Experts worry the slow staffing of former President Donald Trump’s Space Force will keep it from reaching its full potential, even though President Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin embraced the military’s newest armed service.
“They’re a full player on the Defense Department team,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told the Washington Examiner in a Friday briefing of the still-fledgling armed service.
“The secretary, obviously, is in full support,” he added. “I know of no changes to either that support or to the continued progress of the Space Force in terms of advancing their recruiting, their retention, their capabilities.”
But Heritage Foundation defense analyst John Venable sees an impediment keeping the Space Force from reaching its potential: a congressional restriction in its charter that does not allow the service to take in required space professionals from the Army and the Navy.
“They need to start pushing the Space Force and Gen. [John] Raymond to start making things happen at a more accelerated pace,” the 30-year Air Force veteran recently told the Washington Examiner, referring to the chief of space operations.
The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that created the Space Force only allowed for the voluntary onboarding of personnel from the Air Force, under which most military space assets are located. The result has been an administrative assignment of some 15,000 Air Force personnel, who currently make up the vast majority of the service.
As of Friday, the Space Force confirmed to the Washington Examiner that some 2,700 of that personnel are now guardians, the term used to describe members of the new service.
Raymond recently boasted of a fast-paced Air Force onboarding, but Space Force officials later backtracked in a call with the Washington Examiner.
“The numbers are going up each and every day,” Raymond told the Defense Writers Group. “By the spring of this year, we’ll have about 6,400 active-duty guardians in the force.”
Space Force officials later clarified that Raymond meant that some 6,400 would become guardians by the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30.
Still, Venable said that does not count Army and Navy specialists responsible for managing military space assets.
“The Congress needs to authorize the Space Force to be able to go in and take key personnel and key systems from the other services and bring them on board,” he said. “All of the communications platforms and all of the things that are owned by the Army and the Navy need to be moved over into the service, but the Space Force doesn’t have the authorization to do that yet.”
Nonetheless, just 10 days ago, the White House mocked the military’s newest service before later tweeting an invitation for the Space Force to brief the media about its “important work.”
The following day, Raymond accepted the offer by White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
Biden in his Wednesday visit to the Pentagon slipped in a reference to the department’s protection of the United States’s space assets.
“We need to take on the dangers and opportunities of emerging technologies — enhance our capabilities in cyberspace to ensure that we are positioned to lead a new era of competition from the deep sea to outer space,” Biden said alongside Austin.
Still, Venable suggested that lofty platitudes won’t stand up to the rapid pace at which adversaries are developing space weapons that threaten America’s space-dependent way of life.
“The Space Force and what we’re doing and what the Trump administration did was huge for us,” he said. “The last administration basically realigned us into the real world that China and Russia had militarized space, and we’re behind.”
Turning to Congress, again, he outlined what the Space Force needs to move forward.
“They need to be authorized to move into Fiscal Year [20]22 beginning on Oct. 1 and start taking the personnel and assets, the key people and assets, from other services — not on a voluntary basis,” he said.
