The Trump administration will ask Congress to establish a sixth branch of the military to defend U.S. satellites and counter adversaries in space fulfilling President Trump’s vision of a Space Force, which he announced in June and wants up and running two years from now.
“The time has come to establish the United States Space Force,” declared Vice President Mike Pence in a speech in the Pentagon’s subterranean auditorium, packed with military members including all the senior leaders of the Air Force, which now has responsibility for space defense.
While acknowledging that “creating a new branch of the military is not a simple process,” Pence nevertheless announced an ambitious goal of launching the proposed U.S. Department of the Space Force by 2020.
“Ultimately, Congress must act to establish this new department,” Pence said, adding the White House is already working with Congress to build bipartisan support for the plan.
[More: Jim Mattis says there is ‘complete agreement’ between DOD, White House on Space Force]
Pence singled out four key members of the House who support the plan, Republicans Mac Thornberry and Mike Rogers, and Democrats Adam Smith and Jim Cooper.
“Next February, in the president’s budget, we will call on the Congress to marshal the resources we need to stand up the Space Force, and before the end of next year, our administration will work with the Congress to enact the statutory authority for the Space Force in the National Defense Authorization Act,” Pence said.
Pence compared the creation of Space Force to establishment of the U.S. Air Force in 1947, the last time a new military service was created, which at the time was hotly debated.
“Air power had forever changed the nature of war, so we marshaled the resources and the will to build the most powerful air force the world had ever seen,” Pence said. “Now the time has come to write the next great chapter in the history of our armed forces, to prepare for the next battlefield where America’s best and bravest will be called to deter and defeat a new generation of threats to our people, to our nation.”
A congressionally mandated Pentagon report released concurrently with Pence’s speech outlined the first steps to eventually establishing a new Department of the Space Force.
The actions, which do not require congressional approval, include creating a new combatant command for space headed by a four-star commander, gathering an elite group of joint warfighters specializing in the domain of space, forming a new agency charged with acquisition of cutting edge capabilities, and appointing a single civilian position to oversee creation of the new military service, who would report to the defense secretary.
Pence was introduced to the largely military audience by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who just last year in a letter to Congress expressed reservations about creating an entire new bureaucracy to oversee space operations. But Thursday he warmly welcomed Pence and heartily endorsed the White House initiative.
“Space is one of our vital national interests in the sense of our use of space, our operations in space, and it is becoming a contested, warfighting domain and we have got to adapt to that reality,” Mattis said. “It’s on par with the air, land, sea, and cyberspace domains in terms of it being contested.”
While there was resistance in the Pentagon to elevation the space mission to an entirely separate branch of the armed forces with its own service secretary and four-star member of the joint chiefs, there has been little debate about the need to focus more on space to counter China and Russia, which Pence alluded to in his remarks.
“Both China and Russia have been conducting highly-sophisticated on-orbit activities that could enable them to maneuver their satellites into close proximity of ours, posing unprecedented new dangers to our space systems,” Pence said.
“Both nations are also investing heavily in what are known as hypersonic missiles designed to fly up to 5 miles per second at such low altitudes that they could potentially evade detection by our missile-defense radars,” he said. “In fact, China claimed to have made its first successful test of a hypersonic vehicle just last week.”
