Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond made the case Friday for the growing armed service as it faces a flat defense budget while in need of additional personnel and platforms to fend off Russian and Chinese threats in space. But some experts say the latest service’s cry of fiscal poverty is overblown.
Hardly 18 months old, Space Force has just 5,200 “Guardians” and some 16,000 total personnel, including administratively assigned Air Force space professionals. While managing satellite launch sites in Florida and California, Space Operations Command in Colorado, and Space Systems Command in California, some 60 space-related departments are still housed within the Navy and Army. Bringing those over will cost money, as will developing and deploying the offensive and defense measures to protect America’s space architecture.
“Our competitors, our adversaries are moving really fast,” Raymond said at a media event hosted by David Ignatius.
Raymond described how China has operationalized its space weapons to include directed energy and a satellite with a robotic arm that can grab onto a satellite in space. A decade ago, China proved it could shoot down a satellite.
SPACE FORCE IS SUDDENLY THE GO-TO ARMED SERVICE
The creation of the Space Force means a service chief sits at the table of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, partners with the commercial space industry, and makes a case to Congress for its budget.
“Space is fully integrated into the thinking across the department,” Raymond said. “We elevate from a service chief our voice and requirements. We elevate our voice in budget.”
Presently, the Space Force represents some 2% of the Pentagon’s $720 billion budget. Some security experts say that’s not enough.
“The Space Force needs an increased budget to be able to deal with the threat challenges,” retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula told the Washington Examiner.
“He needs to ensure that the Space Force gets the resources, the manpower, and the authorities to integrate the numerous organizations and agencies out there with a role in space into the Space Force to fulfill its mandate. Otherwise, why did we stand up a Space Force?” said Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
Raymond made the case that more commercial launches are already pushing costs down and more efficiencies will come in time.
“We really believe that the business model that is developing with commercial industry and an assembly line-type of model will allow us to diversify our architectures to be able to do so at much lower costs,” he said.
Space Systems Command, the former Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base, California, will stand up later this summer and carry some of that acquisition responsibility.
But Dan Grazier of the Project On Government Oversight doesn’t buy it.
“The panic over the so-called flat budgets, I think, is a little overblown,” he said, referring to President Joe Biden’s proposed flat defense budget of $715 billion.
“The services and the Pentagon and the defense industry, they all kind of make these plans on like 3% to 5% growth rate,” he said. “None of this is to say that China and Russia are completely benign and that we shouldn’t take appropriate steps to make sure that we aren’t completely overwhelmed, but it’s also very important that we make smart decisions.”
The 10-year Marine Corps veteran did not support the creation of the Space Force, viewing Space Command in Colorado Springs as a sufficient interlocutor that was capable of coordinating the space needs of all of the services.
“The Space Force is a support force for the other services,” he said.
“When you have a separate service, all of a sudden that separate service has its own budget,” he added. “It starts to establish its own institutional culture and traditions, and there’s all of a sudden this big, gigantic bureaucratic barrier between the force and the support force.”
Deptula said Space Force was stood up to unify the space components scattered across the forces. If Space Force doesn’t get the budget it needs now, it won’t be able to integrate those components.
“We need to move out on that quick and fast because if we don’t, what happens in large bureaucracies is then, they dig their feet in,” he said. “They go, ‘Well, see, there’s a precedent. We don’t need to become part of the Space Force because we’re an effective organization.’”
Grazier believes the services will fight to retain their space components at greater cost to the taxpayer.
“You’re gonna have the Space Force that’s kind of off doing its own thing, and the Army and Navy are going to be doing their own space thing,” he said. “It’s going to end up costing even more money.”
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Still, Raymond argues a unified service with an appropriate budget and partnerships with allies globally will impose costs on adversaries intent on threatening U.S. national security.
“We want to make sure that every American and every one of our global partners around the world has those space capabilities at their fingertips when they need it,” he said. “We’ve got to be able to protect and defend, and we’ve also got to be able to impose costs if needed to change that calculus.”