere.

8. It will reduce incentives for other services to support space. Once a Space Force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain. Having lost their organic space communities, they will shift focus to areas still considered within their core competencies. The perverse effect will be to reduce expertise in space across the joint force by concentrating it in one place that is isolated from other military organizations.

9. It will be defenseless without the help of other services. The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services. So calling space a warfighting domain is a stretch.

10. It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success. In fact, other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US. model. If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.

You might say that the U.S. Air Force has helped bring on this danger by exaggerating the notion that space is becoming a warfighting domain. All that has really happened is that Russia and China have figured out how vital orbital assets are to our terrestrial warfighting capabilities. But that's an argument for keeping space expertise spread across the joint force, not creating a new federal bureaucracy that drains missions and money away from other military services. Creating a Space Force today is premature at best, and will likely make America weaker.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke. It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore.

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List Of Potential Info Sites:

american.edu. (2020). American University. https://www.american.edu/sis/centers/security-technology/the-purpose-and-mission-of-the-space-force.cfm

Add to if you find more!

‌

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National Budget Increased:

"The Air and Space Forces released their combined budget proposal on May 28 as part of the Biden administration’s overall spending request for the 2022 fiscal year. The Department of the Air Force’s request calls for $173.7 billion, a 3% increase over the current budget. The Air Force’s budget of $156.3 billion represents a 2.3% increase, and the Space Force’s budget of $17.4 billion is a 13.1% increase from FY 2021."

The United States National budget is being increased by 3% for a program that as of yet has not shown significant value to the Nation and its economy. These resources and sources of income could be redirected to a different cause that needs immediate action, such as homelessness in California.

FY22 budget gives Air & Space Forces the strength to meet threats, Roth, Brown, Raymond te. (2021, June 8). United States Space Force. https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article/2651197/fy22-budget-gives-air-space-forces-the-strength-to-meet-threats-roth-brown-raym/

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Space Force Needed Now?

Does the United States need a military presence in space? Most informed opinions suggest that the answer is yes. Does the United States need a new independent service for managing that military presence? The answer is less obvious. In the case of the Space Force, an even greater degree of uncertainty looms because the precise organizational structure of the service is unsettled. Indeed, most of the arguments against the creation of the Space Force have focused on either the lack of strategic necessity for creating a new service or the price tag associated with standing up a new organization.

The Space Force’s capstone document, Spacepower, defines space as the domain of orbital flight, including vehicles that leave and then reenter the atmosphere without making a single orbit, such as ballistic missiles. Regarding the militarization of space, Spacepower defines it as the use of space for military purposes, whether those purposes include the transit of objects (missiles) or the use of satellites for surveillance or communications.

The Air Force, for better or worse, had answers to all these questions at its birth. As it now exists, the Space Force appears to be a kludge designed to protect the political aspirations of the president while not encroaching too much on the institutional prerogatives of the Air Force. Provisionally, many aspects of the Space Force seem problematic. Space is, if anything, a more intractable domain than air in terms of interservice conflict in that space assets are the sinews of the day‐​to‐​day activities of the services on land, at sea, in the air, and in cyberspace. The inclusion of the Space Force within the Department of the Air Force raises questions about how independent the Space Force will really be, and thus whether it will realize any of the promised gains. Finally, the lurking problem of the development of an independent space doctrine, which has in some historical cases resolved in favor of doctrines that favor independent, offensive operations, remains a long‐​term concern insofar as it would threaten to endanger peaceful use of the “space commons.”

Space Force: Ahead of Its Time, or Dreadfully Premature? (2020, December). Cato Institute. https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/space-force-ahead-its-time-or-dreadfully-premature#conclusion

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1. Resources:
This would be an incredibly huge waste of resources as the resources used to build a fleet of space ships could be used to help solve problems that we are facing here on our planet.
2. Cost:
The cost to make a fleet of spaceships would be absolutely immense as it would take years to develop safe technology that can safely allow us to travel to and from space and building materials would be super expensive.
3. Time:
To develop a fleet to go into outer space could take decades for it to be advanced enough to sustain human life for an extremely long period of time without having major health consequences.
4. Military tension:
This could cause yet another space race as the United States participated in before during the cold war with Russia which was a race for space ship development and other means of satellites out in space. This would cause military tension among the countries and could ultimately lead to war depending on the technology equipped on the new spaceships.
5. Undermine the Air Force:
The United States currently has the best air force in the world and if we spend too much of our time and money on spaceships then this will eat the air forces budget and make them far less effective compared to our enemy countries.

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The purpose of the space force. The argument of how it will protect us in space is a lackluster argument because what good will a force of 6,434 military personnel and 77 spacecraft do to protect our satellites and GPS systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force?scrlybrkr=74dcf9e8

It isn’t we’ll lead and organized

It will cause interference with existing procedures and lacks organizational structure like the other branches

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/space-force-ahead-its-time-or-dreadfully-premature#introduction

It won’t be creating that many new jobs considering how few personnel there are to begin with and not to mention many people in the air force who already covered the jobs of some aspects of the space force are simply being transferred over.

https://www.spaceforce.mil/About-Us/FAQs/Whats-the-Space-Force/

This is an urgently needed protective measure.

If it was truly a necessary thing why is it taking so long for basic branch policies to show such as official uniforms and training requirements.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/03/11/space-force-guardians-grow-exasperated-waiting-branchs-policies-slowly-emerge.html

It will be the first of its kind. From 1985 to 2002 the Pentagon had a U.S. Space Command and seeing as it isn’t in use yet today it wasn’t useful then when security measures were lesser why would it be more important now when every couple of months security updates happen. https://www.military.com/space-force?scrlybrkr=722da551

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1. Disrupt the current military system
Adding another branch to the military would mean it must be added to the complex military system. This is unnecessary adjusting the rest of the military would have to go through.
2.  It is unnecessary
All other branches can split the responsibilities the space force would have. Creating a space force would take responsibilities away from the Air Force and Navy
3. It would take a lot of time to develop
The space force was expected to be fully operational at this point. There are many more important concerns for the US. “organize, train, and equip space forces to protect U.S. and allied interests in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force. Space Force responsibilities include developing military space professionals, acquiring military space systems, maturing the military doctrine for space power, and organizing space forces to present to our Combatant Commands.” All of this would take up time and attention that could be focused elsewhere.
4. Big cost
The money used for the space force would give less bureaucratic leverage. This money could be spent elsewhere, and where we truly need it.
5. Effects of NASA
The creation of the space force could affect civilian missions from NASA and make them targets. Funding for each may be difficult to decide.

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Danger for all mankind.

1. In the 21st century, humanity needs to move to a new level of resolving global conflicts without using any weapons: tactical and, especially, space ones. Conflicts must be resolved at the level of debate, and in no case by war!

2. In addition to the fact that the growth of space power can lead to war, there is also a threat that the war between countries will turn into a World War, and even worse, into a space war with the complete destruction of the planet. Everything in the world must develop in harmony with balance, therefore the growth of cosmic forces is dangerous for all mankind.

3. Also, the space force program is costly to taxpayers. It would be nice to use most of the taxes for peaceful creation, to save the planet from an impending ecological catastrophe.

4. To turn the cosmic forces to the destruction of impending dangerous objects from the Cosmos, it is more useful for the Earth. There is enough space junk in space that could be lethal to the planet if it goes unmanaged, which can happen if military space forces are used.

5. The development of space technology in outer space should have peaceful purposes, the study of outer space, new discoveries, and the prevention of disasters on Earth. Space forces should not dominate or compete with anyone for security purposes.

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/space-force-ahead-its-time-or-dreadfully-premature#what-space-why-does-it-need-military

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1. President Donald Trump directed DOD to prepare for the establishment of yet another Military service. This would be the sixth service of the year 2018 he has helped with.

2. During 2019 Trump signed a National Defense Authorization ct for Fiscal Year 2020, which then created Space force.

3. The U.S Military achieved new operational capabilities in space, delivering intelligence, communications, and navigational systems during the years through 1970s to 1980s.

4. Space's Forces capstone document, space power, defines space as the domain of orbital flights. Including vehicles that leave and then reenter the atmosphere without making a single orbit, such as ballistic missiles.

5. A great point of the Space Force was to create new pathways for personnel development in expertise for space issues. Which made it convenient for facilitating outreach to the civilian space sectors.

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In December 2019, Congress established the U.S. Space Force as an independent uniformed military service within the Department of the Air Force. Although many defense analysts had long argued for a reorganization of the Department of Defense's space capabilities, few had settled on this particular solution. This policy analysis evaluates the reasoning behind the Space Force's establishment, concluding that the service's creation is premature.

The Space Force is the first new independent U.S. service since the creation of the Air Force in 1947. At its inception, the Air Force had hundreds of thousands of personnel, several years of battle experience, a coherent body of doctrine, and a robust organizational culture. Even so, the creation of the Air Force sparked bitter interservice conflict for the first decade of its existence.

However, the Space Force lacks a strong institutional basis, an identifiable organizational culture, and an established foundation of strategic theory. In the short term, it runs the risk of disrupting existing procedures and relationships that enable the U.S. military to function. In the long term, it runs the risk of distorting the procurement and force structure of U.S. space capabilities.

Introduction

Does the United States need a military presence in space? Most informed opinions suggest that the answer is yes. Does the United States need a new independent service for managing that military presence? The answer is less obvious. In December 2019, Congress created the U.S. Space Force, which is meant to bolster U.S. military capabilities in a domain that the existing services have not prioritized. The wisdom of creating a new service is uncertain in the best of times, given the need of forces to coordinate across organizational borders. In the case of the Space Force, an even greater degree of uncertainty looms because the precise organizational structure of the service is unsettled. Indeed, most of the arguments against the creation of the Space Force have focused on either the lack of strategic necessity for creating a new service or the price tag associated with standing up a new organization.

To understand the Space Force's inception, this study investigates five interrelated questions. First, how has outer space changed to become a more important domain for military activities? Second, what is the relationship between the Space Force and its antecedents within the U.S. military? Third, how can traditional metrics of military effectiveness apply to the Space Force? Fourth, how will the Space Force affect the international strategic environment? And finally, how will the Space Force interact with civilian government agencies and the civilian space sector?

This analysis initially establishes how the military space environment has changed since the last major U.S. military reorganization in 1947. It then examines how the existing institutions of the U.S. military have managed space up to this point, including a discussion of the theorization of military space power. The details of the establishment of the Space Force come next, followed by an assessment of the new problems its establishment introduces, including questions about military effectiveness and military culture. Finally, the analysis examines the potential implications of the Space Force for diplomatic, economic, and civilian management of space. This investigation determines that the Space Force's establishment is hobbled by unclear goals and uncertain effects, contending that the Space Force lacks a clearly defined organizational culture and a clear strategic purpose, both core elements of organizational success, and that the decision to create the service is premature at best and irresponsible at worst.

What Is Space, and Why Does It Need a Military Force?

The Space Force's capstone document, Spacepower, defines space as the domain of orbital flight, including vehicles that leave and then reenter the atmosphere without making a single orbit, such as ballistic missiles. While some definitions of space rely on a judgment of where the Earth's atmosphere ends (many multilateral agreements use the Kármán line, which is 100 km above sea level), the Space Force doctrine resists using any specific physical demarcation.

Regarding the militarization of space, Spacepower defines it as the use of space for military purposes, whether those purposes include transit of objects (missiles) or the use of satellites for surveillance or communications. The militarization of space began in the final years of World War II, when Germany began to strike England with V‑2 ballistic missiles. After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union used technology and scientists from Germany to establish and develop their own space programs, eventually resulting in a "space race" to achieve various milestones of national prestige.

The complexity and importance of military operations in space have changed considerably since the 1950s, often in unpredictable ways. While the military value of ballistic missiles was immediately apparent, the implications of space‐​based satellites for military reconnaissance and communication dawned slowly. The first spy satellites entered service in 1960. Though they took lower‐​quality photographs compared to existing reconnaissance aircraft, they also could not be intercepted. Prior to the establishment of sufficiently high‐​bandwidth communications, satellites would drop physical film for ships and aircraft to recover. The United States launched the first dedicated military communications satellite in 1966, significantly easing problems of military signal transfer.

In the 1970s and 1980s the number and sophistication of satellites expanded rapidly. The U.S. military achieved new operational capabilities in space, delivering intelligence, communications, and navigational systems to soldiers. As demonstrated in the Gulf War, the U.S. military could use space to fight more effectively in conventional conflicts, essentially making the battlefield transparent. In short order, nearly the entirety of modern U.S. military operations, by all services and at all levels of intensity, required the use of space. Satellites identify targets, track their movement, transfer data to shooters, and monitor the results of the attack. Satellites enable commanders to have a full understanding of the battlefield, allowing them to communicate with their forces and offering information about the size and movements of enemy forces.

Civilian use of space also increased alongside changes in the military use of space. Communications satellites now dominate the international telecommunications industry, providing connectivity to firms and individuals around the world. Businesses, universities, and governments have built this ready connectivity into the basic structure of their daily operations. This has enabled what Richard Baldwin refers to as the second "Great Acceleration" of globalization. If space went away, so to speak, many people would struggle to find their way to the local grocery store due to a lack of the Global Positioning System. The way knowledge moves between nations, firms, and individuals depends on easy access to space. Preventing such access could cause massive social and economic disruption.

But the military and civilian advantages created by greater use of space have also created new vulnerabilities. The U.S. military has become dependent on space to conduct its basic operations, just as the U.S. civilian economy's dependence on space has increased. Competitors have access to space and increasingly the technologies necessary to attack U.S. satellites. Consequently, competitors can threaten damage against both the U.S. military and civilian economy by attacking space infrastructure. Moreover, the United States can no longer assume that satellites' role in the nuclear enterprise will deter foes from attacking satellites tasked with conventional military missions.

In 2007, China destroyed one of its satellites in low‐​Earth orbit (LEO), demonstrating its ability to threaten core U.S. communications infrastructure. Unfortunately, the satellite's destruction produced an extensive debris field, some of which remains in orbit today. This field, full of fast‐​moving orbital objects, poses a long‐​term threat to the military and civilian use of LEO. As the demonstration made clear, a war in space could result in the long‐​term loss of some of the most valuable real estate in LEO, which would not only disrupt military operations but could also render civilian space infrastructure inoperable. The United States responded to China's test with its own antisatellite test, during which it launched a Standard Missile‑3 missile defense interceptor from an Aegis weapons system on a U.S. Navy warship. The U.S. test destroyed a satellite but produced a smaller debris field because it occurred at a lower altitude than the Chinese test, with most debris burning up as it reentered Earth's atmosphere. Russia and India have both conducted antisatellite tests subsequently, with the Indian test leaving a debris field similar to that of the 2008 American test.

Several major powers now have the demonstrated capacity to undertake antisatellite attacks that could destroy their opponents' civilian and military communications infrastructures. Most of these antisatellite weapons involve interceptors launched from ground, sea, and air platforms. Moreover, the use of space assets to damage or destroy satellites also appears technically feasible. The argument that space is more important now than ever before is strategically sound. The U.S. civilian economy depends on space for its connectivity, and thus its prosperity. The U.S. military depends on space for communications and reconnaissance. However, concluding that space represents a key strategic interest for the United States does not imply or necessitate any specific institutional framework for pursuing that interest.

An Institutional History of Space

Reviewing the history of U.S. military space institutions gives us both a sense of how these organizations have evolved into the Space Force and a survey of the institutional alternatives to the establishment of Space Force. See Figure 1 for a timeline of U.S. space institutions and major historical events discussed in this section.

After 1947, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force each began to experiment with ballistic missiles. Initial Air Force skepticism gave way to enthusiasm as it became obvious that ballistic missiles could both deploy satellites and deliver warheads to distant targets. The military implications of space came into clearer view with nuclear‐​armed ballistic missiles, offering a difficult‐​to‐​intercept weapon that could cause catastrophic damage to the enemy homeland. By the early 1950s, the Department of Defense estimated both satellite and ballistic missile projects to enter service before 1960. Sputnik's launch in October 1957 created a crisis, resulting in significant expansion and consolidation of U.S. military space programs, with the Air Force playing a lead role. Civilian research proceeded along a separate track with the 1958 establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which manages civilian aspects of space travel and exploration.

The growing importance of space led the Pentagon and the Reagan administration to seek a broader institutional structure for space, one that could coordinate among all the services. Established in 1985, U.S. Space Command was a combatant command designed to have joint control of Department of Defense space operations. Combatant commands, which increased in importance after the Goldwater‐​Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, manage a region or function that includes units from two or more military services. Examples of combatant commands include Central Command (with responsibility for the Middle East) and Transportation Command (with responsibility for worldwide Department of Defense logistics and transportation). President Reagan heralded the establishment of Space Command in the 1982 announcement of the National Space Policy. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or "Star Wars") eventually played a significant role in this policy. The initial vision of SDI included not only reconnaissance satellites but also space‐​based weapons systems to intercept and destroy Soviet missiles. This would require a more substantial bureaucratic infrastructure than either Air Force Space Command or NORAD possessed. Space Command took over the Aerospace Defense Command portfolio from NORAD and prepared to lay the groundwork for the space components of SDI.

The end of the Cold War, controversy over the strategic value of SDI, and a broad array of technical difficulties with the program relegated the main priorities of Space Command to a bureaucratic afterthought. Moreover, after 9/11 the prospect of strategic attack on the United States via space seemed remote, and in any case, other priorities loomed. The Department of Defense deactivated Space Command in 2002, relegating its defense responsibilities to Northern Command and its duties involving integration of the different service space capabilities to Strategic Command. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan de‐​emphasized space's role in armed conflict in favor of human‐​centric "hearts and minds" approaches to counterterrorism.

However, while the Global War on Terror did not involve direct competition in space, it did abet a growing realization that the management of space can affect how conflicts are fought. Both counterinsurgency and counterterror techniques required the integration of surveillance and communications technology at operational and tactical levels, and this required unfettered access to space. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq waned and competition with Russia and China waxed, support within Congress and the strategic community for new institutions for the military management of space grew.

In 2017, Reps. Mike Rogers (R‑AL) and Jim Cooper (D‑TN) proposed the establishment of a Space Corps within the U.S. Air Force tasked with managing the military aspects of space. In March 2018, President Trump expressed strong support for additional attention to space, portending his eventual support for an independent Space Force. In June, Trump directed the Department of Defense to prepare for the establishment of a sixth service, and shortly thereafter "Space Force" became a talking point in his political rally speeches. The Pentagon rapidly re‐​established U.S. Space Command as a combatant command in 2019, with its initial personnel drawn primarily from Strategic Command. In December 2019, President Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, establishing the U.S. Space Force, which immediately assumed the responsibilities of Air Force Space Command.

Theories of Space Power

These theoretical frameworks provide ideas not only about how to structure and employ forces on the battlefield but also about the institutionalization of military organizations, the relationships among those organizations within a defense establishment, and the prioritization of particular capabilities by national leadership. In short, theory is necessary for institution building and good strategic decisionmaking.

Yet thus far there has been limited theorization about the militarization of space, arguably in part because of the lack of a dedicated cadre of space thinkers. In contrast to the U.S. Air Force, which had existing examples of independent air forces and a core of personnel that shared the explicit goal of achieving service independence, even the idea of an independent space force is relatively new. Some theorists have attempted to borrow aspects of air power and sea power theory to apply to space. One notable example is the Center for a New American Security's 2010 report Contested Commons: The Future of American Power i n a M ultipolar World, which included space as one of the "commons" where nations compete for influence. Treating space as a commons made it easier to import some concepts from air power and sea power theory, although analysts have disagreed over which body of theory is more applicable.

One analyst, borrowing a metaphor from sea power theory that distinguishes between naval operations in littoral waters and the open sea, has characterized "brown water" and "blue water" schools of thought on space theory, with "brown water" theories of space emphasizing the joint dimension of space operations-how space enables the functioning of existing military capabilities on land, at sea, and in the air-and "blue water" theories exploring the potential for new dynamics of space dominance, including extensive exploration and use of space for civilian, economic, and military purposes. An example of the "blue water" theories of space can be found in The Future of Space 2060 and Implications for U.S. Strategy, a September 2019 workshop report sponsored by Air Force Space Command that envisions a host of ways in which the United States could dominate different parts of space by the mid‐​21st century.

On August 10, 2020, the Space Force released its first doctrinal document, which defined "space power" for the first time, delineated the "space domain," and explained how the Space Force's assets contribute to national power and national security. According to the document, "military spacepower is the ability to accomplish strategic and military objectives through the control and exploitation of the space domain." The document makes clear that "spacepower cannot unilaterally win wars" and that the military space power should be used to preserve freedom of action, support the joint force, and provide civilian leadership with "independent options for achieving strategic effects." This last point is reminiscent of interwar thinking on air power and Air Force independence, but the document offers little detail. Nor does it establish a pathway for thinking about the unique ways that space power contributes to national power, nor of how to assess the relative contribution of space power against air power, land power, or sea power.

Over time, the Space Force may develop the kinds of institutions (such as the Naval War College or the Air Corps Tactical School) that bring people together to develop and test theories of space power and space warfare. Indeed, some work on space warfare is now emerging to clarify the parameters of discussion. At the moment, however, while some theoretical frameworks for exploring the military relevance of space exist, the Space Force does not seem representative of any clear theoretical position. This makes it difficult to evaluate the position of the Space Force within the constellation of American defense institutions but also complicates how the service compiles priorities, procures equipment, and trains personnel.

The U.S. Space Force: A Solution to Space?

The U.S. Space Force is an independent uniformed service under the authority of the Department of the Air Force. It was established on December 20, 2019, and was expected to be fully operational by 2021. Like the other services, the Space Force is headed by a four‐​star general (the chief of Space Operations) who is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and thus a contributor to the National Military Strategy. The official mission of the Space Force is to "organize, train, and equip space forces to protect U.S. and allied interests in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force. Space Force responsibilities include developing military space professionals, acquiring military space systems, maturing the military doctrine for space power, and organizing space forces to present to our Combatant Commands."

The Space Force is projected to grow to 16,000 military personnel, with 2,500 active‐​duty personnel transferred from Air Force Space Command by the beginning of fiscal year 2021. The official headquarters of the Space Force remains undecided. The service will initially include three primary field commands: one responsible for training, one for acquisition, and one for support of combatant commanders. The projected budget for the Space Force in fiscal year 2021 is some $15 billion, transferred from the Air Force Space Command allocation.

What does it mean to say that the Space Force is a "service?" A service is a largely autonomous military organization that designs its own doctrine, manages its own systems of recruitment and promotion, and (in the U.S. system) has its own place on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Services are distinct from subservice designators such as Army "branches" (artillery, armor, or infantry, for example) or Navy "communities" (surface, submarine, aviation).

The Space Force is notably different from the other services. It is much smaller than any other service; the next smallest is the U.S. Marine Corps, at some 220,000 active and reserve personnel. It does not yet have its own uniforms, rank structure, bases, or substantial equipment pool. Unlike the Air Force, Navy, or Army, the Space Force does not have distinct representation as a military department within the Department of Defense. The Space Force shares this last attribute with the Marine Corps, an independent service under the authority of the Department of the Navy, a handicap that has not prevented the Marine Corps from developing its own doctrine, civilian support network, and organizational identity.

The Organizational Culture of the U.S. Space Force

Given that the bulk of Space Force personnel have and will come from the Air Force, it seems likely that elements of Air Force organizational culture will accompany them. Since the Space Force emerged almost fully formed from Air Force Space Command, it is safe to assume that the service's culture will strongly resemble that of Space Command. The question then becomes how Space Command's personnel differed from those of the Air Force as a whole. The answer to this remains unclear, although interviews with Army space officers suggest that the Space Command is technologically focused, uninterested in operational warfighting, and overly committed to an engineering view of space problems rather than to a vision of strategic competition with foreign countries. Nevertheless, one recent survey indicated that a large majority (over 85 percent) of Army space officers would leave the Army for the Space Force if they could.

Still, the problem is less the specific cultural traits of the Space Force than the apparent absence of any strong organizational culture at all. We have no sense of how organizational culture will contribute to military effectiveness of the service. We have few clues from the antecedents of the Space Force regarding how the beliefs and assumptions of the organization will structure its day‐​to‐​day operation. Space Force organizational culture, a critical component of the success of the institution, will be a work in progress.

The Determinants of Military Effectiveness

Assessing the effectiveness of a service that barely exists is difficult for obvious reasons. The nature of the Space Force complicates the problem, since for now it seems primarily to support other parts of the U.S. military. It has taken over a set of missions associated with its direct progenitor, Air Force Space Command, and largely consists of the same equipment, personnel, and doctrine. Though some measures evaluate performance at the granular level, other improvements in effectiveness will only manifest in the performance of other organizations, not in the Space Force itself. For this reason, there is little use in exploring questions of tactical and operational effectiveness at this point, since the Space Force will neither manage forces nor develop techniques for outer space combat. Antisatellite weapons, for example, are still under Navy and Air Force control. In the future, changes in the performance of U.S. military forces that depend on space for communications and intelligence may offer some indication as to the effectiveness of the Space Force, although even this will depend on assessing a bewildering array of confounding factors.

The military effectiveness literature also indicates that metrics of effectiveness are very important to how an organization performs, regardless of the level of analysis. These metrics allow an organization to perform diagnostics on itself, assessing policies that work and those that do not. With respect to the Space Force, we do not yet have a set of metrics (such as loss‐​exchange ratios, air‐​to‐​air combat kill ratios, precision targeting statistics, etc.) to measure the effectiveness of any space military organization. The Space Force will need to develop metrics suitable for a support force; for example, how regularly do "customers" of the Space Force's products use that product in their daily operations? What rates of operational malfunction in spacecraft can be attributed to internal as opposed to external causes? Developing and using these metrics will be critical for how the Space Force performs in the long term.

Determining the Space Force's strategic effectiveness is different but no more reassuring. Strategic effectiveness depends on a well‐​reasoned and articulated theory of space competition, discussed in more detail in the Theories of Space Power section of this paper. Such a theory would allow the Space Force to formulate ways of achieving national goals through doctrine, procurement, and force structure. Although the capstone document points the Space Force in some potentially promising theoretical directions, we cannot evaluate the service's strategic effectiveness as of yet but may have the means to do so at some point.

There are reasons to worry about the prospective political effectiveness of the Space Force. While the Space Force undoubtedly will have a presence in the defense industrial base, its budget will be much smaller than that of any of the other services. It will lack a base of veterans and a history of success to draw upon. It can offer Congress and state governors less in terms of industry or footprint. Its budgetary decisions will be housed under the same department as the service it is most likely to conflict with over missions and resources (the Air Force). The politicized nature of its birth may leave it a figurative orphan if President Trump does not win a second term. In short, the ability of the Space Force to command the bureaucratic and fiscal resources needed to conduct its mission is in dire question.

As a point of comparison, when the Air Force won its independence from the Army in 1947, it had already completed the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which evaluated the effectiveness of the bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan at tactical, operational, and strategic levels. The very act of compiling the survey was evidence of political effectiveness, as it gave Air Force leaders and their allies the tools needed then to fight for independence and then to fight post‐​independence battles for resources and bureaucratic turf. The Space Force has nothing remotely comparable to the Strategic Bombing Survey, and it is difficult to imagine how a document measuring effectiveness in such a way could be compiled.

The Air Force Comparison, and the Broader Implications of the Space Force for the Department of Defense

The last new uniformed service that the United States created was the Air Force in 1947. Governments establish new services because they believe that certain kinds of capabilities do not receive the necessary institutional support from existing military organizations. The establishment of new services and separate commands (the U.S. Air Force or Special Operations Command, for example) provides protection for specific capabilities, as well as a greenhouse in which those capabilities can reach their full potential.

However, new institutions come with costs, both literal (in terms of bureaucratic overhead, redundancies, and procurement distortions) and figurative (interservice conflict and bureaucratic competition). The Air Force built upon the foundation of the Army Air Forces, the Army Air Corps, and the Army Air Service. Because of this, the creation of the Space Force necessarily evokes comparison with the independence of the earlier service. However, while there are certain surface similarities, the two cases are dramatically different in many key respects.

Like the Space Force, the founding of the Air Force came at a point when expectations of the future of war were rapidly changing, most notably the belief that nuclear weapons (delivered primarily by Air Force bombers) would dominate future conflicts. As with the Space Force, Air Force advocates argued that existing institutions (in both the Army and the Navy) were insufficient to facilitate the emergence of new capabilities and new modes of warfighting. As with space, the air represented a new domain of warfighting, theoretically requiring the creation of a new military organization. As previously noted, the inclusion of a Space Force officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff will give space a voice in the formulation of the National Military Strategy, which describes the strategic goals of the uniformed military.

Those are the similarities. The differences are dramatic. The Air Force emerged from a long process in which aviators argued for the liberation of air power from the control of ground commanders and freedom from subservience to the needs of ground forces. At its founding the Air Force was enormous, with 304,000 personnel and thousands of aircraft. It had large bodies of theory that it had developed in the interwar period and experience honed through multiple campaigns in the Second World War. It held strongly to a set of theories of strategic air power that gave guidance to procurement, force structure, and doctrine. It also had a strong sense of its importance and a willingness to fight the other services for its priorities. The U.S. Air Force could also draw upon the example of numerous other independent air forces, including most notably the Royal Air Force.

The introduction of the U.S. Air Force created substantial interservice conflict, which has persisted. The causes and consequences of tensions among the Air Force, Navy, and Army are too complicated to deal with here, but they have often involved the pursuit of autonomy and disputes over shared missions. By comparison, the Space Force may introduce even more substantial problems, as it currently exists primarily as a support organization for the other services. The Air Force could at least conceptualize operations that would produce independent, decisive military effects, shorn of the need to work with the other services. The Space Force, at this point, cannot.

Air Force independence was an earthquake in the U.S. military establishment, for better or worse. An independent Air Force catalyzed the creation of the Department of Defense and the establishment of a new system of managing national security. By contrast, the Space Force begins with a handful of personnel, no agreed‐​upon strategic theory, and little history or experience to draw upon. Moreover, separating the Space Force from the Air Force does not even win the former independence from the Department of the Air Force. For good or ill, the independence of the Space Force does not bear much comparison with the independence of the Air Force.

We have little sense thus far of the size or significance of the Space Force budget. As noted, the initial budget for the Space Force runs at $15 billion, which is by far the smallest of any independent service; the Marine Corps, the closest analogue to the Space Force, will have a budget of $46 billion in 2021. The Department of Defense projected new costs for establishing the Space Force at roughly $500 million per year for the first five years. The Congressional Budget Office, by contrast, estimated one‐​time costs at between $1 billion and $3 billion, with annual cost increases between $840 million and $1.3 billion. Another estimate, developed for Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson in 2018, projected a $13 billion five‐​year price tag for establishing and operating the Space Force. Because of the size of the force, personnel costs occupy a relatively small part of the budget; although, this could grow rapidly due to the need for maintaining technical expertise.

Political, Economic, and Diplomatic Implications of the Space Force

Space Force and Multilateral Space Governance

The increasing militarization of space has spurred discussion of the need for additional space governance. War in space could threaten the long‐​term health and usability of the "space commons" by distributing fragments of destroyed satellites across a wide range of orbits, including those commonly used by civilian spacecraft. This could result in severe short‐​term economic dislocation, even for noncombatants, and pose a long‐​term obstacle to the human exploitation of space. Two combatants could cause catastrophic damage to the infrastructure that enables modern social and economic life, making the establishment of some "rules of the road" imperative.

Military services tend to warily view arms control arrangements that affect their autonomy in their specialized domains. The events described in the 1964 film (and 1962 novel) Seven Days in May, in which an Air Force general seeks to topple an arms control-minded American president in a coup, are overstated, but services have historically opposed arms control limitations that affect their core priorities. The Royal Air Force's preference for offensive bombing doctrines during the interwar period, and its belief that the realities of war would rapidly blow past any legal limitations, undoubtedly influenced the United Kingdom's approach to international law in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, the U.S. Navy (and its counterparts in Britain, Japan, and elsewhere) resented the Washington Naval Treaty process because it limited the construction of their most prized vessels.

Even in the prehistory of the U.S. Air Force, Billy Mitchell warned about the threat that international arms control might pose for aerial bombardment. However, opposition to arms control was not always automatic or immediate; the Army Air Forces chiefs offered qualified support for nuclear arms control in the immediate aftermath of World War II. By the early 1960s, however, the Air Force senior hierarchy resolutely opposed most multilateral arms control, including the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In part because of generational change, the Air Force had minimal influence over the early Strategic Arms Limitation Talks negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Later activism on the part of the Air Force and of the Navy focused on the protection of specific systems, such as the B‑1 Lancer bomber, the LGM-118 Peacekeeper ballistic missile (then the Missile, Experimental, or MX), and the Trident submarine‐​launched ballistic missile.

The reasoning behind this opposition is clear: Strategic bombing (and later the delivery of nuclear payloads through intercontinental ballistic missiles) provided the rationale for the autonomy, independence, and primacy of the Air Force. Limitation of these weapons would not only require significant revision of doctrine and force structure but also would strike at the core cultural stories that undergirded the services. Moreover, compliance with the restrictions of a multilateral governance regime can be onerous in terms of financial, human resources, and intelligence demands. Most modern arms limitation regimes demand transparency on the part of the participants, which services tend not to welcome.

Given that services tend to pursue autonomy, the Space Force could pose some obstacle to future efforts for multilateral arms control in space. To be sure, neither the navies nor the air forces of the 20th century managed to prevent arms control. Nevertheless, if the Space Force manages to acquire the bureaucratic heft it needs to accomplish its core missions, it could act as an interest group within government to prevent the execution of strong multilateral arms control agreements. The record offers qualified reasons for concern about the role that the Space Force could play in future arms control negotiations. Services tend to resent the imposition of external limits on their procurement and force structure, although the extent of this resentment depends on organizational priorities. Still, the Space Force is unlikely to spearhead a drive for arms control within the U.S. government and probably will resist limitations imposed by such arms control on its core interests.

Conclusion

Decisions on institutional reorganizations are necessarily political, in addition to whatever technocratic impetus might drive them. A service's creation reveals the political priorities of Congress and the president, especially as it incurs substantial costs and substantial risk. But the creation of a service is rarely political in the sense that it stems largely from an interest in generating a talking point that a president can use at political rallies. Although the Space Force has some roots in theories of bureaucratic behavior, as well as considerable support from some actors within the defense community, it seems to have caught the president's attention through his belief in its public appeal.

This leaves analysts in an unusual situation, insofar as we have relatively little information with which to generate good expectations about whether the Space Force will perform its mission effectively, how it will get along with other services, or how it will affect the international environment. We have only a vague sense of the answers to many of the questions that will determine the success of the Space Force as an institution. We have reason to suspect that the Space Force will negatively affect multilateral arms limitation negotiations; we do not know how well the Space Force will be on traditional metrics of military effectiveness; we can guess that the presence of a Space Force officer on the Joint Chiefs will increase the prominence of space considerations in the National Military Strategy; and we have some reason to expect that the Space Force will increase demands on the military budget. This very uncertainty is an indictment of the decision to create the Space Force now. The Air Force, for better or worse, had answers to all these questions at its birth. As it now exists, the Space Force appears to a be a kludge designed to protect the political aspirations of the president while not encroaching too much on the institutional prerogatives of the Air Force.

Provisionally, many aspects of the Space Force seem problematic. Space is, if anything, a more intractable domain than air in terms of interservice conflict in that space assets are the sinews of the day‐​to‐​day activities of the services on land, at sea, in the air, and in cyberspace. The inclusion of the Space Force within the Department of the Air Force raises questions about how independent the Space Force will really be, and thus whether it will realize any of the promised gains. Finally, the lurking problem of the development of an independent space doctrine, which has in some historical cases resolved in favor of doctrines that favor independent, offensive operations, remains a long‐​term concern insofar as it would threaten to endanger peaceful use of the "space commons."

Space Force's establishment as an independent service is premature. Even for an institutional system in which services have domain‐​specific responsibilities (rather than a system that asks services to think holistically about how to accomplish missions across multiple domains), the Space Force is immature. Creating the Space Force at this point does not necessarily create the conditions under which the service can mature in a healthy fashion. Rather, it introduces the Space Force into a political arena where it lacks the resources and the political heft to effectively establish its prerogatives among the other services. In effect, it is a service in name only; in reality, it remains Air Force Space Command, and there is little in its birth that suggests it will grow beyond this any time soon.

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Space Force: Ahead of Its Time, or Dreadfully Premature?

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In December 2019, Congress established the U.S. Space Force as an independent uniformed military service within the Department of the Air Force. Although many defense analysts had long argued for a reorganization of the Department of Defense's space capabilities, few had settled on this particular solution.

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1. It will lack the resources to be co- equal service
- Donald Trump wanted the space force to be separate but also equal with the Airforce. The Airforce in the defense department and intelligence community just represent 1% of the personnel employed by the pentagon. the total budget of national security is less than two days worth of federal spending each year. So the space force with not be separate nor equal to other services.

2. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits

- The vice chairman of the joints Chiefs stated that if people think creating a space force will be revenue neutral is naive. A new military service will require a lot of expensive equipment that do not exist now.  Pat Shanahan states that it will cost billions of dollars and most of the money will most likely be used for important activities.

3. It will disrupt vital military relationships
- It will cost millions of dollars to get different  things like uniforms, special support systems, and military staff.

4. It will disrupt vital military relationships
- It would rely on the industry to much for technical support, policy advice, and program oversight

5. money use
-The space force is 13 percent over there budget total of 17.4 billions dollars, the air forces is 3 percent over there current budget. Aswell the United states had to spend the money to support the Space Force.

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1. It doesn't have a good organizational structure or strong purpose to be efficient and useful. The air force already had a strong organizational structure and dealt with what the space force now is supposed to deal with. It could have just stayed as a part of the air force.

2. It has a budget of 17.4 billion a year, and it's predicted that the cost will keep going up.

3. The force was created without a strong foundation. It should have been thought through more before being created. It will struggle to strongly establish itself.

4. Putting more military emphasis on space may cause it to be harder to keep space as a relatively peaceful zone. There are some treaties that aim to keep space as a peaceful zone, but it may be more difficult to maintain them and/or create more restrictions on the weaponization of space since that would go against the Space Force's interests.

5. It could come off as adversarial to other countries. This could trigger unwanted conflict. War in space could have catastrophic consequences on both civilians and the military because of reliance on satellites.

https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article/2651197/fy22-budget-gives-air-space-forces-the-strength-to-meet-threats-roth-brown-raym/#:~:text=The%20Air%20Force's%20budget%20of,evolution%20of%20the%20Space%20Force.
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/space-force-ahead-its-time-or-dreadfully-premature#budget
https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2020/11/05/boots-on-the-moon-weighing-the-pros-and-cons-of-the-space-force/

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In December 2019, Congress established the U.S. Space Force as an independent uniformed military service within the Department of the Air Force. Although many defense analysts had long argued for a reorganization of the Department of Defense's space capabilities, few had settled on this particular solution. This policy analysis evaluates the reasoning behind the Space Force's establishment, concluding that the service's creation is premature.

The Space Force is the first new independent U.S. service since the creation of the Air Force in 1947. At its inception, the Air Force had hundreds of thousands of personnel, several years of battle experience, a coherent body of doctrine, and a robust organizational culture. Even so, the creation of the Air Force sparked bitter interservice conflict for the first decade of its existence.

However, the Space Force lacks a strong institutional basis, an identifiable organizational culture, and an established foundation of strategic theory. In the short term, it runs the risk of disrupting existing procedures and relationships that enable the U.S. military to function. In the long term, it runs the risk of distorting the procurement and force structure of U.S. space capabilities.

Introduction

Does the United States need a military presence in space? Most informed opinions suggest that the answer is yes. Does the United States need a new independent service for managing that military presence? The answer is less obvious. In December 2019, Congress created the U.S. Space Force, which is meant to bolster U.S. military capabilities in a domain that the existing services have not prioritized. The wisdom of creating a new service is uncertain in the best of times, given the need of forces to coordinate across organizational borders. In the case of the Space Force, an even greater degree of uncertainty looms because the precise organizational structure of the service is unsettled. Indeed, most of the arguments against the creation of the Space Force have focused on either the lack of strategic necessity for creating a new service or the price tag associated with standing up a new organization.

To understand the Space Force's inception, this study investigates five interrelated questions. First, how has outer space changed to become a more important domain for military activities? Second, what is the relationship between the Space Force and its antecedents within the U.S. military? Third, how can traditional metrics of military effectiveness apply to the Space Force? Fourth, how will the Space Force affect the international strategic environment? And finally, how will the Space Force interact with civilian government agencies and the civilian space sector?

This analysis initially establishes how the military space environment has changed since the last major U.S. military reorganization in 1947. It then examines how the existing institutions of the U.S. military have managed space up to this point, including a discussion of the theorization of military space power. The details of the establishment of the Space Force come next, followed by an assessment of the new problems its establishment introduces, including questions about military effectiveness and military culture. Finally, the analysis examines the potential implications of the Space Force for diplomatic, economic, and civilian management of space. This investigation determines that the Space Force's establishment is hobbled by unclear goals and uncertain effects, contending that the Space Force lacks a clearly defined organizational culture and a clear strategic purpose, both core elements of organizational success, and that the decision to create the service is premature at best and irresponsible at worst.

What Is Space, and Why Does It Need a Military Force?

The Space Force's capstone document, Spacepower, defines space as the domain of orbital flight, including vehicles that leave and then reenter the atmosphere without making a single orbit, such as ballistic missiles. While some definitions of space rely on a judgment of where the Earth's atmosphere ends (many multilateral agreements use the Kármán line, which is 100 km above sea level), the Space Force doctrine resists using any specific physical demarcation.

Regarding the militarization of space, Spacepower defines it as the use of space for military purposes, whether those purposes include transit of objects (missiles) or the use of satellites for surveillance or communications. The militarization of space began in the final years of World War II, when Germany began to strike England with V‑2 ballistic missiles. After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union used technology and scientists from Germany to establish and develop their own space programs, eventually resulting in a "space race" to achieve various milestones of national prestige.

The complexity and importance of military operations in space have changed considerably since the 1950s, often in unpredictable ways. While the military value of ballistic missiles was immediately apparent, the implications of space‐​based satellites for military reconnaissance and communication dawned slowly. The first spy satellites entered service in 1960. Though they took lower‐​quality photographs compared to existing reconnaissance aircraft, they also could not be intercepted. Prior to the establishment of sufficiently high‐​bandwidth communications, satellites would drop physical film for ships and aircraft to recover. The United States launched the first dedicated military communications satellite in 1966, significantly easing problems of military signal transfer.

In the 1970s and 1980s the number and sophistication of satellites expanded rapidly. The U.S. military achieved new operational capabilities in space, delivering intelligence, communications, and navigational systems to soldiers. As demonstrated in the Gulf War, the U.S. military could use space to fight more effectively in conventional conflicts, essentially making the battlefield transparent. In short order, nearly the entirety of modern U.S. military operations, by all services and at all levels of intensity, required the use of space. Satellites identify targets, track their movement, transfer data to shooters, and monitor the results of the attack. Satellites enable commanders to have a full understanding of the battlefield, allowing them to communicate with their forces and offering information about the size and movements of enemy forces.

Civilian use of space also increased alongside changes in the military use of space. Communications satellites now dominate the international telecommunications industry, providing connectivity to firms and individuals around the world. Businesses, universities, and governments have built this ready connectivity into the basic structure of their daily operations. This has enabled what Richard Baldwin refers to as the second "Great Acceleration" of globalization. If space went away, so to speak, many people would struggle to find their way to the local grocery store due to a lack of the Global Positioning System. The way knowledge moves between nations, firms, and individuals depends on easy access to space. Preventing such access could cause massive social and economic disruption.

But the military and civilian advantages created by greater use of space have also created new vulnerabilities. The U.S. military has become dependent on space to conduct its basic operations, just as the U.S. civilian economy's dependence on space has increased. Competitors have access to space and increasingly the technologies necessary to attack U.S. satellites. Consequently, competitors can threaten damage against both the U.S. military and civilian economy by attacking space infrastructure. Moreover, the United States can no longer assume that satellites' role in the nuclear enterprise will deter foes from attacking satellites tasked with conventional military missions.

In 2007, China destroyed one of its satellites in low‐​Earth orbit (LEO), demonstrating its ability to threaten core U.S. communications infrastructure. Unfortunately, the satellite's destruction produced an extensive debris field, some of which remains in orbit today. This field, full of fast‐​moving orbital objects, poses a long‐​term threat to the military and civilian use of LEO. As the demonstration made clear, a war in space could result in the long‐​term loss of some of the most valuable real estate in LEO, which would not only disrupt military operations but could also render civilian space infrastructure inoperable. The United States responded to China's test with its own antisatellite test, during which it launched a Standard Missile‑3 missile defense interceptor from an Aegis weapons system on a U.S. Navy warship. The U.S. test destroyed a satellite but produced a smaller debris field because it occurred at a lower altitude than the Chinese test, with most debris burning up as it reentered Earth's atmosphere. Russia and India have both conducted antisatellite tests subsequently, with the Indian test leaving a debris field similar to that of the 2008 American test.

Several major powers now have the demonstrated capacity to undertake antisatellite attacks that could destroy their opponents' civilian and military communications infrastructures. Most of these antisatellite weapons involve interceptors launched from ground, sea, and air platforms. Moreover, the use of space assets to damage or destroy satellites also appears technically feasible. The argument that space is more important now than ever before is strategically sound. The U.S. civilian economy depends on space for its connectivity, and thus its prosperity. The U.S. military depends on space for communications and reconnaissance. However, concluding that space represents a key strategic interest for the United States does not imply or necessitate any specific institutional framework for pursuing that interest.

An Institutional History of Space

Reviewing the history of U.S. military space institutions gives us both a sense of how these organizations have evolved into the Space Force and a survey of the institutional alternatives to the establishment of Space Force. See Figure 1 for a timeline of U.S. space institutions and major historical events discussed in this section.

After 1947, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force each began to experiment with ballistic missiles. Initial Air Force skepticism gave way to enthusiasm as it became obvious that ballistic missiles could both deploy satellites and deliver warheads to distant targets. The military implications of space came into clearer view with nuclear‐​armed ballistic missiles, offering a difficult‐​to‐​intercept weapon that could cause catastrophic damage to the enemy homeland. By the early 1950s, the Department of Defense estimated both satellite and ballistic missile projects to enter service before 1960. Sputnik's launch in October 1957 created a crisis, resulting in significant expansion and consolidation of U.S. military space programs, with the Air Force playing a lead role. Civilian research proceeded along a separate track with the 1958 establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which manages civilian aspects of space travel and exploration.

The growing importance of space led the Pentagon and the Reagan administration to seek a broader institutional structure for space, one that could coordinate among all the services. Established in 1985, U.S. Space Command was a combatant command designed to have joint control of Department of Defense space operations. Combatant commands, which increased in importance after the Goldwater‐​Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, manage a region or function that includes units from two or more military services. Examples of combatant commands include Central Command (with responsibility for the Middle East) and Transportation Command (with responsibility for worldwide Department of Defense logistics and transportation). President Reagan heralded the establishment of Space Command in the 1982 announcement of the National Space Policy. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or "Star Wars") eventually played a significant role in this policy. The initial vision of SDI included not only reconnaissance satellites but also space‐​based weapons systems to intercept and destroy Soviet missiles. This would require a more substantial bureaucratic infrastructure than either Air Force Space Command or NORAD possessed. Space Command took over the Aerospace Defense Command portfolio from NORAD and prepared to lay the groundwork for the space components of SDI.

The end of the Cold War, controversy over the strategic value of SDI, and a broad array of technical difficulties with the program relegated the main priorities of Space Command to a bureaucratic afterthought. Moreover, after 9/11 the prospect of strategic attack on the United States via space seemed remote, and in any case, other priorities loomed. The Department of Defense deactivated Space Command in 2002, relegating its defense responsibilities to Northern Command and its duties involving integration of the different service space capabilities to Strategic Command. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan de‐​emphasized space's role in armed conflict in favor of human‐​centric "hearts and minds" approaches to counterterrorism.

However, while the Global War on Terror did not involve direct competition in space, it did abet a growing realization that the management of space can affect how conflicts are fought. Both counterinsurgency and counterterror techniques required the integration of surveillance and communications technology at operational and tactical levels, and this required unfettered access to space. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq waned and competition with Russia and China waxed, support within Congress and the strategic community for new institutions for the military management of space grew.

In 2017, Reps. Mike Rogers (R‑AL) and Jim Cooper (D‑TN) proposed the establishment of a Space Corps within the U.S. Air Force tasked with managing the military aspects of space. In March 2018, President Trump expressed strong support for additional attention to space, portending his eventual support for an independent Space Force. In June, Trump directed the Department of Defense to prepare for the establishment of a sixth service, and shortly thereafter "Space Force" became a talking point in his political rally speeches. The Pentagon rapidly re‐​established U.S. Space Command as a combatant command in 2019, with its initial personnel drawn primarily from Strategic Command. In December 2019, President Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, establishing the U.S. Space Force, which immediately assumed the responsibilities of Air Force Space Command.

Theories of Space Power

These theoretical frameworks provide ideas not only about how to structure and employ forces on the battlefield but also about the institutionalization of military organizations, the relationships among those organizations within a defense establishment, and the prioritization of particular capabilities by national leadership. In short, theory is necessary for institution building and good strategic decisionmaking.

Yet thus far there has been limited theorization about the militarization of space, arguably in part because of the lack of a dedicated cadre of space thinkers. In contrast to the U.S. Air Force, which had existing examples of independent air forces and a core of personnel that shared the explicit goal of achieving service independence, even the idea of an independent space force is relatively new. Some theorists have attempted to borrow aspects of air power and sea power theory to apply to space. One notable example is the Center for a New American Security's 2010 report Contested Commons: The Future of American Power i n a M ultipolar World, which included space as one of the "commons" where nations compete for influence. Treating space as a commons made it easier to import some concepts from air power and sea power theory, although analysts have disagreed over which body of theory is more applicable.

One analyst, borrowing a metaphor from sea power theory that distinguishes between naval operations in littoral waters and the open sea, has characterized "brown water" and "blue water" schools of thought on space theory, with "brown water" theories of space emphasizing the joint dimension of space operations-how space enables the functioning of existing military capabilities on land, at sea, and in the air-and "blue water" theories exploring the potential for new dynamics of space dominance, including extensive exploration and use of space for civilian, economic, and military purposes. An example of the "blue water" theories of space can be found in The Future of Space 2060 and Implications for U.S. Strategy, a September 2019 workshop report sponsored by Air Force Space Command that envisions a host of ways in which the United States could dominate different parts of space by the mid‐​21st century.

On August 10, 2020, the Space Force released its first doctrinal document, which defined "space power" for the first time, delineated the "space domain," and explained how the Space Force's assets contribute to national power and national security. According to the document, "military spacepower is the ability to accomplish strategic and military objectives through the control and exploitation of the space domain." The document makes clear that "spacepower cannot unilaterally win wars" and that the military space power should be used to preserve freedom of action, support the joint force, and provide civilian leadership with "independent options for achieving strategic effects." This last point is reminiscent of interwar thinking on air power and Air Force independence, but the document offers little detail. Nor does it establish a pathway for thinking about the unique ways that space power contributes to national power, nor of how to assess the relative contribution of space power against air power, land power, or sea power.

Over time, the Space Force may develop the kinds of institutions (such as the Naval War College or the Air Corps Tactical School) that bring people together to develop and test theories of space power and space warfare. Indeed, some work on space warfare is now emerging to clarify the parameters of discussion. At the moment, however, while some theoretical frameworks for exploring the military relevance of space exist, the Space Force does not seem representative of any clear theoretical position. This makes it difficult to evaluate the position of the Space Force within the constellation of American defense institutions but also complicates how the service compiles priorities, procures equipment, and trains personnel.

The U.S. Space Force: A Solution to Space?

The U.S. Space Force is an independent uniformed service under the authority of the Department of the Air Force. It was established on December 20, 2019, and was expected to be fully operational by 2021. Like the other services, the Space Force is headed by a four‐​star general (the chief of Space Operations) who is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and thus a contributor to the National Military Strategy. The official mission of the Space Force is to "organize, train, and equip space forces to protect U.S. and allied interests in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force. Space Force responsibilities include developing military space professionals, acquiring military space systems, maturing the military doctrine for space power, and organizing space forces to present to our Combatant Commands."

The Space Force is projected to grow to 16,000 military personnel, with 2,500 active‐​duty personnel transferred from Air Force Space Command by the beginning of fiscal year 2021. The official headquarters of the Space Force remains undecided. The service will initially include three primary field commands: one responsible for training, one for acquisition, and one for support of combatant commanders. The projected budget for the Space Force in fiscal year 2021 is some $15 billion, transferred from the Air Force Space Command allocation.

What does it mean to say that the Space Force is a "service?" A service is a largely autonomous military organization that designs its own doctrine, manages its own systems of recruitment and promotion, and (in the U.S. system) has its own place on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Services are distinct from subservice designators such as Army "branches" (artillery, armor, or infantry, for example) or Navy "communities" (surface, submarine, aviation).

The Space Force is notably different from the other services. It is much smaller than any other service; the next smallest is the U.S. Marine Corps, at some 220,000 active and reserve personnel. It does not yet have its own uniforms, rank structure, bases, or substantial equipment pool. Unlike the Air Force, Navy, or Army, the Space Force does not have distinct representation as a military department within the Department of Defense. The Space Force shares this last attribute with the Marine Corps, an independent service under the authority of the Department of the Navy, a handicap that has not prevented the Marine Corps from developing its own doctrine, civilian support network, and organizational identity.

The Organizational Culture of the U.S. Space Force

Given that the bulk of Space Force personnel have and will come from the Air Force, it seems likely that elements of Air Force organizational culture will accompany them. Since the Space Force emerged almost fully formed from Air Force Space Command, it is safe to assume that the service's culture will strongly resemble that of Space Command. The question then becomes how Space Command's personnel differed from those of the Air Force as a whole. The answer to this remains unclear, although interviews with Army space officers suggest that the Space Command is technologically focused, uninterested in operational warfighting, and overly committed to an engineering view of space problems rather than to a vision of strategic competition with foreign countries. Nevertheless, one recent survey indicated that a large majority (over 85 percent) of Army space officers would leave the Army for the Space Force if they could.

Still, the problem is less the specific cultural traits of the Space Force than the apparent absence of any strong organizational culture at all. We have no sense of how organizational culture will contribute to military effectiveness of the service. We have few clues from the antecedents of the Space Force regarding how the beliefs and assumptions of the organization will structure its day‐​to‐​day operation. Space Force organizational culture, a critical component of the success of the institution, will be a work in progress.

The Determinants of Military Effectiveness

Assessing the effectiveness of a service that barely exists is difficult for obvious reasons. The nature of the Space Force complicates the problem, since for now it seems primarily to support other parts of the U.S. military. It has taken over a set of missions associated with its direct progenitor, Air Force Space Command, and largely consists of the same equipment, personnel, and doctrine. Though some measures evaluate performance at the granular level, other improvements in effectiveness will only manifest in the performance of other organizations, not in the Space Force itself. For this reason, there is little use in exploring questions of tactical and operational effectiveness at this point, since the Space Force will neither manage forces nor develop techniques for outer space combat. Antisatellite weapons, for example, are still under Navy and Air Force control. In the future, changes in the performance of U.S. military forces that depend on space for communications and intelligence may offer some indication as to the effectiveness of the Space Force, although even this will depend on assessing a bewildering array of confounding factors.

The military effectiveness literature also indicates that metrics of effectiveness are very important to how an organization performs, regardless of the level of analysis. These metrics allow an organization to perform diagnostics on itself, assessing policies that work and those that do not. With respect to the Space Force, we do not yet have a set of metrics (such as loss‐​exchange ratios, air‐​to‐​air combat kill ratios, precision targeting statistics, etc.) to measure the effectiveness of any space military organization. The Space Force will need to develop metrics suitable for a support force; for example, how regularly do "customers" of the Space Force's products use that product in their daily operations? What rates of operational malfunction in spacecraft can be attributed to internal as opposed to external causes? Developing and using these metrics will be critical for how the Space Force performs in the long term.

Determining the Space Force's strategic effectiveness is different but no more reassuring. Strategic effectiveness depends on a well‐​reasoned and articulated theory of space competition, discussed in more detail in the Theories of Space Power section of this paper. Such a theory would allow the Space Force to formulate ways of achieving national goals through doctrine, procurement, and force structure. Although the capstone document points the Space Force in some potentially promising theoretical directions, we cannot evaluate the service's strategic effectiveness as of yet but may have the means to do so at some point.

There are reasons to worry about the prospective political effectiveness of the Space Force. While the Space Force undoubtedly will have a presence in the defense industrial base, its budget will be much smaller than that of any of the other services. It will lack a base of veterans and a history of success to draw upon. It can offer Congress and state governors less in terms of industry or footprint. Its budgetary decisions will be housed under the same department as the service it is most likely to conflict with over missions and resources (the Air Force). The politicized nature of its birth may leave it a figurative orphan if President Trump does not win a second term. In short, the ability of the Space Force to command the bureaucratic and fiscal resources needed to conduct its mission is in dire question.

As a point of comparison, when the Air Force won its independence from the Army in 1947, it had already completed the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which evaluated the effectiveness of the bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan at tactical, operational, and strategic levels. The very act of compiling the survey was evidence of political effectiveness, as it gave Air Force leaders and their allies the tools needed then to fight for independence and then to fight post‐​independence battles for resources and bureaucratic turf. The Space Force has nothing remotely comparable to the Strategic Bombing Survey, and it is difficult to imagine how a document measuring effectiveness in such a way could be compiled.

The Air Force Comparison, and the Broader Implications of the Space Force for the Department of Defense

The last new uniformed service that the United States created was the Air Force in 1947. Governments establish new services because they believe that certain kinds of capabilities do not receive the necessary institutional support from existing military organizations. The establishment of new services and separate commands (the U.S. Air Force or Special Operations Command, for example) provides protection for specific capabilities, as well as a greenhouse in which those capabilities can reach their full potential.

However, new institutions come with costs, both literal (in terms of bureaucratic overhead, redundancies, and procurement distortions) and figurative (interservice conflict and bureaucratic competition). The Air Force built upon the foundation of the Army Air Forces, the Army Air Corps, and the Army Air Service. Because of this, the creation of the Space Force necessarily evokes comparison with the independence of the earlier service. However, while there are certain surface similarities, the two cases are dramatically different in many key respects.

Like the Space Force, the founding of the Air Force came at a point when expectations of the future of war were rapidly changing, most notably the belief that nuclear weapons (delivered primarily by Air Force bombers) would dominate future conflicts. As with the Space Force, Air Force advocates argued that existing institutions (in both the Army and the Navy) were insufficient to facilitate the emergence of new capabilities and new modes of warfighting. As with space, the air represented a new domain of warfighting, theoretically requiring the creation of a new military organization. As previously noted, the inclusion of a Space Force officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff will give space a voice in the formulation of the National Military Strategy, which describes the strategic goals of the uniformed military.

Those are the similarities. The differences are dramatic. The Air Force emerged from a long process in which aviators argued for the liberation of air power from the control of ground commanders and freedom from subservience to the needs of ground forces. At its founding the Air Force was enormous, with 304,000 personnel and thousands of aircraft. It had large bodies of theory that it had developed in the interwar period and experience honed through multiple campaigns in the Second World War. It held strongly to a set of theories of strategic air power that gave guidance to procurement, force structure, and doctrine. It also had a strong sense of its importance and a willingness to fight the other services for its priorities. The U.S. Air Force could also draw upon the example of numerous other independent air forces, including most notably the Royal Air Force.

The introduction of the U.S. Air Force created substantial interservice conflict, which has persisted. The causes and consequences of tensions among the Air Force, Navy, and Army are too complicated to deal with here, but they have often involved the pursuit of autonomy and disputes over shared missions. By comparison, the Space Force may introduce even more substantial problems, as it currently exists primarily as a support organization for the other services. The Air Force could at least conceptualize operations that would produce independent, decisive military effects, shorn of the need to work with the other services. The Space Force, at this point, cannot.

Air Force independence was an earthquake in the U.S. military establishment, for better or worse. An independent Air Force catalyzed the creation of the Department of Defense and the establishment of a new system of managing national security. By contrast, the Space Force begins with a handful of personnel, no agreed‐​upon strategic theory, and little history or experience to draw upon. Moreover, separating the Space Force from the Air Force does not even win the former independence from the Department of the Air Force. For good or ill, the independence of the Space Force does not bear much comparison with the independence of the Air Force.

We have little sense thus far of the size or significance of the Space Force budget. As noted, the initial budget for the Space Force runs at $15 billion, which is by far the smallest of any independent service; the Marine Corps, the closest analogue to the Space Force, will have a budget of $46 billion in 2021. The Department of Defense projected new costs for establishing the Space Force at roughly $500 million per year for the first five years. The Congressional Budget Office, by contrast, estimated one‐​time costs at between $1 billion and $3 billion, with annual cost increases between $840 million and $1.3 billion. Another estimate, developed for Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson in 2018, projected a $13 billion five‐​year price tag for establishing and operating the Space Force. Because of the size of the force, personnel costs occupy a relatively small part of the budget; although, this could grow rapidly due to the need for maintaining technical expertise.

Political, Economic, and Diplomatic Implications of the Space Force

Space Force and Multilateral Space Governance

The increasing militarization of space has spurred discussion of the need for additional space governance. War in space could threaten the long‐​term health and usability of the "space commons" by distributing fragments of destroyed satellites across a wide range of orbits, including those commonly used by civilian spacecraft. This could result in severe short‐​term economic dislocation, even for noncombatants, and pose a long‐​term obstacle to the human exploitation of space. Two combatants could cause catastrophic damage to the infrastructure that enables modern social and economic life, making the establishment of some "rules of the road" imperative.

Military services tend to warily view arms control arrangements that affect their autonomy in their specialized domains. The events described in the 1964 film (and 1962 novel) Seven Days in May, in which an Air Force general seeks to topple an arms control-minded American president in a coup, are overstated, but services have historically opposed arms control limitations that affect their core priorities. The Royal Air Force's preference for offensive bombing doctrines during the interwar period, and its belief that the realities of war would rapidly blow past any legal limitations, undoubtedly influenced the United Kingdom's approach to international law in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, the U.S. Navy (and its counterparts in Britain, Japan, and elsewhere) resented the Washington Naval Treaty process because it limited the construction of their most prized vessels.

Even in the prehistory of the U.S. Air Force, Billy Mitchell warned about the threat that international arms control might pose for aerial bombardment. However, opposition to arms control was not always automatic or immediate; the Army Air Forces chiefs offered qualified support for nuclear arms control in the immediate aftermath of World War II. By the early 1960s, however, the Air Force senior hierarchy resolutely opposed most multilateral arms control, including the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In part because of generational change, the Air Force had minimal influence over the early Strategic Arms Limitation Talks negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Later activism on the part of the Air Force and of the Navy focused on the protection of specific systems, such as the B‑1 Lancer bomber, the LGM-118 Peacekeeper ballistic missile (then the Missile, Experimental, or MX), and the Trident submarine‐​launched ballistic missile.

The reasoning behind this opposition is clear: Strategic bombing (and later the delivery of nuclear payloads through intercontinental ballistic missiles) provided the rationale for the autonomy, independence, and primacy of the Air Force. Limitation of these weapons would not only require significant revision of doctrine and force structure but also would strike at the core cultural stories that undergirded the services. Moreover, compliance with the restrictions of a multilateral governance regime can be onerous in terms of financial, human resources, and intelligence demands. Most modern arms limitation regimes demand transparency on the part of the participants, which services tend not to welcome.

Given that services tend to pursue autonomy, the Space Force could pose some obstacle to future efforts for multilateral arms control in space. To be sure, neither the navies nor the air forces of the 20th century managed to prevent arms control. Nevertheless, if the Space Force manages to acquire the bureaucratic heft it needs to accomplish its core missions, it could act as an interest group within government to prevent the execution of strong multilateral arms control agreements. The record offers qualified reasons for concern about the role that the Space Force could play in future arms control negotiations. Services tend to resent the imposition of external limits on their procurement and force structure, although the extent of this resentment depends on organizational priorities. Still, the Space Force is unlikely to spearhead a drive for arms control within the U.S. government and probably will resist limitations imposed by such arms control on its core interests.

Conclusion

Decisions on institutional reorganizations are necessarily political, in addition to whatever technocratic impetus might drive them. A service's creation reveals the political priorities of Congress and the president, especially as it incurs substantial costs and substantial risk. But the creation of a service is rarely political in the sense that it stems largely from an interest in generating a talking point that a president can use at political rallies. Although the Space Force has some roots in theories of bureaucratic behavior, as well as considerable support from some actors within the defense community, it seems to have caught the president's attention through his belief in its public appeal.

This leaves analysts in an unusual situation, insofar as we have relatively little information with which to generate good expectations about whether the Space Force will perform its mission effectively, how it will get along with other services, or how it will affect the international environment. We have only a vague sense of the answers to many of the questions that will determine the success of the Space Force as an institution. We have reason to suspect that the Space Force will negatively affect multilateral arms limitation negotiations; we do not know how well the Space Force will be on traditional metrics of military effectiveness; we can guess that the presence of a Space Force officer on the Joint Chiefs will increase the prominence of space considerations in the National Military Strategy; and we have some reason to expect that the Space Force will increase demands on the military budget. This very uncertainty is an indictment of the decision to create the Space Force now. The Air Force, for better or worse, had answers to all these questions at its birth. As it now exists, the Space Force appears to a be a kludge designed to protect the political aspirations of the president while not encroaching too much on the institutional prerogatives of the Air Force.

Provisionally, many aspects of the Space Force seem problematic. Space is, if anything, a more intractable domain than air in terms of interservice conflict in that space assets are the sinews of the day‐​to‐​day activities of the services on land, at sea, in the air, and in cyberspace. The inclusion of the Space Force within the Department of the Air Force raises questions about how independent the Space Force will really be, and thus whether it will realize any of the promised gains. Finally, the lurking problem of the development of an independent space doctrine, which has in some historical cases resolved in favor of doctrines that favor independent, offensive operations, remains a long‐​term concern insofar as it would threaten to endanger peaceful use of the "space commons."

Space Force's establishment as an independent service is premature. Even for an institutional system in which services have domain‐​specific responsibilities (rather than a system that asks services to think holistically about how to accomplish missions across multiple domains), the Space Force is immature. Creating the Space Force at this point does not necessarily create the conditions under which the service can mature in a healthy fashion. Rather, it introduces the Space Force into a political arena where it lacks the resources and the political heft to effectively establish its prerogatives among the other services. In effect, it is a service in name only; in reality, it remains Air Force Space Command, and there is little in its birth that suggests it will grow beyond this any time soon.

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Space Force: Ahead of Its Time, or Dreadfully Premature?

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In December 2019, Congress established the U.S. Space Force as an independent uniformed military service within the Department of the Air Force. Although many defense analysts had long argued for a reorganization of the Department of Defense's space capabilities, few had settled on this particular solution.

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1. It will affect important military relationships: Our military service is working well today. Forming a new space force will just disrupt what we have already created. It will not only require time but also money that we could be spending elsewhere.

2. New barriers will be created: Part of the reason our law enforcement has failed is because of information that has been kept private. Creating this new military service will cause more secrets and barriers that we must overcome.

3. We will rely too heavily on industry: When we lack the resources to complete tasks, we often turn to outsiders for help. An industry like this would require technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. Private forces like this cause controversy and judgement.

4. It will be defenseless without other services help: We do not have the ability to build battle ships to fight war in space. The only tools being used are satellites which have no way to defend themselves.

5. It will make the world's best Air Force less effective: We have built one of the most successful air power and space capabilities. Other countries are starting to build similar models based off of our success rate. If we were to create something like a space force, it might undermine our credibility.

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Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

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President Trump’s proposal to create a Space Force is not grounded in a realistic vision of what space can or will be for America’s military.

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1. Time:
Creating a good space force would take lots of time. This would take years to develop completely while the time would be better spent actually fixing the problem.
2. Military Escalation:
A space force could push war into space and cause a chain reaction. Countries may obtain large quantities of satellites and rockets for a space war which would be catastrophic.
3. Spending:
By creating a space force, there would be excessive military spending. There would be many added costs like education and training which is unnecessary considering the Air Force already spends a lot of money and resources for space.
4. Drain resources from more productive pursuits:
Creating a space force would mean a new military service. This requires a war-fighting doctrine, a secretariat, military staff, and many other items. The resources that would go into a space force could be used for more important issues.
5. Would make the world’s best Air Force less effective:
The U.S. Air Force has created a model that works so well other countries imitate the model. The U.S. will lose its dominance, skills, and capabilities if a space force is created.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/fp_20180730_space_force_transcript.pdf
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/08/27/ten-ways-a-space-force-will-make-america-weaker/?sh=749ceded34b0

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The Space Force has been the subject of much ridicule in the media. The release of Netflix's Space Force earlier this year and several comedians picking the force as a comedy bit have added to this mainstream conversation and have painted a rather odd picture of what the Space Force is designed to achieve. But, the reality is that most of us have only heard about the Space Force through these channels.

The Space Force, as established in December of 2019, is designed to serve as the 6th branch of the United States military. But so far, it has been an enigma with an unclear and ill-defined purpose.

Despite the ridicule, the Space Force and its implications should be carefully considered based upon military and scientific need. However, there are drawbacks to introducing the force and they almost certainly outweigh the pros.

What exactly is the purpose of this force?
First and foremost, it is important to understand what exactly the Space Force is designed to accomplish. If you have watched Space Force on Netflix or heard about it through other entertainment channels, it is easy to paint a frivolous picture of what the Space Force is and what it is trying to achieve. Perhaps the most common misconception is that the Space Force is trying to put soldiers on the moon or have an active personnel in Space. Although the idea evokes or , it is blatantly . Instead, the Space Force aims to achieve a few tactical tasks.

The space force would consolidate space-related military into a singular branch. Currently, space-related military is split amongst the branches of the military, much of it held in the Air Force. A Space Force would centralize control of space-related military. However, more broadly, the Space Force's responsibilities, according to its , "will include developing military space professionals, acquiring military space systems, maturing the military doctrine for space power, and organizing space forces to present to our Combatant Commands." Essentially, the Space Force intends to create a centralized hub for all space related military and develop a space-focused strategy. But even with a stated purpose, we must dig deeper to understand the historical motivation for the force.
What is the precedent for the Space Force?
Aside from the scientific feats that accompany it, space flight has long been a display of hegemony and a source of national pride for countries and individuals alike. So, it begs the question: what happens when we politicize our relationship to space? We first saw this politicization begin in the 50s, 60s and 70s when the US and USSR deliberately used the Space Race as a political strategy to reestablish their dominance in the post-war period. In an effort to boost morale and rebound from the consequences of the war, the Space Race effectively politicized science on a global scale. It turned the quest for scientific advancement into a component of the Cold War.

While the Cold War led to significant technological developments, it was motivated by the creation of long-range nuclear missiles as both the United States and Russia hoarded missiles for the purpose of maintaining mutually-assured destruction, the effects of which we still see today. At the same time, the money, time, and resources invested in space exploration led to some of the greatest scientific advancements of the century, including remote satellite technologies. The Space Force re-energizes the conversation regarding the balance between beneficial and potentially perilous scientific invention. For the first time in decades, the government is taking concrete steps to project openly their intent to weaponize space.

But we must not conflate the deliberate creation of the Space Force and the beginning of space-assisted warfare, as such warfare has long been an integral part of military conflicts. The Strategic Defense Initiative, conceived in the early 80s, attempted unsuccessfully to use space as a countermeasure to long-range nuclear weapons. Since the 50s, space technology and the military have been deeply intertwined. The Gulf War, in large part, heavily on satellite technologies. The Global Positioning System (GPS), which has led to over a dollars in economic benefits, is owned and controlled by the Air Force, a branch of the military which was created a mere 70 years ago for a technologically-advancing style of warfare.
Does the Space Force deserve the ridicule it has received?
It's clear that discussions around the Space Force shouldn't be taken lightly. As technology advances, it is not unlikely that space will become a battlefield in spite of governing Space.

Although the US currently spends on space than any other country, it is no secret that global adversaries are making political moves in space. China's increase in space spending by almost over the last 15 years and Russia's recent over Venus are two examples. While the latter seems straight out of some dystopian future, it sends a deliberate message about not only Russia's technological capabilities, but its ambitions. In fact, every action that a country takes in space sends a calculated and purposeful message. Each rocket launch, satellite destruction, and yes, planet-claiming, showcases technology and military capabilities. Even disregarding any potential US offensive strategy, the military needs a concrete way to respond to such implicit threats. The Space Force could become the hub for this response, able to strategize about space-military needs.
Is the Space Force the best choice for addressing these needs?
With all military strategy, there runs the obvious risk of escalation, and instead of sending a purely defensive or philosophical message, a Space Force may send an adversarial one. The major risk is that we push war into space and trigger a chain-reaction or wartime expansion in space similar to that of a Cold War. It could be catastrophic for the world to enter a scenario where countries are stockpiling satellites or rockets for the purpose of a space war. In fact, the world should avoid military escalation at all costs and the US should make it its mission to push for space to be solely an arena of global collaboration and peaceful exploration. The idea of a Space Force undermines this.

Perhaps a less dire drawback would be excessive military bureaucracy and spending. Currently, a large part of the space military is controlled by the Air Force and its leadership does not feel the to split the Space Force into a different branch. As long as the task of space operations remains manageable to the Air Force, there is no reason to split off and add to an already long bureaucratic process; splitting into a separate branch may complicate and meddle with an already sound system. Secretary Debbie Lee James, the secretary of the Air Force under President Obama that the Air Force already invests a significant amount of money and resources into space and several military experts champion the idea of integration within the military instead of establishing several separate branches.

In light of these trade-offs, it becomes clear that the US needs to have a long and productive conversation about the future of the military. Instead of wasting dollars on an already over-funded military, the US needs to rethink its strategy and prepare itself for a modern world. There are definitive drawbacks to the Space Force, and it should not be unthinkingly or unequivocally championed. However, we must take this idea seriously while considering the technologically-advancing reality that we live in today.

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Boots on the Moon: Weighing the Pros and Cons of the Space Force

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The Space Force has been the subject of much ridicule in the media. The release of Netflix's Space Force earlier this year and several comedians picking the force as a comedy bit have added to this mainstream conversation and have painted a rather odd picture of what the Space Force is designed to achieve.

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1. Lead to War- The military strategies might push them into war, because instead of sending a purely defensive or philosophical message the Space Force may send an adversarial one. There is a major risk that if we are lead to war then a chain reaction will be triggered or even wartime expansion in space that is similar to that of the Cold War.
2. Excessive Military Bureaucracy- Currently, a large part of the space military is controlled by the Air Force. The task of space operations remains manageable to the Air Force and it's leadership does not feel the need to split the Space Force into a different branch. Every service depends on the connectivity provided by communication satellites and data. Bureaucratic walls can create unexpected problems such as jargon, communications, and professional expectations differ across organizations. In the past, simple definitional misunderstandings between services have produced serious problems. The Space Force may struggle to provide the level of service that the other organizations have grown to rely on.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/it-time-space-force
3. Cost- The U.S. Space Force has a contract made up of $32 million dollars of which can be used in the other branches of the military that handle the operations of space.
https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2021/12/23/space-force-issues-32-million-contract-for-prototype-space-based-sensor/
4. Lack of Purpose- The Space Force has inherited a legacy of poor performance and hasn't shown any organizational structure. They haven't delivered or shown us any results. They don't have strong relationships with allies and partners, particularly those with spacefaring militaries.
5. Doesn't Represent the U.S.- In this article below, General Raymond states that "they have set the tone, such as focusing on being a digital service, but being different should be a permanent part of the Space Force's DNA." They believe that the Space Force should embrace being different than the other branches of the military. The military should stand as one and be able to unite together, but with the Space Force they will have issues.
https://warontherocks.com/2021/03/hey-space-force-dont-worry-about-public-relations-just-deliver-results/

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1. It lacks resources to be a co-equal service. It doesn't have the facts, history, resources, statistics, personnel, and funding to be separate but equal. Each new military has to have its own war-fighting military staffing and philosophy which would drain the resources.
2. It would disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force depends heavily on orbital systems in which our warships couldn't communicate without our satellite links. Creating new military service will confuse the arrangements that work well today.
3. Cost. The budget of the Space Force is $15 billion as of 2021. Creating a new military service would alone cost about $2 million over 5 years, just for the education, training, testing, and added expenses.
4. Time. For everything that would have to happen in order for the technological advances could take place, it would take too much time. The U.S. is unprepared and needs a lot more testing done to ensure safety.
5. It would be defenseless without the help of other services. Any actions for the military response on the U.S. space assets would have to be required by other services. The "War-fighting" capabilities in space consist mostly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known patterns.

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke.

It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore. Despite widespread opposition to creating a sixth branch of the military, the president on reflection decided it was a "great idea" and directed defense officials to begin preparations for the new service. On August 9 the Pentagon released a preliminary report laying out plans for establishing a space development agency, a space operating force, and a unified space command. The next budget request sent to Congress will seek legal authority to separate the Space Force from other military organizations.

Congress should reject that proposal. It is a poorly conceived, wasteful undertaking that will weaken the joint force. America's military needs in space would be far better served by retaining the existing organization of the joint force and making modest adjustments to assure space challenges are met in a timely fashion.

Most experts already know this. The president, who isn't an expert, does not. So for the benefit of those who have not been paying close attention and might be captivated by rhetoric untethered to reality, here are ten reasons why creating a Space Force would be a really bad idea.

1. It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.

2. It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Organizations have boundaries that get in the way of cooperating with other organizations -- particularly when they are competing for missions and resources. One reason the 9-11 attacks succeeded was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not share information because they were protecting their bureaucratic turf. A great deal of effort has been invested in tearing down those walls. But standing up a Space Force would create new barriers to cooperation.

3. It will lack the resources to be a co-equal service. President Trump says he wants the Space Force to be "separate but equal" with the Air Force. But the entire space workforce in the defense department and intelligence community -- 27,500 people according to Sandra Erwin of Space News -- represents less than 1% of the personnel employed by the Pentagon. The budget for all national security space activities totals less than two days' worth of federal spending per year. So a Space Force will not be "separate but equal" with other services.

4. It will be too dependent on industry. When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. However, private industry is not driven by the same priorities as public agencies, and thus reliance on its advice would tend to distort the judgment and objectivity of a Space Force.

5. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits. The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently told an audience that anyone who thinks creating a Space Force will be revenue-neutral is "naive." A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today. Deputy defense secretary Pat Shanahan says this will cost billions of dollars, and much of the money will likely come from more important activities.

6. It will replicate capabilities already resident elsewhere. A Space Force wouldn't just receive functions transferred from other military services. It would share responsibility for missions like joint networking and cybersecurity that would continue to exist in those other services. For instance, the Air Force isn't going to give up its cyber capabilities just because a new service is created. So the Space Force will have to stand up mirror organizations and compete for scarce technical talent, creating wasteful redundancy.

7. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand that every time Washington creates a major new organization, it gives birth to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. That is what will happen with the Space Force. It won't just replicate what already exists in other places, it will find new functions to perform and new positions that need to be filled -- often by highly paid personnel who could be better deployed elsewhere.

8. It will reduce incentives for other services to support space. Once a Space Force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain. Having lost their organic space communities, they will shift focus to areas still considered within their core competencies. The perverse effect will be to reduce expertise in space across the joint force by concentrating it in one place that is isolated from other military organizations.

9. It will be defenseless without the help of other services. The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services. So calling space a warfighting domain is a stretch.

10. It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success. In fact, other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US. model. If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.

You might say that the U.S. Air Force has helped bring on this danger by exaggerating the notion that space is becoming a warfighting domain. All that has really happened is that Russia and China have figured out how vital orbital assets are to our terrestrial warfighting capabilities. But that's an argument for keeping space expertise spread across the joint force, not creating a new federal bureaucracy that drains missions and money away from other military services. Creating a Space Force today is premature at best, and will likely make America weaker.

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Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke. It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/08/27/ten-ways-a-space-force-will-make-america-weaker/?sh=61e26a3634b0&scrlybrkr=cddfd945

1. It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success.
2. It will be defenseless without the help of other services. The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system.
3. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand that every time Washington creates a major new organization, it gives birth to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. That is what will happen with the Space Force.
4. It will be too dependent on industry. When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight.
5. It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. The smart bombs were not able to hit their targets without guidance from the GPA craft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate.

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke.

It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore. Despite widespread opposition to creating a sixth branch of the military, the president on reflection decided it was a "great idea" and directed defense officials to begin preparations for the new service. On August 9 the Pentagon released a preliminary report laying out plans for establishing a space development agency, a space operating force, and a unified space command. The next budget request sent to Congress will seek legal authority to separate the Space Force from other military organizations.

Congress should reject that proposal. It is a poorly conceived, wasteful undertaking that will weaken the joint force. America's military needs in space would be far better served by retaining the existing organization of the joint force and making modest adjustments to assure space challenges are met in a timely fashion.

Most experts already know this. The president, who isn't an expert, does not. So for the benefit of those who have not been paying close attention and might be captivated by rhetoric untethered to reality, here are ten reasons why creating a Space Force would be a really bad idea.

1. It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.

2. It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Organizations have boundaries that get in the way of cooperating with other organizations -- particularly when they are competing for missions and resources. One reason the 9-11 attacks succeeded was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not share information because they were protecting their bureaucratic turf. A great deal of effort has been invested in tearing down those walls. But standing up a Space Force would create new barriers to cooperation.

3. It will lack the resources to be a co-equal service. President Trump says he wants the Space Force to be "separate but equal" with the Air Force. But the entire space workforce in the defense department and intelligence community -- 27,500 people according to Sandra Erwin of Space News -- represents less than 1% of the personnel employed by the Pentagon. The budget for all national security space activities totals less than two days' worth of federal spending per year. So a Space Force will not be "separate but equal" with other services.

4. It will be too dependent on industry. When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. However, private industry is not driven by the same priorities as public agencies, and thus reliance on its advice would tend to distort the judgment and objectivity of a Space Force.

5. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits. The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently told an audience that anyone who thinks creating a Space Force will be revenue-neutral is "naive." A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today. Deputy defense secretary Pat Shanahan says this will cost billions of dollars, and much of the money will likely come from more important activities.

6. It will replicate capabilities already resident elsewhere. A Space Force wouldn't just receive functions transferred from other military services. It would share responsibility for missions like joint networking and cybersecurity that would continue to exist in those other services. For instance, the Air Force isn't going to give up its cyber capabilities just because a new service is created. So the Space Force will have to stand up mirror organizations and compete for scarce technical talent, creating wasteful redundancy.

7. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand that every time Washington creates a major new organization, it gives birth to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. That is what will happen with the Space Force. It won't just replicate what already exists in other places, it will find new functions to perform and new positions that need to be filled -- often by highly paid personnel who could be better deployed elsewhere.

8. It will reduce incentives for other services to support space. Once a Space Force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain. Having lost their organic space communities, they will shift focus to areas still considered within their core competencies. The perverse effect will be to reduce expertise in space across the joint force by concentrating it in one place that is isolated from other military organizations.

9. It will be defenseless without the help of other services. The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services. So calling space a warfighting domain is a stretch.

10. It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success. In fact, other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US. model. If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.

You might say that the U.S. Air Force has helped bring on this danger by exaggerating the notion that space is becoming a warfighting domain. All that has really happened is that Russia and China have figured out how vital orbital assets are to our terrestrial warfighting capabilities. But that's an argument for keeping space expertise spread across the joint force, not creating a new federal bureaucracy that drains missions and money away from other military services. Creating a Space Force today is premature at best, and will likely make America weaker.

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Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke. It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore.

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1. The Cost - The first year of the Space for in works, it costed the country over $3.3 billion dollars. This totaling a project cost of over $12 billion in the end of five years.

2. Shared Services - Since the majority of the Space Force personal comes from the military, such as my dad, we are taking responsibilities and people away from the Air Force. Where the majority of these tasks can be accomplished by the Air Force and dispersed to the Navy as well.

3. Structure - With being a new branch of the military services, the personal have to start new and create a structure from the beginning. For the longest time, dad wore his Air Force uniform due to the lack of communication and formality of the new uniforms. But that is just the beginning of struggles. Most of this branch is cyber based. Personal have to be created and trained to work on projects such as satellites to the upmost cyber tracking and analyzation. With most personal not holding these qualities, this creates a hardship and difficulty that can't be missed.

4. Starting new - When dad was first endowered into the USSF, we were assigned to Buckley Air Force base in Aurora Colorado. With all of the USSF personal on Air Force Ground, this created problems and possible recollections since you aren't on a "home turf." Buckley is now a Space Force base but at the time this was a difficulty we had to face. There are only 6 USSF bases. With the USAF having 59 current bases, they have home ground and area to structure as their own. With only 6 bases, the USSF can't really do that. Space Force Locations

5.  Misconceptions - Unlike the US Army or the Navy, the Space Force does not entirely fight. The USSF is more of a defense and surveillance branch rather than an in-war sense. By doing this they work more with these other branches helping with warnings and possible mishaps waiting to happen. But have the possibilities to send the equipment and defense needed to help defend this situation and help be prepared before the situation at hand happens. About Space Force

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The Official Website for the United States Space Force

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1. It reduces incentives for other services to support space. With the space force being created, other military services will have less incentive to invest in understanding orbital domain.
2. It will make the world's best air force less effective. Other countries are following suite due to the success that the U.S. has had, however, it is undermining the current dominance of both air and orbit. The air force will be diminished by loss of skills and capabilities.
3. It lacks resources to be a co-equal service. "Separate but equal" was the goal. However, this program lacks the funding and personnel to be separate but equal.
4. It disrupts vital military relationships. The joint force is dependent greatly on orbital systems. the new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.
5. It is defenseless without the help of other services. "Warfighting" capabilities in space have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response needed would have to come from the atmosphere by other services.

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke.

It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore. Despite widespread opposition to creating a sixth branch of the military, the president on reflection decided it was a "great idea" and directed defense officials to begin preparations for the new service. On August 9 the Pentagon released a preliminary report laying out plans for establishing a space development agency, a space operating force, and a unified space command. The next budget request sent to Congress will seek legal authority to separate the Space Force from other military organizations.

Congress should reject that proposal. It is a poorly conceived, wasteful undertaking that will weaken the joint force. America's military needs in space would be far better served by retaining the existing organization of the joint force and making modest adjustments to assure space challenges are met in a timely fashion.

Most experts already know this. The president, who isn't an expert, does not. So for the benefit of those who have not been paying close attention and might be captivated by rhetoric untethered to reality, here are ten reasons why creating a Space Force would be a really bad idea.

1. It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.

2. It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Organizations have boundaries that get in the way of cooperating with other organizations -- particularly when they are competing for missions and resources. One reason the 9-11 attacks succeeded was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not share information because they were protecting their bureaucratic turf. A great deal of effort has been invested in tearing down those walls. But standing up a Space Force would create new barriers to cooperation.

3. It will lack the resources to be a co-equal service. President Trump says he wants the Space Force to be "separate but equal" with the Air Force. But the entire space workforce in the defense department and intelligence community -- 27,500 people according to Sandra Erwin of Space News -- represents less than 1% of the personnel employed by the Pentagon. The budget for all national security space activities totals less than two days' worth of federal spending per year. So a Space Force will not be "separate but equal" with other services.

4. It will be too dependent on industry. When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. However, private industry is not driven by the same priorities as public agencies, and thus reliance on its advice would tend to distort the judgment and objectivity of a Space Force.

5. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits. The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently told an audience that anyone who thinks creating a Space Force will be revenue-neutral is "naive." A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today. Deputy defense secretary Pat Shanahan says this will cost billions of dollars, and much of the money will likely come from more important activities.

6. It will replicate capabilities already resident elsewhere. A Space Force wouldn't just receive functions transferred from other military services. It would share responsibility for missions like joint networking and cybersecurity that would continue to exist in those other services. For instance, the Air Force isn't going to give up its cyber capabilities just because a new service is created. So the Space Force will have to stand up mirror organizations and compete for scarce technical talent, creating wasteful redundancy.

7. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand that every time Washington creates a major new organization, it gives birth to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. That is what will happen with the Space Force. It won't just replicate what already exists in other places, it will find new functions to perform and new positions that need to be filled -- often by highly paid personnel who could be better deployed elsewhere.

8. It will reduce incentives for other services to support space. Once a Space Force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain. Having lost their organic space communities, they will shift focus to areas still considered within their core competencies. The perverse effect will be to reduce expertise in space across the joint force by concentrating it in one place that is isolated from other military organizations.

9. It will be defenseless without the help of other services. The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services. So calling space a warfighting domain is a stretch.

10. It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success. In fact, other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US. model. If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.

You might say that the U.S. Air Force has helped bring on this danger by exaggerating the notion that space is becoming a warfighting domain. All that has really happened is that Russia and China have figured out how vital orbital assets are to our terrestrial warfighting capabilities. But that's an argument for keeping space expertise spread across the joint force, not creating a new federal bureaucracy that drains missions and money away from other military services. Creating a Space Force today is premature at best, and will likely make America weaker.

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Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke. It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore.

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1. It will disrupt vital military relationships.
The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.
2. It will make the world's best air force less effective.
If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.
3. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits.
A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today.
4. It will be too dependent on industry.
An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight.
5. It will be defenseless without the help of other services.
Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services.

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Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

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President Trump’s proposal to create a Space Force is not grounded in a realistic vision of what space can or will be for America’s military.

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1. Other military services rely on space - we need space for communication and military function, the Space Force would disrupt and confuse the system that we have now. Why fix what isn't broken?
2. Wouldn't be equal to the other services - lacks resources, personnel, history, overall facts and statistics to measure effectiveness, etc. There would have to be a creation of a "warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today."
3. Too similar to other services already provided
4. Resources could be spent somewhere else. We don't have a dying need or current urge for a Space Force so why pull the trigger and make an impulsive decision.
5. Other services won't specialize in space anymore - creating the Space Force would only have a small number of people who focus on space instead of an array of individuals from various military services.

https://www.cato.org/policy-report/march/april-2021/was-space-force-good-idea
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/08/27/ten-ways-a-space-force-will-make-america-weaker/?scrlybrkr=cddfd945&sh=73d445f034b0

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke.

It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore. Despite widespread opposition to creating a sixth branch of the military, the president on reflection decided it was a "great idea" and directed defense officials to begin preparations for the new service. On August 9 the Pentagon released a preliminary report laying out plans for establishing a space development agency, a space operating force, and a unified space command. The next budget request sent to Congress will seek legal authority to separate the Space Force from other military organizations.

Congress should reject that proposal. It is a poorly conceived, wasteful undertaking that will weaken the joint force. America's military needs in space would be far better served by retaining the existing organization of the joint force and making modest adjustments to assure space challenges are met in a timely fashion.

Most experts already know this. The president, who isn't an expert, does not. So for the benefit of those who have not been paying close attention and might be captivated by rhetoric untethered to reality, here are ten reasons why creating a Space Force would be a really bad idea.

1. It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.

2. It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Organizations have boundaries that get in the way of cooperating with other organizations -- particularly when they are competing for missions and resources. One reason the 9-11 attacks succeeded was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not share information because they were protecting their bureaucratic turf. A great deal of effort has been invested in tearing down those walls. But standing up a Space Force would create new barriers to cooperation.

3. It will lack the resources to be a co-equal service. President Trump says he wants the Space Force to be "separate but equal" with the Air Force. But the entire space workforce in the defense department and intelligence community -- 27,500 people according to Sandra Erwin of Space News -- represents less than 1% of the personnel employed by the Pentagon. The budget for all national security space activities totals less than two days' worth of federal spending per year. So a Space Force will not be "separate but equal" with other services.

4. It will be too dependent on industry. When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. However, private industry is not driven by the same priorities as public agencies, and thus reliance on its advice would tend to distort the judgment and objectivity of a Space Force.

5. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits. The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently told an audience that anyone who thinks creating a Space Force will be revenue-neutral is "naive." A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today. Deputy defense secretary Pat Shanahan says this will cost billions of dollars, and much of the money will likely come from more important activities.

6. It will replicate capabilities already resident elsewhere. A Space Force wouldn't just receive functions transferred from other military services. It would share responsibility for missions like joint networking and cybersecurity that would continue to exist in those other services. For instance, the Air Force isn't going to give up its cyber capabilities just because a new service is created. So the Space Force will have to stand up mirror organizations and compete for scarce technical talent, creating wasteful redundancy.

7. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand that every time Washington creates a major new organization, it gives birth to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. That is what will happen with the Space Force. It won't just replicate what already exists in other places, it will find new functions to perform and new positions that need to be filled -- often by highly paid personnel who could be better deployed elsewhere.

8. It will reduce incentives for other services to support space. Once a Space Force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain. Having lost their organic space communities, they will shift focus to areas still considered within their core competencies. The perverse effect will be to reduce expertise in space across the joint force by concentrating it in one place that is isolated from other military organizations.

9. It will be defenseless without the help of other services. The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services. So calling space a warfighting domain is a stretch.

10. It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success. In fact, other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US. model. If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.

You might say that the U.S. Air Force has helped bring on this danger by exaggerating the notion that space is becoming a warfighting domain. All that has really happened is that Russia and China have figured out how vital orbital assets are to our terrestrial warfighting capabilities. But that's an argument for keeping space expertise spread across the joint force, not creating a new federal bureaucracy that drains missions and money away from other military services. Creating a Space Force today is premature at best, and will likely make America weaker.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke. It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore.

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1. 2018- President Trump directs the Department of Defense to prepare for the establishment of a sixth military service.

2. 2019- Space Command re-established as a combatant command; President Trump signs the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, creating the Space Force.

3. In the 1970s and 1980s the number and sophistication of satellites expanded rapidly. The U.S. military achieved new operational capabilities in space, delivering intelligence, communications, and navigational systems to soldiers. As demonstrated in the Gulf War, the U.S. military could use space to fight more effectively in conventional conflicts, essentially making the battlefield transparent.9 In short order, nearly the entirety of modern U.S.

4. The Space Force’s capstone document, Space power, defines space as the domain of orbital flight, including vehicles that leave and then reenter the atmosphere without making a single orbit, such as ballistic missiles. While some definitions of space rely on a judgment of where the Earth’s atmosphere ends (many multilateral agreements use the Kármán line, which is 100 km above sea level), the Space Force doctrine resists using any specific physical demarcation.

5. Part of the point of the Space Force is to create pathways for personnel to develop expertise in space issues, making it particularly appropriate for facilitating outreach to the civilian space sector.

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It would cost a lot of money. -There would be a lot of different things that would have to happen that would cost a lot more money. We would have to get different things as well as get new resources.
Time- Between everything that would have to be done to make. this happen, it would take too much time.
Unnecessary- The space is not really needed at the moment. On top of not needing it, the US has other things that should be taking priority.  It will also not fix any of the current problems we are experiencing.
It will disrupt vital military relationships.-The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links.  Smart bombs are not able to hit their targets without help from the GPA craft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate.
Risks- Developing a Space Force, would increase risks in many different ways. Including attacks as well as different risks that could happen up in Space.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke.

It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore. Despite widespread opposition to creating a sixth branch of the military, the president on reflection decided it was a "great idea" and directed defense officials to begin preparations for the new service. On August 9 the Pentagon released a preliminary report laying out plans for establishing a space development agency, a space operating force, and a unified space command. The next budget request sent to Congress will seek legal authority to separate the Space Force from other military organizations.

Congress should reject that proposal. It is a poorly conceived, wasteful undertaking that will weaken the joint force. America's military needs in space would be far better served by retaining the existing organization of the joint force and making modest adjustments to assure space challenges are met in a timely fashion.

Most experts already know this. The president, who isn't an expert, does not. So for the benefit of those who have not been paying close attention and might be captivated by rhetoric untethered to reality, here are ten reasons why creating a Space Force would be a really bad idea.

1. It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.

2. It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Organizations have boundaries that get in the way of cooperating with other organizations -- particularly when they are competing for missions and resources. One reason the 9-11 attacks succeeded was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not share information because they were protecting their bureaucratic turf. A great deal of effort has been invested in tearing down those walls. But standing up a Space Force would create new barriers to cooperation.

3. It will lack the resources to be a co-equal service. President Trump says he wants the Space Force to be "separate but equal" with the Air Force. But the entire space workforce in the defense department and intelligence community -- 27,500 people according to Sandra Erwin of Space News -- represents less than 1% of the personnel employed by the Pentagon. The budget for all national security space activities totals less than two days' worth of federal spending per year. So a Space Force will not be "separate but equal" with other services.

4. It will be too dependent on industry. When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. However, private industry is not driven by the same priorities as public agencies, and thus reliance on its advice would tend to distort the judgment and objectivity of a Space Force.

5. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits. The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently told an audience that anyone who thinks creating a Space Force will be revenue-neutral is "naive." A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today. Deputy defense secretary Pat Shanahan says this will cost billions of dollars, and much of the money will likely come from more important activities.

6. It will replicate capabilities already resident elsewhere. A Space Force wouldn't just receive functions transferred from other military services. It would share responsibility for missions like joint networking and cybersecurity that would continue to exist in those other services. For instance, the Air Force isn't going to give up its cyber capabilities just because a new service is created. So the Space Force will have to stand up mirror organizations and compete for scarce technical talent, creating wasteful redundancy.

7. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand that every time Washington creates a major new organization, it gives birth to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. That is what will happen with the Space Force. It won't just replicate what already exists in other places, it will find new functions to perform and new positions that need to be filled -- often by highly paid personnel who could be better deployed elsewhere.

8. It will reduce incentives for other services to support space. Once a Space Force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain. Having lost their organic space communities, they will shift focus to areas still considered within their core competencies. The perverse effect will be to reduce expertise in space across the joint force by concentrating it in one place that is isolated from other military organizations.

9. It will be defenseless without the help of other services. The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services. So calling space a warfighting domain is a stretch.

10. It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success. In fact, other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US. model. If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.

You might say that the U.S. Air Force has helped bring on this danger by exaggerating the notion that space is becoming a warfighting domain. All that has really happened is that Russia and China have figured out how vital orbital assets are to our terrestrial warfighting capabilities. But that's an argument for keeping space expertise spread across the joint force, not creating a new federal bureaucracy that drains missions and money away from other military services. Creating a Space Force today is premature at best, and will likely make America weaker.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke. It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore.

# data[].attributes.body
Cost - The minimum cost for developing a Space Force would roughly be $11 billion over a 5-year period.

Unneeded - As cool as it sounds, a Space Force is not needed.  The US has so many things to deal with and fix first, that this, at least for now, is an unnecessary investment.

Rushed - The US is unprepared for a high-tech advancement like this. There needs to be a lot more testing to secure the safety of the Space Force; not only for its members but also for America's citizens.

Keeping Up - Technical advancements are made so fast.  How would the US keep up with those advancements?  Not only would it be very difficult to, but the cost of it would be outrageous.

Oversight - There will be and have many mistakes, but is the US prepared for those mistakes?

Risks - Developing a Space Force would increase the risk of missile attacks. Adversaries may push more aggressively and are mistaken that the Space Force could prevent such attacks, causing a risk of blowing up territory.

Sources:
Does America Need a Space Force? - Defense One
Shielded-from-Oversight-full-report.pdf (ucsusa.org)

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1. Cost/Spending-
The added expenses of education, training, testing would be substantial. The cost of launching the service alone would be $2 million over a five-year period.

2. The country's air force will be weakened.-
It has been a success for the US Air Force to combine airpower with space capabilities. As the United States has done, other countries are following suit. If the military aircraft community in the United States continues to disintegrate, it runs the danger of losing its current air and space dominance. The loss of war-winning skills and capabilities will cripple its air force.

3. It will be too dependent on the industry-
It is common for smaller organizations to look for help from outsiders when their licenses are restricted and they lack the resources of larger rivals. Private sector knowledge, policy guidance, and program supervision would be critical to an autonomous Space Force. If the Space Force depended on private industry's advice, its judgment and neutrality would be warped.

4. There are no current concerns addressed by this proposal-
Delays in technical advancements and a paucity of combat aircraft capable of participating in space warfare limit the Air Force's ability to address space-related threats. No action is taken by the USSF to remedy any of these problems.

5. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits-
Every new military branch must have its own warfighting philosophy and military staffing as well as different uniforms and other types of support. Pat Shanahan, Deputy Defense Secretary, points out that this will cost billions of dollars and divert funds from other priorities.

https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2020/11/05/boots-on-the-moon-weighing-the-pros-and-cons-of-the-space-force/Editor in Chief.    https://connectusfund.org/18-biggest-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-space-  https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/08/27/ten-ways-a-space-force-will-make-america-weaker/amp/

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke.

It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore. Despite widespread opposition to creating a sixth branch of the military, the president on reflection decided it was a "great idea" and directed defense officials to begin preparations for the new service. On August 9 the Pentagon released a preliminary report laying out plans for establishing a space development agency, a space operating force, and a unified space command. The next budget request sent to Congress will seek legal authority to separate the Space Force from other military organizations.

Congress should reject that proposal. It is a poorly conceived, wasteful undertaking that will weaken the joint force. America's military needs in space would be far better served by retaining the existing organization of the joint force and making modest adjustments to assure space challenges are met in a timely fashion.

Most experts already know this. The president, who isn't an expert, does not. So for the benefit of those who have not been paying close attention and might be captivated by rhetoric untethered to reality, here are ten reasons why creating a Space Force would be a really bad idea.

1. It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.

2. It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Organizations have boundaries that get in the way of cooperating with other organizations -- particularly when they are competing for missions and resources. One reason the 9-11 attacks succeeded was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not share information because they were protecting their bureaucratic turf. A great deal of effort has been invested in tearing down those walls. But standing up a Space Force would create new barriers to cooperation.

3. It will lack the resources to be a co-equal service. President Trump says he wants the Space Force to be "separate but equal" with the Air Force. But the entire space workforce in the defense department and intelligence community -- 27,500 people according to Sandra Erwin of Space News -- represents less than 1% of the personnel employed by the Pentagon. The budget for all national security space activities totals less than two days' worth of federal spending per year. So a Space Force will not be "separate but equal" with other services.

4. It will be too dependent on industry. When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. However, private industry is not driven by the same priorities as public agencies, and thus reliance on its advice would tend to distort the judgment and objectivity of a Space Force.

5. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits. The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently told an audience that anyone who thinks creating a Space Force will be revenue-neutral is "naive." A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today. Deputy defense secretary Pat Shanahan says this will cost billions of dollars, and much of the money will likely come from more important activities.

6. It will replicate capabilities already resident elsewhere. A Space Force wouldn't just receive functions transferred from other military services. It would share responsibility for missions like joint networking and cybersecurity that would continue to exist in those other services. For instance, the Air Force isn't going to give up its cyber capabilities just because a new service is created. So the Space Force will have to stand up mirror organizations and compete for scarce technical talent, creating wasteful redundancy.

7. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand that every time Washington creates a major new organization, it gives birth to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. That is what will happen with the Space Force. It won't just replicate what already exists in other places, it will find new functions to perform and new positions that need to be filled -- often by highly paid personnel who could be better deployed elsewhere.

8. It will reduce incentives for other services to support space. Once a Space Force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain. Having lost their organic space communities, they will shift focus to areas still considered within their core competencies. The perverse effect will be to reduce expertise in space across the joint force by concentrating it in one place that is isolated from other military organizations.

9. It will be defenseless without the help of other services. The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services. So calling space a warfighting domain is a stretch.

10. It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success. In fact, other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US. model. If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.

You might say that the U.S. Air Force has helped bring on this danger by exaggerating the notion that space is becoming a warfighting domain. All that has really happened is that Russia and China have figured out how vital orbital assets are to our terrestrial warfighting capabilities. But that's an argument for keeping space expertise spread across the joint force, not creating a new federal bureaucracy that drains missions and money away from other military services. Creating a Space Force today is premature at best, and will likely make America weaker.

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Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke. It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore.

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By creating this space force, we are implicating that we are preparing to safe guard and secure the space, which means this is opening a whole way that countries could attack another. If we are preparing ways to protect ourselves like through a space force it's just going to lead other countries to do the same because we started it, thus creating a whole new war domain and completely changing war as we know it. If nobody would have started looking into space and keep expanding war tactics into space we wouldn't have to safe guard it.

https://thediplomat.com/2018/06/the-us-space-force-and-its-implications/

We will now have to divide funds between 4 different branches of defense. This reduces the funding that goes to the army, navy, and the air force. This means it will be a completely separate branch of defense by it's own chain of command which could lead to more chaos.

https://thediplomat.com/2018/06/the-us-space-force-and-its-implications/

It will further worsen the already detrimental pollution levels. The amount of fossil fuels used and expended into our atmosphere when we launch rockets into space created a significant amount of pollution, when we are already on the downfall and seeing consequences to the pollution made thus far. And the bottom line, sending rockets to space it mostly explorational so we are polluting for something not necessary. roughly 4 millions lbs of carbon pollution is expended after every action made to go to space.

https://connectusfund.org/18-biggest-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-space-exploration

There is always the risk of running into other species in space. We cannot rule out nor assume that we will find other species out there but say we do, water is said to be the scarcest commodities in the universe, we are a planet made of 70% water if we run into other species are they going to want to take advantage of our resources? We would have no idea what we would be getting into. We would all like to think space travel can be peaceful but we can't guarantee it. The farther we go, the closer we may get to interstellar war that we only just started exploring.

https://connectusfund.org/18-biggest-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-space-exploration

The exploration that we do now is already quite expensive. We spend about 200 billion per decade currently. Our planet as a whole spends 60 billion per year. Keeping in mind that world hunger could be solved with a mere half of that amount. Space travel is not necessary to survival so should it really be our top priority. There are many risks to humanity in our own planet should we really be bringing more risks into it?

https://connectusfund.org/18-biggest-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-space-exploration

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May Send Adversarial Message - There have been many measures put into place in order to maintain good relations with other countries. Establishing a space force could send the message that war/fighting techniques are being pushed into space, and may cause a chain of events similar to that of what happened in the Cold War (For example, instead of an “arms race,” this could cause a “satellite race”).

Reduces Efficiency of the Air Force/Military - The military, specifically the air force, has been managing space resources effectively for years. Establishing a new branch could complicate a chain of communication that is already effective.

Prevents Making Advances in the Understanding of Space - Establishing a space force could undermine the idea of global collaboration in regards to exploring the universe. This would put a huge dent into progressing our understanding of the rest of space.

Expenses - Establishing a space force would be very expensive. This would impact the funding of other branches of the military or the economy.

Lack of Need - The Air Force already has a good grasp over controlling space-based technology and data, and does not feel the need to establish another branch of the military. Doing so in spite of this would make a space force feel redundant.

https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2020/11/05/boots-on-the-moon-weighing-the-pros-and-cons-of-the-space-force/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/08/27/ten-ways-a-space-force-will-make-america-weaker/amp/

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The Space Force has been the subject of much ridicule in the media. The release of Netflix's Space Force earlier this year and several comedians picking the force as a comedy bit have added to this mainstream conversation and have painted a rather odd picture of what the Space Force is designed to achieve. But, the reality is that most of us have only heard about the Space Force through these channels.

The Space Force, as established in December of 2019, is designed to serve as the 6th branch of the United States military. But so far, it has been an enigma with an unclear and ill-defined purpose.

Despite the ridicule, the Space Force and its implications should be carefully considered based upon military and scientific need. However, there are drawbacks to introducing the force and they almost certainly outweigh the pros.

What exactly is the purpose of this force?
First and foremost, it is important to understand what exactly the Space Force is designed to accomplish. If you have watched Space Force on Netflix or heard about it through other entertainment channels, it is easy to paint a frivolous picture of what the Space Force is and what it is trying to achieve. Perhaps the most common misconception is that the Space Force is trying to put soldiers on the moon or have an active personnel in Space. Although the idea evokes or , it is blatantly . Instead, the Space Force aims to achieve a few tactical tasks.

The space force would consolidate space-related military into a singular branch. Currently, space-related military is split amongst the branches of the military, much of it held in the Air Force. A Space Force would centralize control of space-related military. However, more broadly, the Space Force's responsibilities, according to its , "will include developing military space professionals, acquiring military space systems, maturing the military doctrine for space power, and organizing space forces to present to our Combatant Commands." Essentially, the Space Force intends to create a centralized hub for all space related military and develop a space-focused strategy. But even with a stated purpose, we must dig deeper to understand the historical motivation for the force.
What is the precedent for the Space Force?
Aside from the scientific feats that accompany it, space flight has long been a display of hegemony and a source of national pride for countries and individuals alike. So, it begs the question: what happens when we politicize our relationship to space? We first saw this politicization begin in the 50s, 60s and 70s when the US and USSR deliberately used the Space Race as a political strategy to reestablish their dominance in the post-war period. In an effort to boost morale and rebound from the consequences of the war, the Space Race effectively politicized science on a global scale. It turned the quest for scientific advancement into a component of the Cold War.

While the Cold War led to significant technological developments, it was motivated by the creation of long-range nuclear missiles as both the United States and Russia hoarded missiles for the purpose of maintaining mutually-assured destruction, the effects of which we still see today. At the same time, the money, time, and resources invested in space exploration led to some of the greatest scientific advancements of the century, including remote satellite technologies. The Space Force re-energizes the conversation regarding the balance between beneficial and potentially perilous scientific invention. For the first time in decades, the government is taking concrete steps to project openly their intent to weaponize space.

But we must not conflate the deliberate creation of the Space Force and the beginning of space-assisted warfare, as such warfare has long been an integral part of military conflicts. The Strategic Defense Initiative, conceived in the early 80s, attempted unsuccessfully to use space as a countermeasure to long-range nuclear weapons. Since the 50s, space technology and the military have been deeply intertwined. The Gulf War, in large part, heavily on satellite technologies. The Global Positioning System (GPS), which has led to over a dollars in economic benefits, is owned and controlled by the Air Force, a branch of the military which was created a mere 70 years ago for a technologically-advancing style of warfare.
Does the Space Force deserve the ridicule it has received?
It's clear that discussions around the Space Force shouldn't be taken lightly. As technology advances, it is not unlikely that space will become a battlefield in spite of governing Space.

Although the US currently spends on space than any other country, it is no secret that global adversaries are making political moves in space. China's increase in space spending by almost over the last 15 years and Russia's recent over Venus are two examples. While the latter seems straight out of some dystopian future, it sends a deliberate message about not only Russia's technological capabilities, but its ambitions. In fact, every action that a country takes in space sends a calculated and purposeful message. Each rocket launch, satellite destruction, and yes, planet-claiming, showcases technology and military capabilities. Even disregarding any potential US offensive strategy, the military needs a concrete way to respond to such implicit threats. The Space Force could become the hub for this response, able to strategize about space-military needs.
Is the Space Force the best choice for addressing these needs?
With all military strategy, there runs the obvious risk of escalation, and instead of sending a purely defensive or philosophical message, a Space Force may send an adversarial one. The major risk is that we push war into space and trigger a chain-reaction or wartime expansion in space similar to that of a Cold War. It could be catastrophic for the world to enter a scenario where countries are stockpiling satellites or rockets for the purpose of a space war. In fact, the world should avoid military escalation at all costs and the US should make it its mission to push for space to be solely an arena of global collaboration and peaceful exploration. The idea of a Space Force undermines this.

Perhaps a less dire drawback would be excessive military bureaucracy and spending. Currently, a large part of the space military is controlled by the Air Force and its leadership does not feel the to split the Space Force into a different branch. As long as the task of space operations remains manageable to the Air Force, there is no reason to split off and add to an already long bureaucratic process; splitting into a separate branch may complicate and meddle with an already sound system. Secretary Debbie Lee James, the secretary of the Air Force under President Obama that the Air Force already invests a significant amount of money and resources into space and several military experts champion the idea of integration within the military instead of establishing several separate branches.

In light of these trade-offs, it becomes clear that the US needs to have a long and productive conversation about the future of the military. Instead of wasting dollars on an already over-funded military, the US needs to rethink its strategy and prepare itself for a modern world. There are definitive drawbacks to the Space Force, and it should not be unthinkingly or unequivocally championed. However, we must take this idea seriously while considering the technologically-advancing reality that we live in today.

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Boots on the Moon: Weighing the Pros and Cons of the Space Force

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The Space Force has been the subject of much ridicule in the media. The release of Netflix's Space Force earlier this year and several comedians picking the force as a comedy bit have added to this mainstream conversation and have painted a rather odd picture of what the Space Force is designed to achieve.

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1. It might mess with relationships with other countries considering that countries are fighting for land as we speak adding a whole new thing to fight over seems really bad
2. The time it would take to build wouldn't make sense
3. the side effects of having people up in space for years could really come into affect depending on how this is going to be organized
4.  The cost of constantly sending people to and from space just to work on the space for up there seems insane not really worth it.
5. We could get another cold war regarding territory in space or just other planets in general countries might claim them even if they haven't reached it yet and that could cause problems.
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/space-force-ahead-its-time-or-dreadfully-premature#theories-space-power
https://www.brookings.edu/events/space-force-the-pros-and-cons-of-creating-a-new-military-branch/

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1) It will disrupt vital military relationships.
The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.
2) It will be too dependent on industry.
When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. However, private industry is not driven by the same priorities as public agencies, and thus reliance on its advice would tend to distort the judgment and objectivity of a Space Force.
3) It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy.
This space force will give way to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. It won’t just replicate what already exists, it will find new functions to perform and new positions that need to be filled often by highly paid personnel who could be better deployed elsewhere.
4) It will be defenseless without the help of other services.
The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services.
5) It will reduce incentives for other services to support space.
Once a Space Force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain. Having lost their organic space communities, they will shift focus to areas still considered within their core competencies. The perverse effect will be to reduce expertise in space across the joint force by concentrating it in one place that is isolated from other military organizations.

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke.

It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore. Despite widespread opposition to creating a sixth branch of the military, the president on reflection decided it was a "great idea" and directed defense officials to begin preparations for the new service. On August 9 the Pentagon released a preliminary report laying out plans for establishing a space development agency, a space operating force, and a unified space command. The next budget request sent to Congress will seek legal authority to separate the Space Force from other military organizations.

Congress should reject that proposal. It is a poorly conceived, wasteful undertaking that will weaken the joint force. America's military needs in space would be far better served by retaining the existing organization of the joint force and making modest adjustments to assure space challenges are met in a timely fashion.

Most experts already know this. The president, who isn't an expert, does not. So for the benefit of those who have not been paying close attention and might be captivated by rhetoric untethered to reality, here are ten reasons why creating a Space Force would be a really bad idea.

1. It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.

2. It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Organizations have boundaries that get in the way of cooperating with other organizations -- particularly when they are competing for missions and resources. One reason the 9-11 attacks succeeded was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not share information because they were protecting their bureaucratic turf. A great deal of effort has been invested in tearing down those walls. But standing up a Space Force would create new barriers to cooperation.

3. It will lack the resources to be a co-equal service. President Trump says he wants the Space Force to be "separate but equal" with the Air Force. But the entire space workforce in the defense department and intelligence community -- 27,500 people according to Sandra Erwin of Space News -- represents less than 1% of the personnel employed by the Pentagon. The budget for all national security space activities totals less than two days' worth of federal spending per year. So a Space Force will not be "separate but equal" with other services.

4. It will be too dependent on industry. When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. However, private industry is not driven by the same priorities as public agencies, and thus reliance on its advice would tend to distort the judgment and objectivity of a Space Force.

5. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits. The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently told an audience that anyone who thinks creating a Space Force will be revenue-neutral is "naive." A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today. Deputy defense secretary Pat Shanahan says this will cost billions of dollars, and much of the money will likely come from more important activities.

6. It will replicate capabilities already resident elsewhere. A Space Force wouldn't just receive functions transferred from other military services. It would share responsibility for missions like joint networking and cybersecurity that would continue to exist in those other services. For instance, the Air Force isn't going to give up its cyber capabilities just because a new service is created. So the Space Force will have to stand up mirror organizations and compete for scarce technical talent, creating wasteful redundancy.

7. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand that every time Washington creates a major new organization, it gives birth to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. That is what will happen with the Space Force. It won't just replicate what already exists in other places, it will find new functions to perform and new positions that need to be filled -- often by highly paid personnel who could be better deployed elsewhere.

8. It will reduce incentives for other services to support space. Once a Space Force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain. Having lost their organic space communities, they will shift focus to areas still considered within their core competencies. The perverse effect will be to reduce expertise in space across the joint force by concentrating it in one place that is isolated from other military organizations.

9. It will be defenseless without the help of other services. The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services. So calling space a warfighting domain is a stretch.

10. It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success. In fact, other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US. model. If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.

You might say that the U.S. Air Force has helped bring on this danger by exaggerating the notion that space is becoming a warfighting domain. All that has really happened is that Russia and China have figured out how vital orbital assets are to our terrestrial warfighting capabilities. But that's an argument for keeping space expertise spread across the joint force, not creating a new federal bureaucracy that drains missions and money away from other military services. Creating a Space Force today is premature at best, and will likely make America weaker.

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Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke. It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore.

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1. Cost- The projected budget of the Space Force in the year 2021 is some $15 billion. Creating the service alone would cost $2 million over 5 years.

2. It is the same as the Air Force- Given that the bulk of Space Force personnel have and will come from the Air Force, it seems likely that elements of Air Force organizational culture will accompany them. Since the Space Force emerged almost fully formed from Air Force Space Command, it is safe to assume that the service’s culture will strongly resemble that of Space Command.

3. Poor Structure- The nature of the Space Force complicates the problem, since for now it seems primarily to support other parts of the U.S. military. It has taken over a set of missions associated with its direct progenitor, Air Force Space Command, and largely consists of the same equipment, personnel, and doctrine.

4. No History- the Space Force begins with a handful of personnel, no agreed‐​upon strategic theory, and little history or experience to draw upon.

5. Poor Space Power- Space power is defined as the ability to accomplish strategic and military objectives through control and exploitation of the space domain. Spacepower cannot unilaterally win wars.

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In December 2019, Congress established the U.S. Space Force as an independent uniformed military service within the Department of the Air Force. Although many defense analysts had long argued for a reorganization of the Department of Defense's space capabilities, few had settled on this particular solution. This policy analysis evaluates the reasoning behind the Space Force's establishment, concluding that the service's creation is premature.

The Space Force is the first new independent U.S. service since the creation of the Air Force in 1947. At its inception, the Air Force had hundreds of thousands of personnel, several years of battle experience, a coherent body of doctrine, and a robust organizational culture. Even so, the creation of the Air Force sparked bitter interservice conflict for the first decade of its existence.

However, the Space Force lacks a strong institutional basis, an identifiable organizational culture, and an established foundation of strategic theory. In the short term, it runs the risk of disrupting existing procedures and relationships that enable the U.S. military to function. In the long term, it runs the risk of distorting the procurement and force structure of U.S. space capabilities.

Introduction

Does the United States need a military presence in space? Most informed opinions suggest that the answer is yes. Does the United States need a new independent service for managing that military presence? The answer is less obvious. In December 2019, Congress created the U.S. Space Force, which is meant to bolster U.S. military capabilities in a domain that the existing services have not prioritized. The wisdom of creating a new service is uncertain in the best of times, given the need of forces to coordinate across organizational borders. In the case of the Space Force, an even greater degree of uncertainty looms because the precise organizational structure of the service is unsettled. Indeed, most of the arguments against the creation of the Space Force have focused on either the lack of strategic necessity for creating a new service or the price tag associated with standing up a new organization.

To understand the Space Force's inception, this study investigates five interrelated questions. First, how has outer space changed to become a more important domain for military activities? Second, what is the relationship between the Space Force and its antecedents within the U.S. military? Third, how can traditional metrics of military effectiveness apply to the Space Force? Fourth, how will the Space Force affect the international strategic environment? And finally, how will the Space Force interact with civilian government agencies and the civilian space sector?

This analysis initially establishes how the military space environment has changed since the last major U.S. military reorganization in 1947. It then examines how the existing institutions of the U.S. military have managed space up to this point, including a discussion of the theorization of military space power. The details of the establishment of the Space Force come next, followed by an assessment of the new problems its establishment introduces, including questions about military effectiveness and military culture. Finally, the analysis examines the potential implications of the Space Force for diplomatic, economic, and civilian management of space. This investigation determines that the Space Force's establishment is hobbled by unclear goals and uncertain effects, contending that the Space Force lacks a clearly defined organizational culture and a clear strategic purpose, both core elements of organizational success, and that the decision to create the service is premature at best and irresponsible at worst.

What Is Space, and Why Does It Need a Military Force?

The Space Force's capstone document, Spacepower, defines space as the domain of orbital flight, including vehicles that leave and then reenter the atmosphere without making a single orbit, such as ballistic missiles. While some definitions of space rely on a judgment of where the Earth's atmosphere ends (many multilateral agreements use the Kármán line, which is 100 km above sea level), the Space Force doctrine resists using any specific physical demarcation.

Regarding the militarization of space, Spacepower defines it as the use of space for military purposes, whether those purposes include transit of objects (missiles) or the use of satellites for surveillance or communications. The militarization of space began in the final years of World War II, when Germany began to strike England with V‑2 ballistic missiles. After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union used technology and scientists from Germany to establish and develop their own space programs, eventually resulting in a "space race" to achieve various milestones of national prestige.

The complexity and importance of military operations in space have changed considerably since the 1950s, often in unpredictable ways. While the military value of ballistic missiles was immediately apparent, the implications of space‐​based satellites for military reconnaissance and communication dawned slowly. The first spy satellites entered service in 1960. Though they took lower‐​quality photographs compared to existing reconnaissance aircraft, they also could not be intercepted. Prior to the establishment of sufficiently high‐​bandwidth communications, satellites would drop physical film for ships and aircraft to recover. The United States launched the first dedicated military communications satellite in 1966, significantly easing problems of military signal transfer.

In the 1970s and 1980s the number and sophistication of satellites expanded rapidly. The U.S. military achieved new operational capabilities in space, delivering intelligence, communications, and navigational systems to soldiers. As demonstrated in the Gulf War, the U.S. military could use space to fight more effectively in conventional conflicts, essentially making the battlefield transparent. In short order, nearly the entirety of modern U.S. military operations, by all services and at all levels of intensity, required the use of space. Satellites identify targets, track their movement, transfer data to shooters, and monitor the results of the attack. Satellites enable commanders to have a full understanding of the battlefield, allowing them to communicate with their forces and offering information about the size and movements of enemy forces.

Civilian use of space also increased alongside changes in the military use of space. Communications satellites now dominate the international telecommunications industry, providing connectivity to firms and individuals around the world. Businesses, universities, and governments have built this ready connectivity into the basic structure of their daily operations. This has enabled what Richard Baldwin refers to as the second "Great Acceleration" of globalization. If space went away, so to speak, many people would struggle to find their way to the local grocery store due to a lack of the Global Positioning System. The way knowledge moves between nations, firms, and individuals depends on easy access to space. Preventing such access could cause massive social and economic disruption.

But the military and civilian advantages created by greater use of space have also created new vulnerabilities. The U.S. military has become dependent on space to conduct its basic operations, just as the U.S. civilian economy's dependence on space has increased. Competitors have access to space and increasingly the technologies necessary to attack U.S. satellites. Consequently, competitors can threaten damage against both the U.S. military and civilian economy by attacking space infrastructure. Moreover, the United States can no longer assume that satellites' role in the nuclear enterprise will deter foes from attacking satellites tasked with conventional military missions.

In 2007, China destroyed one of its satellites in low‐​Earth orbit (LEO), demonstrating its ability to threaten core U.S. communications infrastructure. Unfortunately, the satellite's destruction produced an extensive debris field, some of which remains in orbit today. This field, full of fast‐​moving orbital objects, poses a long‐​term threat to the military and civilian use of LEO. As the demonstration made clear, a war in space could result in the long‐​term loss of some of the most valuable real estate in LEO, which would not only disrupt military operations but could also render civilian space infrastructure inoperable. The United States responded to China's test with its own antisatellite test, during which it launched a Standard Missile‑3 missile defense interceptor from an Aegis weapons system on a U.S. Navy warship. The U.S. test destroyed a satellite but produced a smaller debris field because it occurred at a lower altitude than the Chinese test, with most debris burning up as it reentered Earth's atmosphere. Russia and India have both conducted antisatellite tests subsequently, with the Indian test leaving a debris field similar to that of the 2008 American test.

Several major powers now have the demonstrated capacity to undertake antisatellite attacks that could destroy their opponents' civilian and military communications infrastructures. Most of these antisatellite weapons involve interceptors launched from ground, sea, and air platforms. Moreover, the use of space assets to damage or destroy satellites also appears technically feasible. The argument that space is more important now than ever before is strategically sound. The U.S. civilian economy depends on space for its connectivity, and thus its prosperity. The U.S. military depends on space for communications and reconnaissance. However, concluding that space represents a key strategic interest for the United States does not imply or necessitate any specific institutional framework for pursuing that interest.

An Institutional History of Space

Reviewing the history of U.S. military space institutions gives us both a sense of how these organizations have evolved into the Space Force and a survey of the institutional alternatives to the establishment of Space Force. See Figure 1 for a timeline of U.S. space institutions and major historical events discussed in this section.

After 1947, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force each began to experiment with ballistic missiles. Initial Air Force skepticism gave way to enthusiasm as it became obvious that ballistic missiles could both deploy satellites and deliver warheads to distant targets. The military implications of space came into clearer view with nuclear‐​armed ballistic missiles, offering a difficult‐​to‐​intercept weapon that could cause catastrophic damage to the enemy homeland. By the early 1950s, the Department of Defense estimated both satellite and ballistic missile projects to enter service before 1960. Sputnik's launch in October 1957 created a crisis, resulting in significant expansion and consolidation of U.S. military space programs, with the Air Force playing a lead role. Civilian research proceeded along a separate track with the 1958 establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which manages civilian aspects of space travel and exploration.

The growing importance of space led the Pentagon and the Reagan administration to seek a broader institutional structure for space, one that could coordinate among all the services. Established in 1985, U.S. Space Command was a combatant command designed to have joint control of Department of Defense space operations. Combatant commands, which increased in importance after the Goldwater‐​Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, manage a region or function that includes units from two or more military services. Examples of combatant commands include Central Command (with responsibility for the Middle East) and Transportation Command (with responsibility for worldwide Department of Defense logistics and transportation). President Reagan heralded the establishment of Space Command in the 1982 announcement of the National Space Policy. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or "Star Wars") eventually played a significant role in this policy. The initial vision of SDI included not only reconnaissance satellites but also space‐​based weapons systems to intercept and destroy Soviet missiles. This would require a more substantial bureaucratic infrastructure than either Air Force Space Command or NORAD possessed. Space Command took over the Aerospace Defense Command portfolio from NORAD and prepared to lay the groundwork for the space components of SDI.

The end of the Cold War, controversy over the strategic value of SDI, and a broad array of technical difficulties with the program relegated the main priorities of Space Command to a bureaucratic afterthought. Moreover, after 9/11 the prospect of strategic attack on the United States via space seemed remote, and in any case, other priorities loomed. The Department of Defense deactivated Space Command in 2002, relegating its defense responsibilities to Northern Command and its duties involving integration of the different service space capabilities to Strategic Command. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan de‐​emphasized space's role in armed conflict in favor of human‐​centric "hearts and minds" approaches to counterterrorism.

However, while the Global War on Terror did not involve direct competition in space, it did abet a growing realization that the management of space can affect how conflicts are fought. Both counterinsurgency and counterterror techniques required the integration of surveillance and communications technology at operational and tactical levels, and this required unfettered access to space. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq waned and competition with Russia and China waxed, support within Congress and the strategic community for new institutions for the military management of space grew.

In 2017, Reps. Mike Rogers (R‑AL) and Jim Cooper (D‑TN) proposed the establishment of a Space Corps within the U.S. Air Force tasked with managing the military aspects of space. In March 2018, President Trump expressed strong support for additional attention to space, portending his eventual support for an independent Space Force. In June, Trump directed the Department of Defense to prepare for the establishment of a sixth service, and shortly thereafter "Space Force" became a talking point in his political rally speeches. The Pentagon rapidly re‐​established U.S. Space Command as a combatant command in 2019, with its initial personnel drawn primarily from Strategic Command. In December 2019, President Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, establishing the U.S. Space Force, which immediately assumed the responsibilities of Air Force Space Command.

Theories of Space Power

These theoretical frameworks provide ideas not only about how to structure and employ forces on the battlefield but also about the institutionalization of military organizations, the relationships among those organizations within a defense establishment, and the prioritization of particular capabilities by national leadership. In short, theory is necessary for institution building and good strategic decisionmaking.

Yet thus far there has been limited theorization about the militarization of space, arguably in part because of the lack of a dedicated cadre of space thinkers. In contrast to the U.S. Air Force, which had existing examples of independent air forces and a core of personnel that shared the explicit goal of achieving service independence, even the idea of an independent space force is relatively new. Some theorists have attempted to borrow aspects of air power and sea power theory to apply to space. One notable example is the Center for a New American Security's 2010 report Contested Commons: The Future of American Power i n a M ultipolar World, which included space as one of the "commons" where nations compete for influence. Treating space as a commons made it easier to import some concepts from air power and sea power theory, although analysts have disagreed over which body of theory is more applicable.

One analyst, borrowing a metaphor from sea power theory that distinguishes between naval operations in littoral waters and the open sea, has characterized "brown water" and "blue water" schools of thought on space theory, with "brown water" theories of space emphasizing the joint dimension of space operations-how space enables the functioning of existing military capabilities on land, at sea, and in the air-and "blue water" theories exploring the potential for new dynamics of space dominance, including extensive exploration and use of space for civilian, economic, and military purposes. An example of the "blue water" theories of space can be found in The Future of Space 2060 and Implications for U.S. Strategy, a September 2019 workshop report sponsored by Air Force Space Command that envisions a host of ways in which the United States could dominate different parts of space by the mid‐​21st century.

On August 10, 2020, the Space Force released its first doctrinal document, which defined "space power" for the first time, delineated the "space domain," and explained how the Space Force's assets contribute to national power and national security. According to the document, "military spacepower is the ability to accomplish strategic and military objectives through the control and exploitation of the space domain." The document makes clear that "spacepower cannot unilaterally win wars" and that the military space power should be used to preserve freedom of action, support the joint force, and provide civilian leadership with "independent options for achieving strategic effects." This last point is reminiscent of interwar thinking on air power and Air Force independence, but the document offers little detail. Nor does it establish a pathway for thinking about the unique ways that space power contributes to national power, nor of how to assess the relative contribution of space power against air power, land power, or sea power.

Over time, the Space Force may develop the kinds of institutions (such as the Naval War College or the Air Corps Tactical School) that bring people together to develop and test theories of space power and space warfare. Indeed, some work on space warfare is now emerging to clarify the parameters of discussion. At the moment, however, while some theoretical frameworks for exploring the military relevance of space exist, the Space Force does not seem representative of any clear theoretical position. This makes it difficult to evaluate the position of the Space Force within the constellation of American defense institutions but also complicates how the service compiles priorities, procures equipment, and trains personnel.

The U.S. Space Force: A Solution to Space?

The U.S. Space Force is an independent uniformed service under the authority of the Department of the Air Force. It was established on December 20, 2019, and was expected to be fully operational by 2021. Like the other services, the Space Force is headed by a four‐​star general (the chief of Space Operations) who is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and thus a contributor to the National Military Strategy. The official mission of the Space Force is to "organize, train, and equip space forces to protect U.S. and allied interests in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force. Space Force responsibilities include developing military space professionals, acquiring military space systems, maturing the military doctrine for space power, and organizing space forces to present to our Combatant Commands."

The Space Force is projected to grow to 16,000 military personnel, with 2,500 active‐​duty personnel transferred from Air Force Space Command by the beginning of fiscal year 2021. The official headquarters of the Space Force remains undecided. The service will initially include three primary field commands: one responsible for training, one for acquisition, and one for support of combatant commanders. The projected budget for the Space Force in fiscal year 2021 is some $15 billion, transferred from the Air Force Space Command allocation.

What does it mean to say that the Space Force is a "service?" A service is a largely autonomous military organization that designs its own doctrine, manages its own systems of recruitment and promotion, and (in the U.S. system) has its own place on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Services are distinct from subservice designators such as Army "branches" (artillery, armor, or infantry, for example) or Navy "communities" (surface, submarine, aviation).

The Space Force is notably different from the other services. It is much smaller than any other service; the next smallest is the U.S. Marine Corps, at some 220,000 active and reserve personnel. It does not yet have its own uniforms, rank structure, bases, or substantial equipment pool. Unlike the Air Force, Navy, or Army, the Space Force does not have distinct representation as a military department within the Department of Defense. The Space Force shares this last attribute with the Marine Corps, an independent service under the authority of the Department of the Navy, a handicap that has not prevented the Marine Corps from developing its own doctrine, civilian support network, and organizational identity.

The Organizational Culture of the U.S. Space Force

Given that the bulk of Space Force personnel have and will come from the Air Force, it seems likely that elements of Air Force organizational culture will accompany them. Since the Space Force emerged almost fully formed from Air Force Space Command, it is safe to assume that the service's culture will strongly resemble that of Space Command. The question then becomes how Space Command's personnel differed from those of the Air Force as a whole. The answer to this remains unclear, although interviews with Army space officers suggest that the Space Command is technologically focused, uninterested in operational warfighting, and overly committed to an engineering view of space problems rather than to a vision of strategic competition with foreign countries. Nevertheless, one recent survey indicated that a large majority (over 85 percent) of Army space officers would leave the Army for the Space Force if they could.

Still, the problem is less the specific cultural traits of the Space Force than the apparent absence of any strong organizational culture at all. We have no sense of how organizational culture will contribute to military effectiveness of the service. We have few clues from the antecedents of the Space Force regarding how the beliefs and assumptions of the organization will structure its day‐​to‐​day operation. Space Force organizational culture, a critical component of the success of the institution, will be a work in progress.

The Determinants of Military Effectiveness

Assessing the effectiveness of a service that barely exists is difficult for obvious reasons. The nature of the Space Force complicates the problem, since for now it seems primarily to support other parts of the U.S. military. It has taken over a set of missions associated with its direct progenitor, Air Force Space Command, and largely consists of the same equipment, personnel, and doctrine. Though some measures evaluate performance at the granular level, other improvements in effectiveness will only manifest in the performance of other organizations, not in the Space Force itself. For this reason, there is little use in exploring questions of tactical and operational effectiveness at this point, since the Space Force will neither manage forces nor develop techniques for outer space combat. Antisatellite weapons, for example, are still under Navy and Air Force control. In the future, changes in the performance of U.S. military forces that depend on space for communications and intelligence may offer some indication as to the effectiveness of the Space Force, although even this will depend on assessing a bewildering array of confounding factors.

The military effectiveness literature also indicates that metrics of effectiveness are very important to how an organization performs, regardless of the level of analysis. These metrics allow an organization to perform diagnostics on itself, assessing policies that work and those that do not. With respect to the Space Force, we do not yet have a set of metrics (such as loss‐​exchange ratios, air‐​to‐​air combat kill ratios, precision targeting statistics, etc.) to measure the effectiveness of any space military organization. The Space Force will need to develop metrics suitable for a support force; for example, how regularly do "customers" of the Space Force's products use that product in their daily operations? What rates of operational malfunction in spacecraft can be attributed to internal as opposed to external causes? Developing and using these metrics will be critical for how the Space Force performs in the long term.

Determining the Space Force's strategic effectiveness is different but no more reassuring. Strategic effectiveness depends on a well‐​reasoned and articulated theory of space competition, discussed in more detail in the Theories of Space Power section of this paper. Such a theory would allow the Space Force to formulate ways of achieving national goals through doctrine, procurement, and force structure. Although the capstone document points the Space Force in some potentially promising theoretical directions, we cannot evaluate the service's strategic effectiveness as of yet but may have the means to do so at some point.

There are reasons to worry about the prospective political effectiveness of the Space Force. While the Space Force undoubtedly will have a presence in the defense industrial base, its budget will be much smaller than that of any of the other services. It will lack a base of veterans and a history of success to draw upon. It can offer Congress and state governors less in terms of industry or footprint. Its budgetary decisions will be housed under the same department as the service it is most likely to conflict with over missions and resources (the Air Force). The politicized nature of its birth may leave it a figurative orphan if President Trump does not win a second term. In short, the ability of the Space Force to command the bureaucratic and fiscal resources needed to conduct its mission is in dire question.

As a point of comparison, when the Air Force won its independence from the Army in 1947, it had already completed the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which evaluated the effectiveness of the bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan at tactical, operational, and strategic levels. The very act of compiling the survey was evidence of political effectiveness, as it gave Air Force leaders and their allies the tools needed then to fight for independence and then to fight post‐​independence battles for resources and bureaucratic turf. The Space Force has nothing remotely comparable to the Strategic Bombing Survey, and it is difficult to imagine how a document measuring effectiveness in such a way could be compiled.

The Air Force Comparison, and the Broader Implications of the Space Force for the Department of Defense

The last new uniformed service that the United States created was the Air Force in 1947. Governments establish new services because they believe that certain kinds of capabilities do not receive the necessary institutional support from existing military organizations. The establishment of new services and separate commands (the U.S. Air Force or Special Operations Command, for example) provides protection for specific capabilities, as well as a greenhouse in which those capabilities can reach their full potential.

However, new institutions come with costs, both literal (in terms of bureaucratic overhead, redundancies, and procurement distortions) and figurative (interservice conflict and bureaucratic competition). The Air Force built upon the foundation of the Army Air Forces, the Army Air Corps, and the Army Air Service. Because of this, the creation of the Space Force necessarily evokes comparison with the independence of the earlier service. However, while there are certain surface similarities, the two cases are dramatically different in many key respects.

Like the Space Force, the founding of the Air Force came at a point when expectations of the future of war were rapidly changing, most notably the belief that nuclear weapons (delivered primarily by Air Force bombers) would dominate future conflicts. As with the Space Force, Air Force advocates argued that existing institutions (in both the Army and the Navy) were insufficient to facilitate the emergence of new capabilities and new modes of warfighting. As with space, the air represented a new domain of warfighting, theoretically requiring the creation of a new military organization. As previously noted, the inclusion of a Space Force officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff will give space a voice in the formulation of the National Military Strategy, which describes the strategic goals of the uniformed military.

Those are the similarities. The differences are dramatic. The Air Force emerged from a long process in which aviators argued for the liberation of air power from the control of ground commanders and freedom from subservience to the needs of ground forces. At its founding the Air Force was enormous, with 304,000 personnel and thousands of aircraft. It had large bodies of theory that it had developed in the interwar period and experience honed through multiple campaigns in the Second World War. It held strongly to a set of theories of strategic air power that gave guidance to procurement, force structure, and doctrine. It also had a strong sense of its importance and a willingness to fight the other services for its priorities. The U.S. Air Force could also draw upon the example of numerous other independent air forces, including most notably the Royal Air Force.

The introduction of the U.S. Air Force created substantial interservice conflict, which has persisted. The causes and consequences of tensions among the Air Force, Navy, and Army are too complicated to deal with here, but they have often involved the pursuit of autonomy and disputes over shared missions. By comparison, the Space Force may introduce even more substantial problems, as it currently exists primarily as a support organization for the other services. The Air Force could at least conceptualize operations that would produce independent, decisive military effects, shorn of the need to work with the other services. The Space Force, at this point, cannot.

Air Force independence was an earthquake in the U.S. military establishment, for better or worse. An independent Air Force catalyzed the creation of the Department of Defense and the establishment of a new system of managing national security. By contrast, the Space Force begins with a handful of personnel, no agreed‐​upon strategic theory, and little history or experience to draw upon. Moreover, separating the Space Force from the Air Force does not even win the former independence from the Department of the Air Force. For good or ill, the independence of the Space Force does not bear much comparison with the independence of the Air Force.

We have little sense thus far of the size or significance of the Space Force budget. As noted, the initial budget for the Space Force runs at $15 billion, which is by far the smallest of any independent service; the Marine Corps, the closest analogue to the Space Force, will have a budget of $46 billion in 2021. The Department of Defense projected new costs for establishing the Space Force at roughly $500 million per year for the first five years. The Congressional Budget Office, by contrast, estimated one‐​time costs at between $1 billion and $3 billion, with annual cost increases between $840 million and $1.3 billion. Another estimate, developed for Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson in 2018, projected a $13 billion five‐​year price tag for establishing and operating the Space Force. Because of the size of the force, personnel costs occupy a relatively small part of the budget; although, this could grow rapidly due to the need for maintaining technical expertise.

Political, Economic, and Diplomatic Implications of the Space Force

Space Force and Multilateral Space Governance

The increasing militarization of space has spurred discussion of the need for additional space governance. War in space could threaten the long‐​term health and usability of the "space commons" by distributing fragments of destroyed satellites across a wide range of orbits, including those commonly used by civilian spacecraft. This could result in severe short‐​term economic dislocation, even for noncombatants, and pose a long‐​term obstacle to the human exploitation of space. Two combatants could cause catastrophic damage to the infrastructure that enables modern social and economic life, making the establishment of some "rules of the road" imperative.

Military services tend to warily view arms control arrangements that affect their autonomy in their specialized domains. The events described in the 1964 film (and 1962 novel) Seven Days in May, in which an Air Force general seeks to topple an arms control-minded American president in a coup, are overstated, but services have historically opposed arms control limitations that affect their core priorities. The Royal Air Force's preference for offensive bombing doctrines during the interwar period, and its belief that the realities of war would rapidly blow past any legal limitations, undoubtedly influenced the United Kingdom's approach to international law in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, the U.S. Navy (and its counterparts in Britain, Japan, and elsewhere) resented the Washington Naval Treaty process because it limited the construction of their most prized vessels.

Even in the prehistory of the U.S. Air Force, Billy Mitchell warned about the threat that international arms control might pose for aerial bombardment. However, opposition to arms control was not always automatic or immediate; the Army Air Forces chiefs offered qualified support for nuclear arms control in the immediate aftermath of World War II. By the early 1960s, however, the Air Force senior hierarchy resolutely opposed most multilateral arms control, including the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In part because of generational change, the Air Force had minimal influence over the early Strategic Arms Limitation Talks negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Later activism on the part of the Air Force and of the Navy focused on the protection of specific systems, such as the B‑1 Lancer bomber, the LGM-118 Peacekeeper ballistic missile (then the Missile, Experimental, or MX), and the Trident submarine‐​launched ballistic missile.

The reasoning behind this opposition is clear: Strategic bombing (and later the delivery of nuclear payloads through intercontinental ballistic missiles) provided the rationale for the autonomy, independence, and primacy of the Air Force. Limitation of these weapons would not only require significant revision of doctrine and force structure but also would strike at the core cultural stories that undergirded the services. Moreover, compliance with the restrictions of a multilateral governance regime can be onerous in terms of financial, human resources, and intelligence demands. Most modern arms limitation regimes demand transparency on the part of the participants, which services tend not to welcome.

Given that services tend to pursue autonomy, the Space Force could pose some obstacle to future efforts for multilateral arms control in space. To be sure, neither the navies nor the air forces of the 20th century managed to prevent arms control. Nevertheless, if the Space Force manages to acquire the bureaucratic heft it needs to accomplish its core missions, it could act as an interest group within government to prevent the execution of strong multilateral arms control agreements. The record offers qualified reasons for concern about the role that the Space Force could play in future arms control negotiations. Services tend to resent the imposition of external limits on their procurement and force structure, although the extent of this resentment depends on organizational priorities. Still, the Space Force is unlikely to spearhead a drive for arms control within the U.S. government and probably will resist limitations imposed by such arms control on its core interests.

Conclusion

Decisions on institutional reorganizations are necessarily political, in addition to whatever technocratic impetus might drive them. A service's creation reveals the political priorities of Congress and the president, especially as it incurs substantial costs and substantial risk. But the creation of a service is rarely political in the sense that it stems largely from an interest in generating a talking point that a president can use at political rallies. Although the Space Force has some roots in theories of bureaucratic behavior, as well as considerable support from some actors within the defense community, it seems to have caught the president's attention through his belief in its public appeal.

This leaves analysts in an unusual situation, insofar as we have relatively little information with which to generate good expectations about whether the Space Force will perform its mission effectively, how it will get along with other services, or how it will affect the international environment. We have only a vague sense of the answers to many of the questions that will determine the success of the Space Force as an institution. We have reason to suspect that the Space Force will negatively affect multilateral arms limitation negotiations; we do not know how well the Space Force will be on traditional metrics of military effectiveness; we can guess that the presence of a Space Force officer on the Joint Chiefs will increase the prominence of space considerations in the National Military Strategy; and we have some reason to expect that the Space Force will increase demands on the military budget. This very uncertainty is an indictment of the decision to create the Space Force now. The Air Force, for better or worse, had answers to all these questions at its birth. As it now exists, the Space Force appears to a be a kludge designed to protect the political aspirations of the president while not encroaching too much on the institutional prerogatives of the Air Force.

Provisionally, many aspects of the Space Force seem problematic. Space is, if anything, a more intractable domain than air in terms of interservice conflict in that space assets are the sinews of the day‐​to‐​day activities of the services on land, at sea, in the air, and in cyberspace. The inclusion of the Space Force within the Department of the Air Force raises questions about how independent the Space Force will really be, and thus whether it will realize any of the promised gains. Finally, the lurking problem of the development of an independent space doctrine, which has in some historical cases resolved in favor of doctrines that favor independent, offensive operations, remains a long‐​term concern insofar as it would threaten to endanger peaceful use of the "space commons."

Space Force's establishment as an independent service is premature. Even for an institutional system in which services have domain‐​specific responsibilities (rather than a system that asks services to think holistically about how to accomplish missions across multiple domains), the Space Force is immature. Creating the Space Force at this point does not necessarily create the conditions under which the service can mature in a healthy fashion. Rather, it introduces the Space Force into a political arena where it lacks the resources and the political heft to effectively establish its prerogatives among the other services. In effect, it is a service in name only; in reality, it remains Air Force Space Command, and there is little in its birth that suggests it will grow beyond this any time soon.

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Space Force: Ahead of Its Time, or Dreadfully Premature?

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In December 2019, Congress established the U.S. Space Force as an independent uniformed military service within the Department of the Air Force. Although many defense analysts had long argued for a reorganization of the Department of Defense's space capabilities, few had settled on this particular solution.

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1.Lacking a strong base.
-It was introduced by the president with almost no consultation with the Department of Defense. The decision about national security was made in the spur of the moment.  These types of decisions cannot be made in spur of the moment, they need to be thoroughly thought through.

2. It would be the smallest military branch with a very large budget.  With having a large budget for this, it pulling funds away from other resources that would have more benefits from the funds.

3. It doesn't have distinct representation as a military department within the Department of Defense. This isn't an establish military, not having any organizational structure.

4. It runs the risk of distorting force structure of US air capabilities. The challenges we face in space are not strictly military solutions.

5. Misconception about its defense capabilities. The space force would not be able to fight.  It would have to rely on the help of the other forces to defend itself.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/fp_20180730_space_force_transcript.pdf

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep28729.pdf

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Cost/Spending
The extra amount of schooling, training, testing, and salaries would be extremely high not to mention the tangible expenses as well. Equipment, materials, upkeep, and new innovations all cost money. With a new branch of military, taxes are bound to increase.

Effort/Finding Individuals
The effort and resources to fulfill all the needs that putting together another branch of military needs is not worth it in the end. Finding qualified individuals to fill the roles needed would be difficult and could potentially weaken the other branches if the Space Force poaches individuals from the Air Force for example.

Doesn't fix anything
As of right now, there is not necessarily a need for a military presence in space. Low government spending, no current space issues, and slowly improving technology in that industry doesn't make for the best foundation for the Space Force to build upon.

Resources
Not looking at the cost, the resources it would take to build a functional branch of military would take away from the other branches, especially the Air Force. This could cause conflict between the government and the other branches of military.

Unintended Consequences
When new stuff is tested through trial and error, things are bound to go wrong, and this could cause unnecessary casualties in tests or potential damages with accidental explosions.

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The Space Force has been the subject of much ridicule in the media. The release of Netflix's Space Force earlier this year and several comedians picking the force as a comedy bit have added to this mainstream conversation and have painted a rather odd picture of what the Space Force is designed to achieve. But, the reality is that most of us have only heard about the Space Force through these channels.

The Space Force, as established in December of 2019, is designed to serve as the 6th branch of the United States military. But so far, it has been an enigma with an unclear and ill-defined purpose.

Despite the ridicule, the Space Force and its implications should be carefully considered based upon military and scientific need. However, there are drawbacks to introducing the force and they almost certainly outweigh the pros.

What exactly is the purpose of this force?
First and foremost, it is important to understand what exactly the Space Force is designed to accomplish. If you have watched Space Force on Netflix or heard about it through other entertainment channels, it is easy to paint a frivolous picture of what the Space Force is and what it is trying to achieve. Perhaps the most common misconception is that the Space Force is trying to put soldiers on the moon or have an active personnel in Space. Although the idea evokes or , it is blatantly . Instead, the Space Force aims to achieve a few tactical tasks.

The space force would consolidate space-related military into a singular branch. Currently, space-related military is split amongst the branches of the military, much of it held in the Air Force. A Space Force would centralize control of space-related military. However, more broadly, the Space Force's responsibilities, according to its , "will include developing military space professionals, acquiring military space systems, maturing the military doctrine for space power, and organizing space forces to present to our Combatant Commands." Essentially, the Space Force intends to create a centralized hub for all space related military and develop a space-focused strategy. But even with a stated purpose, we must dig deeper to understand the historical motivation for the force.
What is the precedent for the Space Force?
Aside from the scientific feats that accompany it, space flight has long been a display of hegemony and a source of national pride for countries and individuals alike. So, it begs the question: what happens when we politicize our relationship to space? We first saw this politicization begin in the 50s, 60s and 70s when the US and USSR deliberately used the Space Race as a political strategy to reestablish their dominance in the post-war period. In an effort to boost morale and rebound from the consequences of the war, the Space Race effectively politicized science on a global scale. It turned the quest for scientific advancement into a component of the Cold War.

While the Cold War led to significant technological developments, it was motivated by the creation of long-range nuclear missiles as both the United States and Russia hoarded missiles for the purpose of maintaining mutually-assured destruction, the effects of which we still see today. At the same time, the money, time, and resources invested in space exploration led to some of the greatest scientific advancements of the century, including remote satellite technologies. The Space Force re-energizes the conversation regarding the balance between beneficial and potentially perilous scientific invention. For the first time in decades, the government is taking concrete steps to project openly their intent to weaponize space.

But we must not conflate the deliberate creation of the Space Force and the beginning of space-assisted warfare, as such warfare has long been an integral part of military conflicts. The Strategic Defense Initiative, conceived in the early 80s, attempted unsuccessfully to use space as a countermeasure to long-range nuclear weapons. Since the 50s, space technology and the military have been deeply intertwined. The Gulf War, in large part, heavily on satellite technologies. The Global Positioning System (GPS), which has led to over a dollars in economic benefits, is owned and controlled by the Air Force, a branch of the military which was created a mere 70 years ago for a technologically-advancing style of warfare.
Does the Space Force deserve the ridicule it has received?
It's clear that discussions around the Space Force shouldn't be taken lightly. As technology advances, it is not unlikely that space will become a battlefield in spite of governing Space.

Although the US currently spends on space than any other country, it is no secret that global adversaries are making political moves in space. China's increase in space spending by almost over the last 15 years and Russia's recent over Venus are two examples. While the latter seems straight out of some dystopian future, it sends a deliberate message about not only Russia's technological capabilities, but its ambitions. In fact, every action that a country takes in space sends a calculated and purposeful message. Each rocket launch, satellite destruction, and yes, planet-claiming, showcases technology and military capabilities. Even disregarding any potential US offensive strategy, the military needs a concrete way to respond to such implicit threats. The Space Force could become the hub for this response, able to strategize about space-military needs.
Is the Space Force the best choice for addressing these needs?
With all military strategy, there runs the obvious risk of escalation, and instead of sending a purely defensive or philosophical message, a Space Force may send an adversarial one. The major risk is that we push war into space and trigger a chain-reaction or wartime expansion in space similar to that of a Cold War. It could be catastrophic for the world to enter a scenario where countries are stockpiling satellites or rockets for the purpose of a space war. In fact, the world should avoid military escalation at all costs and the US should make it its mission to push for space to be solely an arena of global collaboration and peaceful exploration. The idea of a Space Force undermines this.

Perhaps a less dire drawback would be excessive military bureaucracy and spending. Currently, a large part of the space military is controlled by the Air Force and its leadership does not feel the to split the Space Force into a different branch. As long as the task of space operations remains manageable to the Air Force, there is no reason to split off and add to an already long bureaucratic process; splitting into a separate branch may complicate and meddle with an already sound system. Secretary Debbie Lee James, the secretary of the Air Force under President Obama that the Air Force already invests a significant amount of money and resources into space and several military experts champion the idea of integration within the military instead of establishing several separate branches.

In light of these trade-offs, it becomes clear that the US needs to have a long and productive conversation about the future of the military. Instead of wasting dollars on an already over-funded military, the US needs to rethink its strategy and prepare itself for a modern world. There are definitive drawbacks to the Space Force, and it should not be unthinkingly or unequivocally championed. However, we must take this idea seriously while considering the technologically-advancing reality that we live in today.

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Boots on the Moon: Weighing the Pros and Cons of the Space Force

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The Space Force has been the subject of much ridicule in the media. The release of Netflix's Space Force earlier this year and several comedians picking the force as a comedy bit have added to this mainstream conversation and have painted a rather odd picture of what the Space Force is designed to achieve.

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It is a dividing issue

The idea of having the United States Space Force is one that has had major issues from both major political parties in America. To have all of the dividing opinions for something that is not a major part of our military is not a good thing to have.

It could easily be a part of the Air Force and not its own branch

Creating an entirely new branch of the government for the space force is something that should not be done as of now. There are not enough issues to deal with to justify the creation of this branch especially when this can be added to the Air Force as a new division which can easily be a better fit for this as of now.

Livingston, Ian. “Experts Offer Their Views on Creating a Space Force.” Brookings, Brookings, 10 Aug. 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/08/10/experts-offer-their-views-on-creating-a-space-force/.

Cost

The Space Force is going to receive $17.4 Billion dollars in funding for this year, this is money that can be spent in other more important parts of the military or on something outside of the military completely.

“FY22 Budget Gives Air & Space Forces the Strength to Meet Threats, Roth, Brown, Raymond Te.” United States Space Force, https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article/2651197/fy22-budget-gives-air-space-forces-the-strength-to-meet-threats-roth-brown-raym/.

Major Misconception on its role

The Space Force is not created to fight but instead to prevent and support different types of satiates and other assets in space.

The expectations for something special could take service men and women away from other parts of the military

Being brand new and having the name Space Force is enough to drive some people to want to join that over the Navy or another branch of the military. Because of this, we might see a shift in the number of servicemen and women for other branches of the military which will hurt them.

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1. It will lack the resources to be a co-equal service.
Space force workforce totals less than 1% of those employed at the Pentagon. Space force is allowed less than two days of federal spending per year. That is for all national security space activities.

2. It will be too dependent on industry.
The space force lacks funds and therefore has to turn to others for funds. Space force would be heavily dependent on private industry. Priorities would not be the same as public agnecies.

3. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits.
Space force is not revenue neutral. It will need many things such as a warfighting doctrine, secretary, uniforms, etc. The money from this will come from more important activities.

4. It will make the world's best air force less effective.
Having air force and space force together allows many skills to be in one place. If you break them apart you will lose major skills.

5. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy.
If space force becomes its own a whole new bureaucracy has to be formed. This is billions of dollars more for the taxpayers.

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke.

It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore. Despite widespread opposition to creating a sixth branch of the military, the president on reflection decided it was a "great idea" and directed defense officials to begin preparations for the new service. On August 9 the Pentagon released a preliminary report laying out plans for establishing a space development agency, a space operating force, and a unified space command. The next budget request sent to Congress will seek legal authority to separate the Space Force from other military organizations.

Congress should reject that proposal. It is a poorly conceived, wasteful undertaking that will weaken the joint force. America's military needs in space would be far better served by retaining the existing organization of the joint force and making modest adjustments to assure space challenges are met in a timely fashion.

Most experts already know this. The president, who isn't an expert, does not. So for the benefit of those who have not been paying close attention and might be captivated by rhetoric untethered to reality, here are ten reasons why creating a Space Force would be a really bad idea.

1. It will disrupt vital military relationships. The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links. Our smart bombs could not hit their targets without guidance from GPS spacecraft. Each armored brigade contains 2,500 pieces of equipment that depend on space to operate. The relationships supporting these functions have been laboriously worked out over many years. Creating a new military service will inevitably impede and confuse arrangements that generally work well today.

2. It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Organizations have boundaries that get in the way of cooperating with other organizations -- particularly when they are competing for missions and resources. One reason the 9-11 attacks succeeded was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not share information because they were protecting their bureaucratic turf. A great deal of effort has been invested in tearing down those walls. But standing up a Space Force would create new barriers to cooperation.

3. It will lack the resources to be a co-equal service. President Trump says he wants the Space Force to be "separate but equal" with the Air Force. But the entire space workforce in the defense department and intelligence community -- 27,500 people according to Sandra Erwin of Space News -- represents less than 1% of the personnel employed by the Pentagon. The budget for all national security space activities totals less than two days' worth of federal spending per year. So a Space Force will not be "separate but equal" with other services.

4. It will be too dependent on industry. When an organization has a narrowly-defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entities with which it must compete, it often turns to outsiders for help. An independent Space Force would be heavily reliant on private industry for technical expertise, policy advice, and program oversight. However, private industry is not driven by the same priorities as public agencies, and thus reliance on its advice would tend to distort the judgment and objectivity of a Space Force.

5. It will drain resources from more productive pursuits. The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently told an audience that anyone who thinks creating a Space Force will be revenue-neutral is "naive." A new military service will require its own warfighting doctrine, a dedicated secretariat and military staff, special support organizations, unique uniforms and other items that do not exist today. Deputy defense secretary Pat Shanahan says this will cost billions of dollars, and much of the money will likely come from more important activities.

6. It will replicate capabilities already resident elsewhere. A Space Force wouldn't just receive functions transferred from other military services. It would share responsibility for missions like joint networking and cybersecurity that would continue to exist in those other services. For instance, the Air Force isn't going to give up its cyber capabilities just because a new service is created. So the Space Force will have to stand up mirror organizations and compete for scarce technical talent, creating wasteful redundancy.

7. It will spawn yet another sprawling bureaucracy. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand that every time Washington creates a major new organization, it gives birth to a bureaucracy that assigns high priority to protecting its interests and growing its budget. That is what will happen with the Space Force. It won't just replicate what already exists in other places, it will find new functions to perform and new positions that need to be filled -- often by highly paid personnel who could be better deployed elsewhere.

8. It will reduce incentives for other services to support space. Once a Space Force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain. Having lost their organic space communities, they will shift focus to areas still considered within their core competencies. The perverse effect will be to reduce expertise in space across the joint force by concentrating it in one place that is isolated from other military organizations.

9. It will be defenseless without the help of other services. The United States does not build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars. Its "warfighting" capabilities in space consist mainly of vulnerable satellites orbiting the Earth on well-known paths. The satellites can be hardened or proliferated, but they have no ability to shoot back at attackers and there is no battle management system. Any military response to attacks on U.S. space assets would likely require action within the atmosphere by other services. So calling space a warfighting domain is a stretch.

10. It will make the world's best air force less effective. The U.S. Air Force has pioneered the integration of air power and space capabilities with great success. In fact, other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US. model. If the U.S. proceeds to dis-integrate its military aerospace community, it will likely undermine its current dominance both in the air and in orbit. Its air force will be diminished by the loss of skills and capabilities directly related to winning wars.

You might say that the U.S. Air Force has helped bring on this danger by exaggerating the notion that space is becoming a warfighting domain. All that has really happened is that Russia and China have figured out how vital orbital assets are to our terrestrial warfighting capabilities. But that's an argument for keeping space expertise spread across the joint force, not creating a new federal bureaucracy that drains missions and money away from other military services. Creating a Space Force today is premature at best, and will likely make America weaker.

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Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker

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President Trump says that when he first brought up the possibility of creating a Space Force separate from the other military services, "I was not really serious." It was a joke. It's still a joke, but it isn't funny anymore.

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It would take too long to build

Including schools, marching bands, etc.

It would cost a lot

Uniforms, marching bands, schools, doctrines, equipment, and building

On top of the huge budget, it will take money away from other services that are already in action.

The Space Force will be defenseless without the help of other armed forces.

The satellites have no ability to fight back, as they cannot shoot back

There is also no battle management system

It will create a new bureaucracy

This means new positions will need to be filled and that comes with extremely high expenses to pay these individuals.

Air Force and Space Force could clash

Seeing the Space Force could have some of the same capabilities, it would be almost like a competition between the two. This would just make a competition rather than a solution.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/04/20/the-space-force-is-a-misguided-idea-congress-should-turn-it-down/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/08/27/ten-ways-a-space-force-will-make-america-weaker/?sh=32b1be2f34b0

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1. No need for an additional military force
U.S. Air force was created in 1947. They have thousands of personnel, years of experience and organizational strategy.

2.  Lack of culture and purpose
Currently has no organizational structure, borders and overlaps the need and job of the already created Air Force and other military branches.

3.  High Costs to the United States Citizens
Through COVID, gas prices, inflation and recent war activities, this is the last thing we need to worry about. Our citizen can hardly manage to pay bills let alone pull 15 million dollars out of thin air to support a program that is already controlled through multiple other military branches.

4.  Premature launch of the Space Force
This program was launched in 2019 without adequate personnel, designated uniforms, purpose and goals, rank structure, bases, equipment or organization identity.

5.  Disruption of Alliance Relationships
We have come so far to have good relationships with other countries. The more we know, the more technology we have this impairs out trust relationships with other countries. Technology is forever changing and if we have "too much control" in space, Other countries will begin to loose faith in our well established relationships.

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Space Force: Ahead of Its Time, or Dreadfully Premature?

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1. Eric Gomez, “Space Force: An Unwise Solution to an Overhyped Threat,” Orlando Sentinel, August 28, 2018.

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1. Roles are duplicated. With creating another military force there were quite a few overlaps when it came to responsibilities and authorities. With the space force being created there was a decrease in what the air force could do and therefore made the air force less effective.
2. Risky in some ways. Sending the United States into a scenario where countries are stockpiling satellites and rockets for the purpose of a space war can lead to risky things for the country.
3. Talk of space force takes attention away from other things. The space force has been brought up so much that it has taken away the attention on domestic and international priorities like Coronavirus and climate change.
4. Money. There has been quite a bit of money into this form of military. It is considered to be a lot less than other branches of military, but it has taken billions of dollars way from taxpayers and just wasted it.
5. Goes against what the United States stands for. The United States has wanted peace and to keep that peace longstanding. If the U.S. gets involved in space war of any kind it will demolish that idea of peace for the American people.

https://govtrackinsider.com/no-militarization-of-space-act-would-abolish-the-space-force-the-newest-armed-forces-branch-e773b02b521f

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/04/20/the-space-force-is-a-misguided-idea-congress-should-turn-it-down/

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Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA2)

Unlike Netflix, which renewed the Steve Carell comedy Space Force for a second season.

The Space Force was established in 2019 as the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, and the first new branch since the Air Force in 1947.

The measure was included as part of the annual omnibus National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which that year overwhelmingly passed 377-48 in the House and 86-8 in the Senate. However, that doesn't necessarily mean the Space Force provision itself commanded such levels of support. Indeed, some are now seeking to repeal the two-year-old military branch.

The No Militarization of Space Act would abolish the Space Force.

This wouldn't abandon such specifics as the branch's mission, personnel, or weapons, but would transfer them back to the Air Force, since prior to 2019 all space-related military operations were conducted through the Air Force. Contrary to the title, the bill wouldn't actually end the "militarization of space."

It was introduced in the House on September 22 as H.R. 5335, by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA2). You can't accuse Rep. Huffman of flip-flopping: he was one of the few House members to vote against the NDAA which created the Space Force in 2019.

Supporters argue that the Space Force is both expensive and potentially dangerous.

"The long-standing neutrality of space has fostered a competitive, non-militarized age of exploration every nation and generation has valued since the first days of space travel," Rep. Huffman said in a press release. "But since its creation under the former Trump administration, the Space Force has threatened longstanding peace and flagrantly wasted billions of taxpayer dollars."

It's time we turn our attention back to where it belongs," Rep. Huffman continued. "Our mission must be to support the American people, not spend billions on the militarization of space."

Opponents counter that it's a straw man argument to claim that the Space Force is contributing to the "militarization of space," any more than the Army has meant the "militarization of land." And rather than being expensive, the Space Force budget is actually only about one-ninth the Air Force budget.

Both Democrats and Republicans currently support the Space Force.

The Space Force will "absolutely have the full support of the Biden administration, and we are not revisiting the decision to establish" it, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said during President Joe Biden's second week in office. "The desire for the Department of Defense to focus greater attention and resources on the growing security challenges in space has long been a bipartisan issue informed by numerous independent commissions and studies conducted across multiple administrations. And thousands of men and women proudly serve in the Space Force."

"Space is the world's newest warfighting domain. Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital," former President Donald Trump said in a speech right before signing the Space Force into law. "And we're leading, but we're not leading by enough. But very shortly, we'll be leading by a lot. The Space Force will help us deter aggression and control the ultimate high ground."

The bill has attracted four cosponsors, all Democrats. It awaits a potential vote in the House Armed Services Committee.

Considering how large the voting margins were to establish the Space Force less than two years ago, it seems unlikely that this bill to repeal it would pass.

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This article was written by GovTrack Insider staff writer Jesse Rifkin.
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No Militarization of Space Act would abolish the Space Force, the newest Armed Forces branch...

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Unlike Netflix, which renewed the Steve Carell comedy Space Force for a second season. The Space Force was established in 2019 as the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, and the first new branch since the Air Force in 1947.

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The United States Space Force is a premature novelty.
1) It lacks a strong institutional basis.
Theoretical frameworks provide ideas on how to structure and employ forces on the battlefield in addition to the institutionalization of military organizations, the relationships within a defense establishment and those organizations, and prioritize particular capabilities through national leadership. This far there has been insubstantial theoretical framework about the militarization of space partially due to the novelty of the idea. The first USSF doctrinal document was published in 2020 and fails to establish clear context that explains how space power contributes to national power (or the contribution it offers to the other branches of the military).
The United States Space Force is a long way off.
2) The USSF cannot be considered a "service" of the military due to lack of configuration.
A service is "a largely autonomous military organization that designs its own doctrines, manages its own systems of recruitment and promotion, and (in the US) has its own place on the Joint Chiefs of Staffs." Services are distinct from appointed sub-services such as Army "branches" or Navy "communities". The Space Force is notably smaller than any other service (by over 200,000 personnel compared to the Marine Corps, the next smallest service in the US). In addition, the USSF does not have its own uniforms, rank structure, bases, or substantial equipment pool.
The political/military effectiveness of a "service" that barely exists.
3) The nature of the USSF complicates the political/military effectiveness.
The USSF appears to primarily support other areas of the military, especially its forefather, the US Air Force to which the USSF largely shares the same equipment, personelle, and doctrine. In order to evaluate the USSF performance and effectiveness, the Space Force will require the collaboration of larger and more prominent organizations. The Space Force doesn't manage forces or develop techniques for outer space combat. For example, anti-satellite weapons are under Navy and Air Force control. Indications of Space Force effectiveness relies on how the US military will depend on space for communication and intelligence in the future which requires assessing many USSF factors that are still not concrete (including metrics such as "how
regularly do 'customers' of the Space Force’s products use that product in their daily operations?" ...and..."What rates of operational malfunction in spacecraft can be attributed to internal as opposed to external causes?"
President Trump Strikes again.
4) The Space Force appears to a be a ploy designed to protect the political aspirations of president Trump while attempting to not infringe too much on the institutional entitlement of the Air Force.
Decisions on institutional reorganizations
are generally political, in addition to whatever political force might drive them. A service’s creation reveals the political priorities of Congress and the president, especially as it attracts substantial costs and substantial risk. But the creation of a service is rarely political in the
sense that it stems largely from an interest in generating a talking point that a president can use at political rallies. Although the Space Force shares a basis with theories of bureaucratic behavior, as well as considerable support from some actors within the defense community, it
seems to have caught the president’s attention through his belief in its public appeal.
Planning for the future.
5)Analysts have only a vague sense of how the Space Force will effect the future.
Analysts are in an unusual situation, as they have relatively little information with which to generate good expectations about whether the Space Force will perform its mission effectively, how it will get along with other services, or how it will affect the international environment. They have only a vague sense of the answers to many of the questions that will determine the success of the Space Force as an institution. Some analysts suspect that the
Space Force will negatively affect multilateral arms limitation negotiations; they do not know how well the Space Force will be on traditional metrics of military effectiveness; they can guess that the presence of a Space Force officer on the
Joint Chiefs will increase the prominence of
space considerations in the National Military Strategy; and they have some reason to expect that the Space Force will increase demands on the military budget. Unlike the Air Force which was able to answer these questions at its birth, this very uncertainty surrounding the USSF is an indictment of the decision to create the Space Force.

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Used to Support other branches: The USSF doesn’t develop techniques or manage forces as other military branches do in regards to space combat. “Antisatellite weapons, for example, are still under Navy and Air Force control.” This means that other organizations are already capable and do most of the work.

Lacks Framework/Strategic Theory: The framework of the USSF was created prematurely due to it being pushed for political reasons, and not in the midst of warfare. The theories of how the organization will be run and pursue its mission are not made clear. While some theoretical theories exist, the “Space Force does not seem representative of any clear theoretical position.” The organization lacks a clear focus, which delays any advancements the organization could potentially make.

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/space-force-ahead-its-time-or-dreadfully-premature#introduction

Doesn’t fix any current problems: The main problems with the Air Force's ability to manage space-related threats are the lack of budget, slow advancements, and lack of warfare fighting. The USSF doesn’t fix any of these problems.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/08/10/experts-offer-their-views-on-creating-a-space-force/

Creation Promotes Escalation: By creating a new military branch, the USA could potentially have risked sending an adverse message to other countries in regards to war in space. Rather than having a mission of peaceful exploration and global collaboration, the USSF has a mission of protection and fighting.

https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2020/11/05/boots-on-the-moon-weighing-the-pros-and-cons-of-the-space-force/

Doesn’t Actually Fight: A common misconception about the Space Force is that it will fight threats in space. However, the purpose of military services like the USSF is to train, organize and equip, not to fight. At the moment, the fighting is done by Stratcom (United States Strategic Command).

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/fp_20180730_space_force_transcript.pdf

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1. It would be defenseless without the help of other services. They would not be able to fight back due to not being able to shoot. So, they have to rely on other agencies.
2. Budget is very large. The budget for this program is 15.4 billion. This hinders the economy.
3. It will disrupt vital military relationships. Satellites are used to communicate with warships. This would be hard to do with the space force.
4. It will create new barriers to joint force integration. Walls of known intelligence has been blocked. A lot of work has gone to bring down these walls, so everyone works together. The space force makes this harder.
5. Friendly fire. Shooting stuff out of the sky must always come down. This can create debris falling.

Ten Ways A Space Force Will Make America Weaker (forbes.com)
The Newest Military Branch—the Space Force - The War Horse

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1.  It will disrupt vital military relationships: The joint force is heavily dependent on orbital systems. Our warships could not communicate without satellite links.
2. It will make the world’s best Air Force less effective: in fact other countries are combining their military air and space organizations in imitation of the US model.
3. It will be defenseless without the help of other services: The US doesn’t build imperial battle cruisers like those seen in Star Wars.
4. It will reduce incentives for other services to support space: Once a space force is created, the other military services will have little incentive to invest in understanding the orbital domain.
5. It will be too dependent on industry: When an organization has a narrowly defined charter and lacks the resources of larger entries.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/08/27/ten-ways-a-space-force-will-make-america-weaker/amp/