Reps. Mike Rogers and Jim Cooper lost their first major legislative battle over creating a new Space Corps inside the Air Force last year, but they are not giving up and may have a new ally in the Pentagon.
The bipartisan lawmakers say they are betting on Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan to shepherd through a reorganization of the military’s space operations, beginning with a key space report they’ve ordered from the Pentagon this year.
“He is a corporate guy, he has our confidence. He gets it, he wants to fix it and we have been staying in regular contact with him on this and we are going to stay in regular contact with him,” Rogers, R-Ala., said during a Wednesday talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “I have every confidence in Deputy Secretary Shanahan and his ability to get this done and I expect it to be on time and productive.”
The report is supposed to detail how the military would create a new space service, and is due in December. Congress requested the Pentagon turn in a similar report last summer before Shanahan was confirmed, but the report never came.
When asked, Rogers said he was “absolutely” certain Shanahan would come through with the plan this time.
Rogers and Cooper, who lead a House Armed Services strategic subcommittee, spearheaded the effort to create the new military space service last year in the National Defense Authorization Act, saying the U.S. has fallen dangerously behind on space threats from Russia and China. But they publicly tangled with Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson and Gen. David Goldfein, the chief of staff.
The Air Force, which oversees about 90 percent of space operations, pushed back hard against creating a separate Space Corps and a bitter political fight ensued. The Senate never backed the idea and it was eventually cut from the final NDAA.
Rogers said the service still has not come to terms with the military’s slow pace in countering quickly developing space threats against a growing array of satellites that are key to U.S. and global communications.
“The first thing they could do it just to come out of denial and admit that we’ve got a problem and we’ve got to fix it and work with us instead of fighting us,” Rogers said.
But the December report requested through Shanahan could provide the blueprint for moving ahead with the Space Corps idea and gin up support, which is already on the rise in the Pentagon, the two lawmakers said during the think tank appearance.
“There are many people in the Pentagon who I think in large part agree with us. I’ve been particularly proud of Deputy Secretary of Defense Shanahan who seems to totally get it,” said Cooper, D-Tenn. “Many other people get it, including people within the Air Force. So we just need the bureaucracy, the brass, the official folks, to get on board with enthusiasm and with speed and with clarity.”
Meanwhile, support from the Senate will also be key if the Space Corps is ever to get off the ground. That may be a tall order after opponents on the Senate Armed Services Committee, most notably senior committee member Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., stood in the way last year.
Nelson, who once traveled on the Space Shuttle, said flatly that a Space Corps would never happen.
But Rogers and Cooper said the attitude in the chamber will likely change as senators get familiar with the alarming, and mostly classified, threats against the U.S. and how the Air Force has mismanaged efforts.
“This really kind of kicked us in the face pretty quick and got our attention when we started working on it, so when they saw this they weren’t saying this is a bad idea, they were saying this is a big thing real fast, slow down,” Rogers said. “I think that you are going to find that this year they’re going to be becoming much more familiar and I hope moving more to the position of the doing something in the vain of what the House proposed.”
Rogers estimated that the Space Corps will be created in about three to five years, a timeline that he said would not be too disruptive.
“It is bad the situation that we are in as a nation, the vulnerabilities we have to China and Russia,” he said. “I’d like for the American public to know more and I can’t because I don’t want to go to jail for leaking classified information. But we’re in a really bad situation.”
Cooper warned that U.S. vulnerabilities in space could leave the country “deaf, dumb and blind in seconds” if quick action is not taken, and he compared it to the situation leading up to the 2001 terror attacks and the subsequent 9/11 commission findings.
“Their central conclusion was that we had a failure of imagination. We did not connect the dots. There were plenty of warning signs. Here, we cannot afford to have a failure of imagination,” Cooper said.
