PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colorado — President Trump’s creation of the United States Space Force may have been met with humorous curiosity, but the branch’s inaugural chief of space operations, Gen. Jay Raymond, has no problem with the venture’s image.
Asked about the Netflix comedy series starring Steve Carell, Raymond only seemed slightly irked. “Yeah. You know, I have seen it,” he told the Washington Examiner. “And so, my take on it is: It’s a really cool time to be in the space business. They’re making television shows about us, right?”
Overall, “I’m very pleased with the image that we have. We provide great advantage to our nation. We provide great advantage to our allied partners around the globe,” he said.
With a bipartisan congressional mandate and growing aggression from Russia and China here on Earth, Raymond has more pressing concerns. With an emotionless, monotone, and soft-spoken demeanor, Raymond asserted that the Space Force isn’t attempting to upset the balance in space but is trying to respond to the actions of America’s adversaries. Raymond is tasked with protecting America’s vulnerable space architecture and a way of life that has become heavily dependent on satellites the size of school buses that have no way to defend themselves from attack — all of this while standing up a lean and lethal, budget-neutral bureaucracy.
Space presents a more challenging frontier for American military supremacy. Center for Strategic and International Studies space security expert Kaitlyn Johnson told the Washington Examiner that the Space Force has an image problem when compared to adversaries such as China and Russia. “The Space Force is fighting a battle right now of being taken seriously by the American public,” said Johnson. “It’s not being helped by the Space Force Netflix show. It’s not being helped by the drama over what they’re going to call their people.” Last week, the Space Force embraced the acronym “SpOC,” an apparent nod to Star Trek, but the agency denied that was intentional.
The obstacles the Space Force faces are much greater abroad, considering the actions of our adversaries. In 2007, China shot down one of its own satellites, scattering broken pieces into the atmosphere in a show of capability. It has since worked on developing directed-energy anti-satellite capabilities and recently flew a robotic space plane similar to the Air Force’s highly classified X-37B.
In 2017, Russia deployed a satellite that released a second satellite, which then fired a high-speed projectile. This past spring, Russia did it again; this time, the second satellite chased an American spy satellite, forcing it to maneuver away with limited fuel.
The signal was clear: The race for space weaponry is on. But America hasn’t shown its cards yet. “There is this kind of signaling that Russia is giving the United States as it tests these weapons in space,” said Johnson. “It’s like, ‘Hey, here we are, this is what we can do. Now you should be worried.’”
Heritage Foundation space security expert Dean Cheng told the Washington Examiner that satellites themselves can be used to ram other satellites. But that type of weaponry would render useless a multibillion-dollar tool.
“What is important to recognize here is that countries like Russia and China are demonstrating that beyond kamikaze, they are fielding actual dedicated systems,” he said. “The Chinese have demonstrated that from the ground, and the Russians, we think, are demonstrating it in space. As far as I know, in the open-source literature, we have not done anything like that.”
Cheng said the secretive X-37 program has the ability to deliver about a pickup truck’s worth of payload into space, and that could theoretically entail a co-orbital anti-satellite weapon. “If you haven’t tested it, and you haven’t tried it out, it’s kind of risky. So, that’s pretty much where we are, as far as I know,” he said.
Johnson said comments by Defense Department leaders such as Raymond show the U.S. is worried. Meanwhile, America is not doing any signaling of its own. “That’s part of the game,” she said of the celestial shows of force. “Convincing your adversary that the threat is real.”
For decades, the U.S. military and intelligence communities have had their own space forces. With the arrival of the U.S. Space Force, Air Force space assets were moved to the new service. Space components remain in the Army and the Navy, and it has yet to be determined how much will be folded into the new service or when.
Until then, a problem remains: Overclassification of space secrets. “Communicating just within those few [services] has been very difficult,” said Johnson. “If it’s even hard for us to communicate internally, how hard is it for us to communicate to our allies and our partners?” she posed. “What our capabilities are, what they can rely on, what maybe we need help with as other countries look to develop their own space forces. What would be great is for our allies to make not duplicative systems but systems that are integrated.”
Raymond told the Washington Examiner that he sees improvement. “There is significant progress being made in declassifying,” he said, underscoring the Space Force mission of deterring a conflict from beginning or extending into space. “It’s really hard to deter conflict if you can’t talk about the capabilities that you have,” Raymond added.
And still, the experts say the future looks bright. Raymond asserted that space engineering applications at universities are up. And the space sector, from NASA’s plan to go back to the moon in 2024, then Mars, to the rapidly growing commercial space industry, is driving interest in the Space Force. “We have more people knocking on our door, wanting to come into the Space Force, than we have room; we have billets to take people in,” he said.
“We’ve got a lot of moms and dads and kids saying, ‘I want to join the military, but I want to go into space,’” Raymond added. “It’s going to allow us to redefine a space professional and help us get to where we need to be.”
Cheng posed that the very creation of the Space Force, elevating war-fighting in the space domain to an armed service, was a signal to adversaries. “The creation of Space Force is our basic declaration that, ‘No, we understand space is actually important because of what transpires there,’” he said. “It is a signal both within our own bureaucracy, but at least as important to other players, Russia and China, in particular, that, ‘Don’t think that you can do something to our systems in space and get away with it.’”
After Trump first mentioned the service’s creation in 2018, Johnson was charged with writing a contrarian op-ed for CSIS on why the Space Force should not be created. “Space is incredibly hard,” she said, noting how Pentagon bureaucracy and acquisition processes hampered past space efforts in other services.
Raymond knows all this. That’s why he has been so focused on “inventing” a Space Force and its combatant command component, Space Command, in a different way. “Next year is all about integrating that command across the Department of Defense and across commercial industry, and with our allies, in ways that will be a model for others to follow,” he said.
Raymond hopes the startup-style design will nurture innovation in the coming years. “It’s a fascinating place to be in history right now as we begin this service,” he said. “The way I describe it, the first year has all been about inventing the force. And I use that term very purposefully, because it’s not just building it — it’s coming up with a new service for a new domain, for a new strategic environment, and to be able to look across the board at, how might we do things differently?” he explained. “We’re also inventing this command, not just to be the Space Command of today or the Space Force of today, but to be the Space Force for a hundred years from now.”
Abraham Mahshie is a Washington Examiner defense reporter.
