Air Force leaders on Wednesday blasted a House plan to create a separate military service for space operations, saying it was no time for lawmakers to focus on organizational charts.
The plan, which the House intends to insert in its annual defense policy bill, would be costly to the Air Force and create unneeded bureaucracy as the service is attempting to advance its space capabilities, Secretary Heather Wilson said during a visit to the Senate.
“The Pentagon is complicated enough. We’re trying to simplify. This will make it more complex, add more boxes to the organization chart and cost more money,” she said. “If I had more money, I would put it into lethality not bureaucracy.”
The House legislation unveiled Tuesday would set up a U.S. Space Corps, which would answer to Wilson but be a separate military service within the Air Force, as well as a unified space command under U.S. Strategic Command.
“There is bipartisan acknowledgement that the strategic advantages we derive from our national security space systems are eroding,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., who lead a House Armed Services subcommittee, said in a released statement.
They said space operations are suffering under a “crippling organizational and management structure.”
Space is increasingly becoming a potential battlefield of concern for the military as other nations such as China advance their capabilities and the Air Force, which now carries the bulk of military responsibilities for the domain, recently announced its own changes to organization and management to get a better handle on the threats.
Gen. David Goldfein, Air Force chief of staff, said the service is transitioning from a benign view of space into a war-fighting stance and warned against the House proposal.
“As we’re making this transition, to get us anchored into a discussion about the organizational chart while we’re right now trying to move towards improving lethality and war fighting going forward quite frankly would slow us down,” Goldfein said.
