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August 9
Vice President Pence laid out an ambitious plan Thursday that would begin creating a military command dedicated to space and establish a "Space Force" as the sixth branch of the U.S. military as soon as 2020, the first since the Air Force was formed shortly after World War II.

Pence warned of the advancements that potential adversaries are making and issued what amounted to a call to arms to preserve the military's dominance in space.

"Just as we've done in ages past, the United States will meet the emerging threats on this new battlefield," he said in a speech at the Pentagon. "The time has come to establish the United States Space Force."

But the monumental task of standing up a new military department, which would require approval by a Congress that shelved the idea last year, may require significant new spending and a reorganization of the largest bureaucracy in the world. And the idea has already run into fierce opposition inside and outside the Pentagon, particularly from the Air Force, which could lose some of its responsibilities.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said last year that he opposed a new department of the military "at a time when we are focused on reducing overhead and integrating joint warfighting functions."

This week, Mattis said the Pentagon and the White House "are in complete alignment" on the need to view space as a warfighting domain. But he stopped short of endorsing a full-fledged Space Force. In a briefing with reporters after Pence's speech, Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan suggested that Mattis's comments opposing the Space Force were made at a different time, before the Pentagon received a bolstered budget.

White House officials have been working with national security leaders to aggressively move ahead without Congress. The first step is creating a new U.S. Space Command by the end of the year, which would be led by a four-star general, the way the Pentagon's Indo-Pacific Command oversees those regions.

The new command would pull space experts from across the armed services, and there would be a separate acquisitions office, dedicated to buying satellites and developing new technology to help the military win wars in space.

After the announcement Thursday, President Trump tweeted, "Space Force all the way!"

For months, Trump has been calling for a Space Force, a new, free-standing military department, with its own chain of command and uniforms.

In a letter to supporters Thursday, the Trump 2020 campaign said it would sell a line of gear that could come with a logo of their choosing - including one labeled "Mars Awaits" - to commemorate "President Trump's new Space Force," according to a copy of the email - a move that fueled criticism that the effort was motivated by politics.

The White House intends to work with lawmakers to introduce legislation by early next year, a senior administration official said, with the hope of standing up the first new military department since the Air Force was formed in 1947.

Some members of Congress and military leaders have been warning that space is no longer a peaceful sanctuary, but a domain of conflict that needs more attention and resources. Space is vital to the way the United States wages war; the Pentagon's satellites are used for missile defense warnings, guiding precision munitions and providing communications and reconnaissance.

Russia and China have made significant advancements, challenging the United States' assets in space.

In 2007, China blew up a dead weather satellite with a missile, creating a massive debris cloud in orbit, which Pence called "a highly provocative demonstration of China's growing capability to militarize space." China also has demonstrated the ability to hit satellites in a much deeper orbit where the military parks some of its most sensitive assets.

In his speech, Pence acknowledged the difficulties in establishing a new service, and said the Pentagon would create an assistant secretary of defense for space, a top-level civilian who will report to the defense secretary "to oversee the growth and expansion of the sixth branch of service."

The official must sort out many details, including how the Pentagon would recruit for the Space Force and compete for resources within the Pentagon. Even basic details, such as what uniforms and what rank structure the Space Force would use, must be decided.

Some members of Congress advocated last year for creating a Space Corps in the Air Force Department, similar to how the Marine Corps is part of the Navy Department. Elevating the proposal to create a new department will mean additional Pentagon bureaucracy, critics say.

Deborah James, who served as Air Force secretary in the Obama administration, said Trump's decision to create a full new department is "a solution in search of a problem."

Before Trump's announcement in June that he wanted a Space Force, Mattis and Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson had cautioned against creating a new Pentagon bureaucracy to address space issues. James said she thinks they're now "stuck because the president announced this by surprise."
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Efforts to reach several senior Air Force officials were not successful Thursday. Wilson was traveling on business and not at the Pentagon when Pence made his announcement. Gen. David L. Goldfein, the Air Force's top officer, and Gen. Stephen Wilson, the vice chief, sat quietly in the Pentagon auditorium as Pence spoke.

Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, the Pentagon's vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a briefing with reporters that the Pentagon is very much in favor of establishing a Space Command as a way to speed up efforts in space.

But when it comes to establishing a new branch of the military, Selva said, "there's an obligation" to present a set of options that can be presented to Congress.

"He's the commander in chief," Selva said of the president.

The White House has pushed for Congress to invest an additional $8 billion in national security space systems over the next five years.

The new command and reorganization "should be budget-
neutral," Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, said in an interview. "However, going forward, there probably will need to be an increase in resources to buy improved capabilities and more warfighters as the Space Force matures."

After Pence's speech, Reps. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.) and Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), members of the House Armed Services Committee, praised the move, saying a Space Force "will result in a safer, stronger America."

"We have been warning for years of the need to protect our space assets and to develop more capable space systems," they said in a joint statement.

In his speech, Pence urged the audience to support the administration's effort to create the department.

Speaking to a room made up mostly of U.S. troops in uniform, Pence said their "commander in chief is going to continue to work tirelessly toward this goal, and we expect you all to do the same."

"The only thing we can't afford is inaction," he said.
Read more: A fight to protect 'the most valuable real estate in space' Some in Congress are pushing for a 'Space Corps,' dedicated to fighting wars in the cosmos Trump says he's directing Pentagon to create a new 'Space Force'

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Pence details plan for creation of Space Force in what would be the sixth branch of the military

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August 9 Vice President Pence laid out an ambitious plan Thursday that would begin creating a military command dedicated to space and establish a "Space Force" as the sixth branch of the U.S. military as soon as 2020, the first since the Air Force was formed shortly after World War II.

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Trump Wants to Create a Space Force: 8 Things You Should Know

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What is a Space Force and what would it do?

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In the midafternoon of January 11, 2007, US Air Force major general William Shelton sat at the head of a table in a command center at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, holding a telephone to each ear. Shelton was the commander in charge of maintaining the US military's "situational awareness" in space-and the situation, at the moment, seemed to be deteriorating fast. One phone connected Shelton to his boss, the head of US Strategic Command, in Nebraska; the other connected to Shelton's operations center, a windowless room full of analysts just next door. In front of Shelton was a can of Diet Dr Pepper, and arrayed around the table were the members of his increasingly nervous senior staff.

For days, US intelligence had been picking up indications that China was about to conduct a missile test aimed at outer space. The analysts next door-and their counterparts around the world-were tracking ground-based radar signals, monitoring infrared sensors, and poring over images from telescopes in space. All of them were briefing Shelton on what they were observing in real time. At 2:28 pm (PST) their readouts showed a ballistic missile taking off from China's Xichang Satellite Launch Center, located in the wooded mountains of Sichuan province. The missile rose into low Earth orbit, about 500 miles above Earth's surface, and appeared to close in on an aging Chinese weather satellite.

Then the telescopes showed a bright flash.

Minutes later, the radar screens began to track a growing cloud of debris-at least 3,000 pieces of shrapnel that would each, Shelton knew, spend the next several years slingshotting around Earth at speeds that could far exceed that of a bullet. Shelton was stunned. The Chinese had just shot a satellite out of the sky.

Not only was this a stupendous technological achievement-to launch a missile from the ground and hit a celestial target moving as fast as 17,000 mph-it also showed a level of audacity not seen in space for decades. "We couldn't imagine they would go against an actual satellite," Shelton recalls. "Because of the debris something like that creates, it's almost unthinkable." It felt like a wake-up call.

In the conference room, Shelton exhaled, set down his two telephones, and pushed himself back from the table. "This changes everything," he said to his staff.

For decades, America's satellites had circled Earth at a largely safe remove from the vicissitudes of geopolitics. An informal global moratorium on the testing of anti-satellite weapons had held since 1985; the intervening decades had been a period of post-Cold War peace-and unquestioned American supremacy-high overhead. During those decades, satellites had become linchpins of the American military apparatus and the global economy. By 2007, ships at sea and warplanes in the air had grown reliant on instant satellite communications with ground stations thousands of miles away. Government forecasters relied on weather satellites; intelligence analysts relied on high-resolution imagery to anticipate and track adversaries the world over. GPS had become perhaps the single most indispensable global system ever designed by humans-the infrastructure upon which the rest of the world's infrastructure is based. (Fourteen of the 16 infrastructure sectors designated as critical by the Department of Homeland Security, like energy and financial services, rely on GPS for their operation.)

Now, Shelton feared, all those satellites overhead had become so many huge, unarmored, billion-dollar sitting ducks.

In the decade since China's first successful anti-satellite missile test, Shelton's premonition has largely come true: Everything has changed in space. A secretive, pitched arms race has opened up between the US, China, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, North Korea. The object of the race: to devise more and better ways to quickly cripple your adversary's satellites. After decades of uncontested US supremacy, multinational cooperation, and a diplomatic consensus on reserving space for peaceful uses, military officials have begun referring to Earth's orbit as a new "warfighting domain."

On the ground, the military is starting to retrain pilots, ship captains, and ground troops in fail-safe forms of navigation that don't rely on GPS-like celestial navigation. The US military must relearn how to fight "unwired" and defend itself in space. "We knew how to do that, and somehow we forgot," General John E. Hyten, the head of US Strategic Command, said in 2015.

When former director of national intelligence James Clapper left office at the end of the Obama administration, he told me that the increasing sophistication of America's adversaries in space was one of the top three strategic threats he worried about. Clapper's successor, Dan Coats, warned last spring that "Russia and China remain committed to developing capabilities to challenge perceived adversaries in space, especially the United States."

Since he took office, President Trump has dropped numerous hints of the warnings he's evidently getting from military and intelligence leaders. During a spring livestream with astronauts aboard the International Space Station, he alluded, obliquely and without context, to the "tremendous military applications in space." And he has repeatedly floated the idea of creating a new branch of the armed forces specifically for celestial combat-culminating last week with a speech out-and-out ordering the Joint Chiefs of Staff to begin developing plans for a new " Space Force."

But if space is indeed becoming a war-fighting domain, it's important to understand the stakes, not just for America's strategic standing but for the species. A Russo-Sino-American space war could very well end with a crippled global economy, inoperable infrastructure, and a planet shrouded by the orbiting fragments of pulverized satellites-which, by the way, could hinder us all on Earth until we figured out a way of cleaning them up. In the aftermath of such a conflict, it might be years before we could restore new constellations of satellites to orbit. Preparing for orbital war has fast become a priority of the US military, but the more urgent priority is figuring out how to prevent it.

Growing up in Oklahoma City, William Shelton dreamed of becoming a pilot. He got as far as the Air Force Academy before he discovered his eyes weren't good enough. So instead he became an astronomical engineer. In 1976 he began serving as a launch facility manager at Vandenberg Air Force Base, the military's oldest space and missile launch base, perched on the California coast north of Santa Barbara. He arrived just as the Air Force was beginning to understand how crucial space would be to its future: The nation's first early-warning satellites had been put in orbit with the intention of tracking Soviet missile launches, and satellite imagery was becoming increasingly critical to intelligence gathering. Shelton's poor eyesight, it turned out, had led him to the center of the Air Force's new frontier.

In August 1990, Shelton, then a young lieutenant colonel, took command of the 2nd Space Operations Squadron in Colorado. When he arrived at his post, the Air Force was busy building a new constellation of satellites-launching new ones from Cape Canaveral in Florida every few months to help fill out what he was told would ultimately be a global system aimed at helping the US improve its navigation and increase the precision of its bombs and missiles. This was the new Global Positioning System, and one of Shelton's first duties at "2Sops" was to build support and enthusiasm for the new effort. To impress visitors (including the brass), he carried around a demo GPS unit that weighed 10 pounds, cost $3,000, and could tell America's soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines exactly where they were on the surface of the planet.

The power of the new system that 2Sops ran was proven faster than anyone imagined. The Gulf War caused a rush of final preparations to get GPS ready for battle. Around 2:30 am on January 17, 1991, GPS-equipped helicopters snuck into Iraq, using the technology to guide themselves through the darkened desert and knock out air defense radars. The first bombing campaign of the war had begun. Reporters marveled at precision-guided bombs zeroing in on their targets and cruise missiles appearing to turn street corners to hit the right buildings. Shelton had a front-row seat to this transformation.

As the technology has improved, so has the precision of GPS. The system originally provided accuracy to within 17 yards; with it, you could pinpoint a specific copse of pine trees. Today, if you're using a smartphone, it can generally locate an object to within five yards-a resolution fine enough to locate a pair of pine trees within that copse. Soon it could be able to zero in on a pine cone: Research from UC Riverside has demonstrated that the latest tech is reliable to within an inch. And research has shown that 1-millimeter accuracy might be eventually possible-which means that the system could locate an individual seed inside that pine cone.

Today, troops on the ground use GPS to navigate foreign streets; drone pilots can program a flight plan from thousands of miles away. And because GPS satellites also house America's detection system for nuclear detonations, we rely on them to tell us if North Korea launches a nuclear weapon, and to tell our missiles and bombs where to find their targets. "When you look at our American way of war, the strategy is largely underpinned by space assets-navigation, early warning, timing," Shelton says.

And that's just the military. The creators of GPS probably never intended for the system to become the backbone of daily life, but it has. I visited Colorado while reporting this story and tried to keep tabs on everything I did that relied on GPS. There were the obvious navigational moments-my Uber ride to the airport, my American Airlines flight to Denver, my own Google Maps-guided drive in a rental car to Schriever Air Force Base, outside Colorado Springs. But there were also less obvious instances, like the phone calls I made along the way (cellular networks rely on GPS data to keep their stations synchronized), my stop at the ATM (banks use GPS to track deposits and withdrawals), and the fill-up at the gas station (the credit card system also relies on GPS). Moreover, GPS is no longer the world's sole geolocating mechanism. Russia, China, and the European Union have now all either deployed or begun working on their own full constellations of navigation satellites, ensuring that they won't have to rely on the US system. It also means that, in the early moments of a war, it's a fair bet that satellites-the other guy's satellites-could be among the first targets.

During the Cold War, a US army mountain outpost in the Fulda Gap, the shortest route between East and West Germany, served as an early warning trip wire for a Soviet invasion of Europe. If Russian tanks ever made a surprise attack, NATO planners knew that the soldiers there would likely be the first to find out.

Today, the members of 2Sops play a similar role. Deep inside the squat, beige, windowless Building 400 at Schriever Air Force Base-the destination I had plugged into Google Maps during my trip to Colorado-10 people at a time remotely operate the heavenly constellation of GPS satellites that guide Tomahawk cruise missiles to their targets, deliver Lyft passengers to their destinations, and help farmers cultivate their crops. They also watch out for any shocks or attacks on the system.

The average GPS operators are in their mid-twenties. During one recent shift, the entire Global Positioning System was being operated by two 19-year-old airmen (who, the Air Force emphasizes, are rigorously trained). Their commander, US Air Force lieutenant colonel Peter Norsky, is in his mid-thirties. Together, they watch over the roughly three dozen GPS satellites, troubleshooting the geolocation system and minding the quirks of each orbiting craft-this one's damaged solar panels, that one's balky communications links-as if they were remotely tending a stable full of temperamental horses.

As integral as GPS is to daily life, the way it actually works is little understood by most people outside of Schriever Air Force Base. Fundamentally, the function of GPS is to provide the globe with a shared clock. GPS satellites allow phone companies to keep their systems in sync, battleships to chart open waters, and ATMs to time-stamp their transactions by triangulating signals from overhead and measuring how long it takes those signals from different satellites to reach a GPS receiver.

Any malfunction in the GPS system threatens to plunge the global economy into chaos.

The system works by making daily calculations, employing Newtonian physics and Einsteinian relativity, to minutely tweak the time broadcast from each GPS satellite as it moves through space-the high-tech version of tuning your grandfather clock to within 100-billionths of a second. Time is, after all, relative; as of January, the time in space was 18 seconds ahead of Earth's "Coordinated Universal Time," since space doesn't recognize the leap seconds that scientists add to terrestrial time to account for the planet's slowing rotation. Additionally, the time-keeping device on each satellite gives a subtly different reading, the result of variations in their atomic clocks, which tell time by measuring the precise oscillations of an atom. (Some GPS satellites use rubidium atoms, which are highly accurate day to day; some use cesium, which is more accurate over long stretches.)

Any malfunction in the GPS system threatens to plunge the global economy into chaos. Fortunately those glitches are rare, but they're not unheard of. On January 25, 2016, one of 2Sops' flight commanders, Captain Aaron Blain, was awoken by a call from work in the middle of the night. User reports from around the country suggested that the system's precision had "wobbled," making measurements increasingly inaccurate. Blain raced to Schriever in his Ford pickup and found that the constellation's timing was off by about 13 microseconds. It was an infinitesimal number-over 25,000 times shorter than the blink of an eye-but for the finely tuned GPS it was a yawning crevice. Left uncorrected, the glitch could have ricocheted through the global economy, corrupting not just driving directions but stock trades too.

Alongside the rest of his team, Blain worked through the night, chugging Mountain Dew. It took about six hours to locate the problem-a single corrupted measurement-and then individually reset the affected satellites. (Russia's GPS equivalent, known as Glonass, has suffered even more serious issues. In 2014 it went down for 10 hours, but many Glonass receivers can also use GPS as a backup, so the systemic chaos was limited.)

2Sops averted a benign catastrophe that night, but it seems increasingly worried about what China and Russia are doing up in the heavens, out of sight. It recently doubled the number of airmen who oversee the satellites, so one team can run the GPS constellation while another trains to face worst-case scenarios-what the Pentagon refers to as "a contested, degraded, and operationally limited environment." That is, a space war.

In one respect, space is already like a war zone: It's increasingly shot through with flying shrapnel. By some estimates, there are more than 100 million pieces of debris zipping around in Earth's orbit. China's 2007 anti-satellite test is estimated to have created some 150,000 new ones, many too small to be tracked. In 2013, some of those fragments hit a Russian satellite-threatening to add still more debris to the orbital mix. And as commercial ventures like SpaceX and Blue Origin ramp up their space tourism plans, Earth's orbit is about to get even more crowded with both junk and spacecraft. Scientists say there could be a point at which the density of objects spinning around the planet reaches a threshold-called the Kessler effect-that triggers a runaway cascade of collisions: an entire orbit, in other words, set to Blend.

Another tricky thing about space debris is that sometimes it isn't just debris. A US military program called the Space Surveillance Network carefully tracks and monitors every piece of space junk that's larger than a softball. That currently amounts to some 20,000 objects-everything from old satellite parts to discarded rocket boosters to a pair of pliers lost during an astronaut's spacewalk. In 2014, a piece of presumptive space junk known to the US military as Object 2014-28E began to behave strangely. The object, known to be of Russian origin, started to perform complicated maneuvers. "That's concerning-when you see something that appears to be debris come to life," Shelton says. Object 2014-28E was, in fact, an autonomous spacecraft capable of veering off course and sidling up to other objects, including American commercial communications satellites.

In the years since, Object 2014-28E has been joined by similar space objects of Russian provenance. Analysts fear that they might mark the revival of a Russian program known as Satellite Killer, which was shut down after the Cold War. But it's difficult, even for US government analysts, to know for certain whether that fear is warranted. The secrecy that surrounds nearly everything space-related makes it hard to assess any adversary's capabilities. Discerning intentions is especially difficult. "If I wanted to build a satellite that looked very different from its actual mission, that's not hard to do," Shelton says.

A satellite that maneuvers close to another could be doing a repair job or squaring up for an attack-and it might use the same tools for both. "Small satellites with small grappling arms-they have both military and nonmilitary uses," says Dean Cheng, who studies China's military capabilities at the Heritage Foundation. "If I manipulate a satellite's bits and pieces, I can also rip something out." The US has also been secretive in developing what may or may not be weapons in space. Last May, the Air Force announced that an unmanned space-shuttle-like vehicle that appears to be classified had completed 718 days orbiting Earth, doing who knows what. As of this May, another OTV was circling the globe, more than 200 days into its mostly classified mission.

Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, explains that there are effectively four categories of space weapons: kinetic (aimed at destroying a satellite), nonkinetic (aimed at disabling a satellite without touching it), electromagnetic (aimed at interfering with a satellite's signals), and cyber (aimed at corrupting the data sent to a satellite).

No country can claim sovereignty in orbit. So what counts as an act of territorial aggression? What qualifies as a proportional response?

The US tested its own anti-satellite missile in 2008, shooting down an errant spy satellite as it was falling out of orbit. Russia has repeatedly flight-tested a so-called direct ascent weapon, the PL-19 Nudol ballistic missile, which could strike objects in orbit, although it hasn't conducted a live attack on an orbiting satellite. And in the decade since China shot down its weather satellite in 2007, Beijing has launched multiple ballistic missile tests that extended into orbit. In addition, a trio of Chinese satellites have practiced "close-proximity operations," similar to those performed by the Russian Object 2014-28E. Anti-satellite weapons form just one part of what China calls shashoujian, or "assassin's mace" systems, which can be used at the start of an attack to achieve a surprise, decisive advantage over a technologically superior foe. There's also the growing challenge of cyberattacks on satellites: Chinese hackers have reportedly infiltrated the US weather satellite system, and a Romanian hacker announced that he had accessed the server of one of NASA's space flight centers. In the past decade, at least two nonmilitary US satellite systems have experienced brief, unattributed glitches tied to hacking attacks.

Some actors have begun to exploit the fragility not of satellites themselves, but of the signals they broadcast. By the time the radio signals from a GPS satellite reach Earth from thousands of miles up, they can be easily overridden by a stronger signal broadcast on the same frequency. Simple GPS jammers sell online for $119, but they have a short reach. Militaries appear to be acquiring much more powerful jamming technologies. In 2016, roughly 1,000 planes and 700 vessels at sea reportedly experienced problems with their GPS signals near North Korea, which is believed to have purchased Russian jammers that can be mounted on trucks. Those devices have an effective radius of 30 to 60 miles. The US seems to possess similar technology; a test that went awry near a Navy base in San Diego in 2007 knocked out GPS signals to cell phone network operators for at least two hours.

More troubling than simple jamming, though, is the rise of "spoofing," which overrides correct GPS data with a more powerful localized signal that delivers false information to a receiver. In 2013 a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin successfully led astray an $80 million yacht in the Mediterranean, overpowering its GPS receivers and sending it onto a new course. The dirty truth about spoofing is that secure channels are no defense against it. "Even our encrypted military GPS receivers can be spoofed," Harrison says.

Shelton, who retired in 2014 after 38 years in the Air Force, lives not far from 2Sops in Colorado; these days he chairs an educational and advocacy nonprofit called the Space Foundation. He still expends a lot of energy worrying about what is happening in the heavens. "We as a nation have been too slow to respond to this threat," he says. He's particularly troubled by the failure of the US to procure new space systems. Some GPS satellites are older than the people running them. "Our systems are archaic," Shelton says. "Because space assets are so expensive, we deploy 'just enough'; there's no backup or excess capability." (The Air Force noted that the GPS constellation consists of more than 30 satellites, which provides some redundancy.)

China, by contrast, is investing heavily in its space program, seeing it as a symbol of its growing prominence. As soon as this year, it could land a craft on the never-before-touched far side of the moon. And China's global navigation satellite system, known as BeiDou, has some capabilities that outmatch even the United States' GPS. In 2015, China created a new space-focused military service, known as the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. Meanwhile, the US relies entirely on Russian rockets to get its astronauts to the Space Station (although NASA has awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to fix that). As Cheng says, "Today China is one of two countries that can put a person into space-and the other country isn't the United States."

Many of America's space warriors, as they call themselves, share Shelton's sense that the US isn't responding nearly quickly enough to the threat of orbital war. "We needed to be marching faster," says Deborah Lee James, who served as President Obama's secretary of the Air Force. "Why aren't there more space and cyber officers at the top of the Air Force?"

Deadly Debris

In orbit, trash becomes shrapnel. When objects in space collide-whether by accident or because, say, someone down on Earth has decided to launch a missile at a satellite-it sometimes creates a hail of smaller fragments that fan out across Earth's orbit. It's already getting difficult to operate satellites and conduct launches amid all the junk zipping around up there. That's why, around the world, scientists and engineers are devising ways to pull space junk out of orbit. In April, a SpaceX rocket carried a collection of experimental debris-removal technologies to the International Space Station. During its time in orbit, the satellite will test out nets, harpoons, and drag sails designed to reduce detritus.
- Saraswati Rathod

20,000
Pieces of space debris larger than a softball
-
500,000
Pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger
-
4,300
Number of satellites in space
-
72
Percent of satellites that are nonfunctioning
-
$1.4 billion
Cost of degradation to commercial satellites caused by debris
-
2,000
Number of trackable fragments created by the last major satellite collision in 2009
-
160 million
Estimated number of pieces of space junk too small to be tracked

-

Sources: European Space Agency; NASA; Aerospace Corporation

Addressing these issues, as James' question suggests, is not just about throwing money at the space-industrial complex. It involves organizational changes too. The Air Force is building what it calls the nation's first Space Mission Force, made up of airmen trained to respond to the demands of an orbital war. On the same base as the 2Sops command center, the military has established the National Space Defense Center, which puts representatives from various military and intelligence offices focused on space under a single roof. And the defense authorization bill is full of upgrades to the Air Force's space-fighting capabilities, including the creation of an additional Air Force unit responsible for space warfighting operations.

Not content to tinker with the Air Force, a growing number of people in Washington-including the commander in chief-have to come to favor creating an entire new military branch dedicated to space operations. In May, during a ceremony honoring West Point's football team, President Trump told his audience, "We're getting very big in space, both militarily and for other reasons, and we are seriously thinking of the Space Force." The comment sounded to many listeners like yet another oddball Trumpian tangent.

But then, after reportedly meeting resistance from the Air Force, Trump escalated. At a mid-June meeting of the newly constituted US Space Council, he announced-much to the surprise of his own advisors and the military itself-that he was ordering the Pentagon to move forward. As he said, "I'm hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the Armed Forces. That's a big statement. We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force-separate but equal. It's going to be something."

The Space Force is, of course, not a fait accompli. Any military reorganization has to be approved by Congress-which is not necessarily an easy path. (Last year, a bill that included the creation of just such a new branch of the military passed the US House of Representatives, but that provision was taken out of the Senate version.) And the establishment of a new branch of the military involves a vast set of logistical and structural questions.

Yet Trump's push may speed up a natural evolution toward an independent space branch by years, if not a decade. Space, the president said, was "going to be important monetarily and militarily. We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We've always led."

But where-and to what-are we leading? Part of the challenge in figuring out how to think about space conflict is the sheer complexity of the orbital environment-an arena that has long belonged to nation-states, but that is increasingly becoming a domain of commerce and tourism. How do countries protect their interests up above-and down here? Right now, countries appear to be racing to build their military capabilities-but an arms race isn't the only answer.

The last time an arms race appeared poised to overtake space, the world's superpowers banded together to sign the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which banned weapons of mass destruction in space and held that "the moon and other celestial bodies" should be reserved for peaceful purposes. The Outer Space Treaty is still in force, but it is by now full of holes. Legal scholars had a hard time proving that China's 2007 anti-satellite test, for instance, violated the agreement. That's because the missile that China fired was not technically addressed in the 50-year-old treaty.

Part of what makes space such volatile terrain right now is that it's hard even to apply the existing laws of war to it. No country can claim sovereignty in orbit, and it's impossible to occupy territory there. So what counts as an act of territorial aggression? What qualifies as a proportional response? It's even difficult to say, with certainty, what the physics of war in space will look like. We don't well understand, for instance, how a kinetic attack on a satellite constellation might spill over into a spiraling Kessler effect.

Humans have "millennia of experience in blowing up things on land," says Laurie Blank, a law professor at Emory University and a specialist in the laws of armed conflict. "We're still learning the consequences of all these things in space."

Blank recently joined together with an international team of legal experts to create what they're calling the Woomera Manual on the International Law of Military Space Operations-a kind of rule book for celestial international conflict, one that will endeavor to translate the laws of terrestrial war for space. It's a daunting task, and the resulting document will be nonbinding. But, Blank says, it's a necessary first step for anyone who would seek to contain a conflict that has, in some senses, already begun.

Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is a WIRED contributing editor. He wrote about US special counsel Robert Mueller's combat experience during the Vietnam War for issue 26.06.
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The New Arms Race Threatening to Explode in Space

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In the midafternoon of January 11, 2007, US Air Force major general William Shelton sat at the head of a table in a command center at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, holding a telephone to each ear. Shelton was the commander in charge of maintaining the US military's "situational awareness" in space-and the situation, at the moment, seemed to be deteriorating fast.

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President Trump's proposal to create a Space Force-a sixth branch of the U.S. military, like the Air Force, "separate but equal," as he put it in a speech on Monday-is not as zany as it may sound, but it's the wrong solution to a real problem.

The problem is this: The U.S. military depends on satellites for everything-for intelligence, surveillance, navigation, communications, even for the accurate guidance of its weapons (GPS satellites make "smart bombs" smart)-but these satellites are vulnerable to attack and disruption.

This became dramatically clear in 2007, when China conducted its first anti-satellite test, destroying one of its own orbiting satellites with a weapon launched by a rocket. Many sounded the alarm, but no one in Washington did anything about it.

In 2011, President Obama, alerted to the problem, quietly made a series of decisions-involving procedures, promotions, and the deployment of new sensors and devices in outer space, most of them highly classified-that began to address the problem. Meanwhile, in the years since, China and several other countries have built up their capabilities-with traditional and cyber weapons-against not only satellites but the ground stations that receive and transmit the data.

It's not as if the military was unaware of the issues or ill-equipped to deal with them. The Air Force Space Command, founded in 1982 and headquartered in Colorado Springs, has 36,000 personnel and budget this year of $8.5 billion. The National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO, an extremely secretive branch of the U.S. intelligence community created in 1961, has a budget that some estimate at about $15 billion.

One might think that the directors of these organizations would have an interest in defending their extremely expensive satellites, but they appear not to.

This neglect is what has led some, well before Trump, to propose an autonomous Space Force. The idea is that, rather than being stacked with-and reporting to-traditional Air Force officers, most of them fighter pilots with a drive for offensive combat operations, the specialists of the Space Force would be attuned to the needs, properties, and vulnerabilities of satellites and the systems connected to them.

If Trump thinks that U.S.-South Korean military exercises are too expensive, those costs are trivial compared to the infrastructure of a sixthservice.

But in fact, this is not likely what would happen-and it's certainly not what should happen. The special thing about satellites and the organizations that control or operate them (Air Force Space Command, the NRO, and other smaller outfits) is that they are, by nature, subordinate to other branches of the armed forces-to wars that are fought not in outer space but on Earth or in the atmosphere. Space assets service air, naval, and ground forces by providing them with intelligence, communications, and guidance for missiles and smart bombs. Placing these vital assets under the command of a four-star general in a separate service-and imbuing its officers and enlisted personnel with the élan of an elite force that doesn't answer to the other services of the armed forces and that, in fact, competes with them for resources-would run counter to the nation's needs.

That was the point that Secretary of Defense James Mattis made last fall, when a few members of Congress pushed for a separate Space Force. In a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mattis wrote, "I oppose the creation of a new military service and additional organizational layers at a time when we are focused on reducing overhead and integrating joint warfighting functions."

The key here was Mattis' emphasis on "joint warfighting functions"-the need for more interservice cooperation rather than building new fiefdoms-but Trump might also want to heed his words about "reducing overhead." A new service would mean a new headquarters, another seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and a few hundred more Pentagon-based staff), more three- and four-star generals (with their attendant pay and benefits), another military academy (with faculty, grounds, scholarships, etc.), more and different uniforms, probably a Space Band, and all the rest. If Trump thinks that U.S.-South Korean military exercises are too expensive, those costs are trivial compared to the infrastructure of a sixth service.

More than that, it's not at all clear what a Space Force would do. Long before the National Security Act of 1947, which laid out the distinct roles and missions of each branch of the U.S. armed forces, the basic functions of an Army, Navy, and Marine Corps had been well established. By contrast, in the decade since China's first anti-satellite test, the United States has still not even declared a policy for deterring and fighting that kind of conflict. That is, we have neither firmly stated what we would do in the event of an attack on our vital satellites nor created (and visibly deployed) the means to carry out that response.

Yes, we need to set that policy, and soon, but that should be the job of the political and military leaders who rely on the satellites-not on the officers of a special Space Force, who might have different priorities.

There's an analogy to this in modern military history. The 1947 act created, among other things, a new and separate Air Force. (Before then, warplanes and their pilots belonged to the Army Air Corps.) World War II ended in 1945 with those planes bombing Germany and Japan, the latter with incendiary explosives and, at the very end, atomic bombs. So the main mission of the new Air Force was to drop bombs on enemy targets with more atomic (and, a few years later, much more powerful hydrogen) bombs, as part of a doctrine that the generals of the new service called "killing a nation." For the next few decades, the Strategic Air Command-the branch of the Air Force that controlled the bomb-dominated the Air Force. Not until the 1970s did the pilots of tactical fighter jets, armed with conventional bombs and air-to-air munitions, rise to the fore; in other words, not until the 1970s did the Air Force pay much attention to missions that involved supporting Army troops and Marines on the ground. And not until the last 15 years, with the development of smart bombs and drones, did the Air Force have any interest in buying airplanes dedicated to those missions. (The best air-to-ground attack plane of the 1990s, the A-10, would have been killed-the Air Force chiefs zeroed it out of their budgets each year-had it not been built in the home district of the chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee; after he died, the chiefs shunted the A-10 fleet to the Air National Guard.)

It is not known what the chiefs of the Space Force would want to do and buy, but it's a decent guess that they would push for shiny, offensive weapons over defensive measures-and that they wouldn't spend much time or money on the other service chiefs' wish lists.

John Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense and an outspoken advocate of doing more to protect the U.S. military's space assets, told me that his big worry about a Space Force is that "we will spend the next 5-10 years on bureaucratic arm-wrestling and will fall even further behind our adversaries."

Trump's wishes notwithstanding, a Space Force will not materialize all at once. Congress would have to authorize and fund its creation; the Joint Chiefs would then have to make room for it among the other services. Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are on record opposing the idea. So are the seniormost Air Force officials as well as many retired generals and senior officials. (In talking with a number of these people, I couldn't find any who support the idea-or know any colleagues who do.)

Then again, Trump announced his proposal for a Space Force at a White House meeting of his Space Council, where Gen. Dunford was present. Turning to Dunford, Trump said, "If you would carry that assignment out, I would be very greatly honored ... Got it?" Dunford replied, "We got it."

The Pentagon is currently conducting a congressionally mandated study, due Dec. 31, of the whole gamut of space-defense issues. If Trump gives Dunford this "assignment" a few more times between now and then, the general-who, like Mattis, rose through the ranks as a Marine-might have to do something.

At some point in the future, it might be a good idea to create a Space Force (or perhaps a Space Corps, which would have the same semi-autonomous relationship to the Air Force that the Marine Corps has to the Navy). But many other things need to be done first: A policy has to be stated; doctrines, strategies, tactics, and training manuals have to be written; specialists need to be given richer incentives-career paths, with steady promotions-to join the existing services' space commands; all the services would need to work jointly on these tasks.

One senior aerospace executive, with a military background, said, "What the Air Force Space Command and the NRO need to do, right now, is to boost the number of soldiers, sailors, aircrews, artillery officers, and so forth-people with operational experience-to be part of the process, who can tell the senior officers what AFSC could do to help, say, the 18 th Airborne Division. There's no one at senior levels who's doing this now."

In other words, what the officers involved in the space commands need is the opposite of a separate Space Force.

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Trump's "Space Force" Idea Is a Terrible Solution to a Real Problem

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President Trump's proposal to create a Space Force-a sixth branch of the U.S. military, like the Air Force, "separate but equal," as he put it in a speech on Monday-is not as zany as it may sound, but it's the wrong solution to a real problem. The problem is this: The U.S.

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Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said that he does not want to add "additional organizational and administrative tail" to the military. Credit Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

WASHINGTON - President Trump's call on Monday for the Defense Department to establish a sixth branch of the military, this one focusing on space, has not exactly engendered a groundswell of support at the Pentagon.

"We got it," Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replied when Mr. Trump put him on the spot during a speech and directed him to "begin the process necessary" to create a space force.

"Working with Congress, this will be a deliberate process with a great deal of input from multiple stakeholders," the Pentagon press secretary, Dana W. White, said a few hours later in an email to reporters.

The Air Force was even more vague, promising a "thorough, deliberative and inclusive process" in the months, or more likely years, ahead.

Those statements, said Kingston Reif, the director of disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, are "the sound of people punching the brakes," he said. "They're saying: We'll study this one for a long time. We'll study and study and study."

But the Pentagon's reluctance aside, does the United States need a space force? Some legislators and aerospace experts, citing growing threats from Russia and China, say a case could be made for one.

Representatives Mike D. Rogers, Republican of Alabama, and Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, have pressed hard for the idea in Congress. They argue that a new military branch is needed because the Air Force does not pay enough attention to outer space. What's more, they say, Russia and China are developing anti-satellite weapons that could imperil American satellites.

"We could be deaf, dumb and blind within seconds," Mr. Cooper, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee with Mr. Rogers, said in February at a space forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Seldom has a great nation been so vulnerable."

On Thursday, Mr. Rogers sounded a similar theme. A bill he and Mr. Cooper backed last year would have created a space corps under the umbrella of the Air Force. But the president took the idea a step further when he said he wanted a space force that would be "separate but equal," an eyebrow-raising description that would essentially create a military service to join the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard.

"The president decided to go straight there," Mr. Rogers told an audience at a Mitchell Institute breakfast on Capitol Hill. "I'm fine with that."

The concern about anti-satellite weaponry from Russia and China is a real one, Defense Department officials and aerospace experts say. A United States intelligence threat assessment warned in February that Russia and China would be able to shoot down American satellites in two to three years, potentially endangering GPS satellites as well as military and civilian communications satellites and the country's spy satellites.

The satellites help guide aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, drones in the skies above Yemen and fighter jets over Syria. American ground troops on patrol in Afghanistan use GPS coordinates to track their movements, and intelligence officers at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., depend on spy satellites to gather information on adversaries.

"Everything the U.S. military does today relies on space," said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that studies space policy. Take drones, for instance, he said. "Their signals are routed over satellites. Data is routed over satellites. Intelligence satellites do the B.D.A. after strikes," he added, referring to battle damage assessments the military makes to determine whether targets have been destroyed.

In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the American military exercised restraint on anti-satellite weaponry, Mr. Weeden said, in the hopes that two other so-called great powers - Russia and China - would follow suit. But "great power adversaries have not decided to exercise the same restraint," he said.

Now Russia and China are getting close to developing ways to disable American satellites, and if the United States goes to war with either of those countries, the fear is that they could interfere with American communications.

But how does having a space force fix that? Before Mr. Trump gave his order on Monday, Pentagon officials maintained that the Air Force and other services could protect military satellites. When Congress was considering a space corps last year, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said he did not want to add "additional organizational and administrative tail" to the military.

"At a time when we are trying to integrate the department's joint warfighting functions, I do not wish to add a separate service that would likely present a narrower and even parochial approach to space operations," Mr. Mattis said in a letter to Representative Michael R. Turner, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the House Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee.

But critics of the Air Force say that it will never make space its top priority when it also has pilots and warplanes to worry about.

And "we keep buying these big expensive satellites that are juicy targets for our adversaries," said Todd Harrison, the director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Meanwhile, our existing space forces are fragmented across our military."

Mr. Harrison said that while the timing of the directive was off, given all that the military was dealing with right now, "the idea of putting those fragmented forces into one coherent organization, under one chain of command," had merit.

Don't tell that to Asgardia, though.

Asgardia, the pet project of the Russian billionaire Igor Ashurbeyli that considers itself to be the world's first space nation (its "citizens" basically have to fill out an application), issued a statement on Wednesday criticizing Mr. Trump's plan.

"Asgardia was founded on the core belief that space be used peacefully without Earth's conflicts being transferred," the statement said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: A Space Force May Have Merit, Some Say. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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A Space Force? The Idea May Have Merit, Some Say

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WASHINGTON - President Trump's call on Monday for the Defense Department to establish a sixth branch of the military, this one focusing on space, has not exactly engendered a groundswell of support at the Pentagon. "We got it," Gen. Joseph F.

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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.

I focus on the strategic, economic and business implications of defense spending as the Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of Source Associates. Prior to holding my present positions, I was Deputy Director of the Securit...

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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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Global Business Editor Read bio

Global Business Editor Read bio

Within months, DoD will start standing up a new combatant command, a new space-procurement agency, and a new Space Operations Force.

The U.S. Defense Department this week will take the first steps to create the Space Force, a new branch of the military ordered up by President Trump but not yet fully backed by Congress.

In coming months, Defense Department leaders plan to stand up three of the four components of the new Space Force: a new combatant command for space, a new joint agency to buy satellites for the military, and a new warfighting community that draws space operators from all service branches. These sweeping changes - on par with the past decade's establishment of cyber forces - are the part the Pentagon can do without lawmakers' approval.

Creating the fourth component - an entirely new branch of the military with services and support functions such as financial management and facilities construction - will require congressional action. Defense officials plan to spend the rest of 2018 building a "legislative proposal for the authorities necessary to fully establish the Space Force." That would go to Congress early next year as part of the Trump administration's 2020 budget proposal.

This plan, developed for execution by Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, the Pentagon's No. 2 civilian, is laid out in a 14-page draft report slated to go to lawmakers on Wednesday. Defense One reviewed a draft of the report dated July 30.
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"The Department of Defense is establishing a Space Force to protect our economy through deterrence of malicious activities, ensure our space systems meet national security requirements and provide vital capabilities to joint and coalition forces across the spectrum of conflict," says the draft report. "DoD will usher in a new age of space technology and field new systems in order to deter, and if necessary degrade, deny, disrupt, destroy and manipulate adversary capabilities to protect U.S. interests, assets and way of life...This new age will unlock growth in the U.S. industrial base, expand the commercial space economy and strengthen partnerships with our allies."

The Pentagon declined to comment on the report in advance of its formal release later this week.
New Forces
The draft report says the Pentagon will, by year's end, establish an eleventh unified combatant command: U.S. Space Command. Like U.S. Special Operations Command, which oversees special forces composed of servicemembers and organizations drawn from various service branches, the four-star Space Command will oversee space forces from across the military. The proposal goes even further than lawmakers demanded in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which orders the Pentagon to create a space command under U.S. Strategic Command.

"The Department will recommend that the President revise the Unified Campaign Plan to create the new U.S. Space Command by the end of 2018 and evaluate the need for any additional personnel, responsibilities and authorities," the draft report says. Initially, the Pentagon will recommend that the head of Air Force Space Command also serve as the commander of U.S. Space Command. Space liaisons will be installed in the geographic combatant commands, starting with U.S. European Command.

The draft report says the Pentagon will also stand up a Space Operations Force, made up of uniformed and civilian space personnel from the four military services and the National Guard and Reserve.

"Similar to Special Forces personnel provided by all military services, the Space Operations Force will be composed of the space personnel from all Military Services, but developed and managed as one community," it says.

This force would come together quickly: the goal is to deploy "teams of space experts" to U.S. European Command and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command by next summer.
New Ways to Procure Satellites
The draft report heralds seismic changes in how the Pentagon buys, launches, and develops new technology for its satellites, including organizational and cultural shifts to emphasize speed and experimentation. It also plans a bigger role for private-sector space companies "as commercial and government entities 'move toward the center' on requirements, regulation and compliance."

The centerpiece of this effort is a new joint office, dubbed the Space Development Agency, to oversee new satellite-development and space-launch contracts.

"Major existing space acquisition programs will remain in current service organizations, and aggressively pursue improved performance, while the Space Development Agency develops and fields the capabilities outlined in the DoD Space Vision," the draft report says. "Over time, as current programs complete, resources will shift from service space acquisition organizations to the Space Development Agency."

The biggest impact will be on the Air Force. The move clouds the future of the service's Space and Missile Systems Center, the 6,000-person organization in Los Angeles that currently oversees about 85 percent of DoD's space procurement budget - and which was recently restructured to speed the purchase and launch of satellites. The report calls this overhaul "the start."

Like the Missile Defense Agency, the Space Development Agency would oversee acquisition projects across the various military services. Its size will be determined by a "DoD governance committee in partnership with the intelligence community," the report said. Its location will be determined through "an accelerated process that considers locations that best enable the Agency to attract talent, leverage commercial expertise and develop new capabilities at speed and scale."

Currently, the Air Force has hubs for space in Colorado, California, and Florida. The Army and Missile Defense Agency have a large presence in Huntsville, Alabama, an area nicknamed "Rocket City" for its large role in NASA and military space projects. The city is also known as "Pentagon South" due to the high concentration of Defense Department civilians there.

The report, which responds to a congressional mandate in the 2018 Defense Authorization Act, was largely written by Shanahan's office and by Stephen Kitay, deputy assistant defense secretary for space policy, according to a senior defense official. Air Force officials were largely cut out of the review process several weeks ago, the official - and another source with knowledge of the decision - said on the condition of anonymity to speak about the yet-to-be-released report.
From Idea to Plan
The idea of creating a new service-level organization to handle the military's space operations has been contentious since lawmakers last year proposed to attach a space corps to the Air Force, along the lines of the Marine Corps and the Navy. Pentagon leaders, including Trump's own Air Force Secretary, largely opposed that move. But in recent months, the president has mulled, and then stated his desire for, a Space Force. If it becomes reality, it would be the first new branch of the military since the Air Force was born out of the Army Air Corps in 1947.

"Both the chief of staff and I are actually very glad that ... people are becoming more aware and having a debate about what we do about this as a nation. That just wasn't really there before," Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said during a Washington Post event on July 25.

"I think the most important thing is to say focused on the warfighter and maintaining the lethality of the service, no matter how the org-chart boxes go," Wilson said. "It's all about the ability to fight. If we keep focused on that and not on which boxes move around which place in the Pentagon, then we'll do the right thing for the nation."

Wilson's predecessor, Deborah Lee James - who served as Air Force secretary during the Obama administration - said Monday that she opposes a Space Force, but supports the creation of a combatant command, like the one discussed in Shanahan's report. She made her comments at a Brookings Institution event in Washington.

In recent years, the Air Force made numerous changes within its space arm to defend against Russian and Chinese interference. This week, the Pentagon is poised to announce a shift from "few independent" satellite constellations to a "a proliferated low-Earth orbit architecture enabled by lower-cost commercial pace technology and access." Air Force officials hinted at these changes earlier this year when Shanahan visited Air Force Space Command in Colorado.

The Air Force operates 77 satellites in orbit while the Navy has 12 communications satellites, Wilson said.

"Satellites are really pretty fragile things and so we have to think now about how do we defend a constellation. It not always just direct defense," she said. "It may be that we distribute a network. If you have multiple nodes it's inherently more resilient than if you're relying on one thing. Some it may be maneuverability. Some of it may be deception. There's a lot of ways to make sure the United States can take a punch and keep on operating."

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EXCLUSIVE: Pentagon To Start Creating Space Force - Even Before Congress Approves It

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Global Business Editor Read bio Global Business Editor Read bio Within months, DoD will start standing up a new combatant command, a new space-procurement agency, and a new Space Operations Force. The U.S. Defense Department this week will take the first steps to create the Space Force, a new branch of the military ordered up by President Trump but not yet fully backed by Congress.

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