As the Space Force nears the first anniversary of its creation on Dec. 20, some space security experts believe that the Biden administration should preserve one of President Trump’s proudest achievements.
“I think the Space Force obviously continues,” Heritage Foundation national security expert Jim Carafano told the Washington Examiner in arguing that the Biden administration should preserve the nation’s newest service instead of folding its components back into the Air Force.
“The U.S. is just the first out of the box,” he said, in terms of having a dedicated force stood up to protect space assets.
Adversaries Russia and China have developed and tested space weapons in recent years capable of knocking out American satellites and threatening the American way of life.
Since the United States’s decision to stand up the Space Force, partners and allies, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and soon, Japan, have or plan to set up similar entities.
“That’s the direction that everybody is going,” Carafano said. “If you can’t operate in every domain, then you essentially have a massive vulnerability that somebody can exploit.”
Brig. Gen. Douglas A. Schiess, wing commander of the 45th Space Wing at Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, told the Washington Examiner that the creation of the Space Force has already shown benefits.
“It is great to have a chief that is solely concerned about space, and to have a chief that is solely concerned about air, all within one department of the Air Force,” said the 28-year Air Force veteran who hopes to transfer to the Space Force.
“You now have one person that has grown up a majority of their career doing space operations, leading that, and advocating to the secretary of the Air Force and the secretary of defense for space operations,” he added.
The Space Force also has broad bipartisan support, and the defense analytical and strategy community are coming around to the value of a force dedicated to the space domain, said Michael O’Hanlon, security scholar at the Brookings Institution.
O’Hanlon himself was originally a detractor.
“I did not support it,” he told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview.
“There probably is the case to undo it because I think it is so bureaucratically inefficient,” he said. “And, I’m just not really wild about having an additional force, just a few thousand people.”
All the current components that make up the new Space Force had been part of the Air Force and could be transferred back, experts explained.
However, the commercial space industry, which has taken on an outsize role in delivering Space Force payloads into orbit, is banking on the continuation of the service.
“The creation and the movement towards a Space Force kind of recognizes the road that we’re going towards,” United Launch Alliance Director and General Manager of Launch Operations Tony Taliancich told the Washington Examiner.
“A more space-dominant future or space-critical future for all of us from a global standpoint,” he continued.
Taliancich explained that continued transition will allow the U.S., over the next several decades, to be better positioned to confront threats and opportunities related to space.
Despite some amusement generated by the Netflix series of the same name, Taliancich believes there has been a positive public relations element to the hoopla surrounding the service’s creation.
“Certainly, it’s changed the burden and got a lot more public visibility into what the value of space is to every human,” he said. “I think it definitely will continue. It makes sense to continue it. That’s why we’re going down that path.”
Nonetheless, security experts say that with only some 8,000 space professionals in its ranks, the Biden administration could take a hard look at just transferring the personnel back to the Air Force.
“You can see that the dynamic wouldn’t be impossible,” editor of the Heritage Foundation 2021 Index of U.S. Military Strength, Lt. Col. Dakota Wood, told the Washington Examiner.
“You just established the Space Force. People who used to be U.S. Air Force put on a different patch, and they become U.S. Air Force again,” he said. “It hasn’t been around long enough to really become something as independent as what the U.S. Air Force became.”
O’Hanlon said the force’s relatively infancy would make it easier to unwind.
“It hasn’t really gone to any logical conclusion or a steady state,” he said. “Because the Space Force is still a work in progress, there probably is a case for deciding whether it really should be continued.”
