Trump’s Air Force secretary calls for warfighting focus to build Space Force budget

As the Biden administration prepares its first defense budget, the Space Force is playing catch-up.

The new service will have its own budget, separate from the Air Force’s spending plan, and will have to chase some threats posed by adversaries to better protect America’s space assets, said Heather Wilson, one of former President Donald Trump’s Air Force secretaries.

“We built a glass house before the invention of stones,” Wilson told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview.

“We had very fragile equipment that was really important to the conduct of operations all around the world,” she said. “Adversaries saw what we were able to do enabled by space and started to develop the capability to deny us the use of space in crisis or war.”

Wilson explained that around 2007, adversaries such as China and Russia began to develop weapons to destroy American telecommunications and spy satellites in orbit.

SPACE FORCE IS SUDDENLY THE GO-TO ARMED SERVICE

“The Air Force had to begin to shift its strategy for how it would deal with that new threat and think of space as a warfighting domain,” she said.

Wilson tells the story of preparing to deliver her opening statement when confirmed as secretary of the Air Force in 2017.

In her draft, she intended to use the words “space” and “warfighter” in the same sentence until an Obama administration holdover said it was not allowed and removed it.

“That changed when I became secretary,” she said. “We faced the cold, hard reality that adversaries were going to hold hostage our space capabilities during a crisis or a conflict. That was a vulnerability, and we needed to address it.”

That meant directing attention and resources to space “warfighting strategies and capabilities,” Wilson explained.

The Air Force, where what is now the Trump-created Space Force then almost exclusively resided, had to pivot to “focus on supporting the warfighter and being able to ensure that the most important capabilities would be there for us in a crisis or conflict.”

‘We dominate in space’

While space operators have long been part of the Air Force, the new service now has its own voice in budget discussions. That voice belongs to Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond.

“We have got to go faster in modernizing our space capabilities and delivering capabilities and putting them in the hands of the warfighter,” Raymond told members of Congress Friday. “We will balance the need to protect capabilities that we have on orbit now while shifting to a more defendable architecture in the future.”

China’s and Russia’s space warfighting capabilities include missiles that can shoot down satellites, directed energy they can use to disable them, and space-based weapons that can fire projectiles or grab on to a satellite while in orbit.

“We need to take into account that threat,” Wilson said. “The truth is, we’re better at space than any other country. So there’s no question that we dominate in space. We have to protect what we have.”

Raymond said partnerships with the commercial industry and a new acquisition process will help Space Force catch up.

“We remain the best in the world in space, but that superiority gap is shrinking, and so that’s why we established the Space Force, that’s why we established U.S. Space Command, and we are all about going fast and moving at speed,” he said.

“Commercial industry is doing in months what is taking the government to do in years,” he said. “It all begins with force design and designing the architecture of space with a new business model in mind and with protection in mind.”

Raymond said Space Force is already benefiting from cheaper launch costs, saving the U.S. government $8 billion over the past eight years out of the National Security Space Launch budget.

The private sector launch capability has also made it easier to place satellites into orbit. Space Force will first need to protect and defend those vulnerable capabilities then shift to more defendable space architecture.

Raymond has been on the public relations campaign for 17 months promoting the Space Force mission while competing with Steve Carell’s Netflix comedy with the same name to explain that it’s not about “boots on the moon” but protecting GPS, cellphones, and all American commodities tied to space, as well as military capabilities that defend the nation.

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Once Space Force’s newness fades, Wilson worries budget dollars may shrink, too.

“I worry about the Space Force in the budget battles in the Pentagon,” she said. “When they stop being the neat, novel, new thing, will they fare well in those budget battles?”

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