When U.S. Space Cmdr. Gen. John Raymond stood at a Pentagon podium shortly after the 100-day mark of the Space Force, he related that hand-washing and social distancing were keeping space professionals safe. Still, he barely touched on another effect of the coronavirus epidemic: personnel numbers.
“Today, there’s one person in the United States Space Force, and that’s me,” he said at the March briefing. “We’ve identified who the second airman will be, and that’s Chief Master Sgt. Towberman.”
Indeed, 16,000 Air Force Space Command professionals are already administratively assigned to the new service. However, the federal government’s preoccupation with COVID-19 may hurt the new service at this nascent stage in its development, robbing it of talent and shared assets from other services, particularly if President Trump doesn’t get reelected.
“This particular virus that’s going through right now is going to send shivers up and down the spines of the entire apparatus of the administration and the federal government,” the Heritage Foundation’s research fellow John Venable told the Washington Examiner.
Venable, a 25-year Air Force veteran and defense policy analyst, recently authored a paper arguing that the Space Force must act fast if it is to have a clean liftoff. He proposed a timeline to fully transfer Air Force personnel by the end of 2022 and all other Department of Defense space assets by 2024.
“This is going to start fraying at the edges,” he worried.
Venable argued that despite the coronavirus turmoil, the president and Congress need to stay focused on reaching those deadlines to stand up the Space Force with space professionals and assets from across the services.
“The oomph from both the secretary of the Air Force, from the president of the United States, and from Congress right now is powerful,” he said. “It’s so important to not lose focus and to keep the momentum going.”
Raymond admitted in an interview with the Mitchell Institute on Wednesday that training had already been disrupted.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Brad Webb, air education and training commander, told the Washington Examiner Friday that physical distancing requirements in Air Force basic training have already led to scaling back the number of new cadets.
Webb could not put his finger on exactly how many future Space Force personnel will not be entering the service on time, but he said that Air Force and Space Force basic training is running at about 60% of standard capacity.
The Air Force Academy is due to graduate 88 cadets to the Space Force in May, and more than 1,800 airmen from 23 different Air Force organizations that have space responsibilities may also join soon, Raymond told the Mitchell Institute.
For now, following Chief Master Sgt. Roger Towberman’s swearing-in ceremony on April 3, the Space Force still stands at two members.
But swearing in new personnel is not Raymond’s only challenge, said Venable.
More than numbers
Venable recounted a story from when he was a junior airman to explain the challenge the Space Force confronts now. He was asked to join a new wing and new squadron at what was then Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina.
The Air Force didn’t want to give up a fighter squadron, so it asked for volunteers — much in the way the services are being asked now for people to step up and recommission in the Space Force.
“What they gave up was their worst,” he recalled. “What we got was — we called them ‘hangar queens’ — 24 hangar queens, and then trying to make those aircraft into sustainable first-rate fighters took us a long time. That was the wrong way of doing business.”
That timeline must happen now, while President Trump is still in office and can save Space Force funding and buy-ins across the DOD, Venable argues. Should Trump not be reelected, Venable worries the president’s excitement and personal interest in the Space Force’s success will take a back seat to other national priorities.
“He’s been a champion of the Space Force,” said Venable, who believes the other services will fight to protect their personnel and assets from being absorbed by the new Space Force.
“It’s that old adage: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Objects at rest stay at rest,” he said. “If we do not continue that move and accelerate the progression of standing up this service, then it’s going to go in the other direction, and we may never see those other uniforms coming into the Space Force.”
Raymond will need to execute the mission both offensively and defensively, explained Venable. That means a joint force capability with a new mindset and a new culture.
“What’s important is that the command and control of those assets rests under one authority, and that would be the Space Force,” he said. “When you do that, you begin to develop a couple of things: You begin to develop a warfighting culture that is servicewide.”
Allowing only volunteers from other services to join is a start, he thinks. Still, it will not make for a capable and robust service to protect U.S. space architecture and the warfighting capability that will be required.
The new space race is already on. China, Russia, and India have shown they can disable or destroy vital satellites.
Raymond told the Mitchell Institute that he is not expecting the Space Force to rival the other U.S. armed services in size.
“I’m going into this with, ‘Hey, we need to be agile. We need to be small,'” he said. “We’re never going to be the size of an Army or Navy or Air Force. We’re a very high-tech service, and we want to design it that way upfront.”
Raymond said the Space Force is currently looking at where space capabilities are housed in the Army and Navy and how they might be incorporated without “breaking” those services.
“I think there’s also a great opportunity to unify efforts and architecture, you know? What does the national security space architecture look like?” he proposed. “We all have to be rowing in the same direction. We have to go fast. We have to reduce duplication of effort.”
Raymond was careful not to go into detail about pilfering talent from other services, instead describing a new way to staff the force.
“On the personnel side, we have been given a clean sheet of paper on how we want to do human capital management. I don’t think we have to do it the way we’ve done business in the past,” he said.
Instead, Raymond said the force would increase the use of civilians and contractors, for example, making direct hires from the industry.
“I’d really like to do that, get some significant industry talent to come in and be part of the Space Force as well,” he said.
In recent months, Raymond said the Space Force advertised for 40 positions at the Pentagon and received more than 5,700 applications.
“Our plan is to be really selective, get the best talent, and with the interest and excitement that’s being generated across all the sectors of space,” he said. “There’s a bunch of excitement here. And I’m comfortable. Although it’s going to take us some time, I’m comfortable we are going to get the talent that we need to be able to do this.”
Raymond described a small, “custom-built” force of about 16,000 members.
“We don’t want to be big and large and bureaucratic and cumbersome,” he said.
“The challenge right now is making sure that that organization is elevated to the new game,” offered Venable. “That should all be progressing right now unabated. It should be completely going forward — as if there were no virus.”
Raymond said the mission to launch the Space Force has not slowed.
“We’re rightly focused on the priorities of handling or participating in handling the COVID crisis,” he said. “But at the same time, we haven’t taken our foot off the accelerator in establishing the Space Force and U.S. Space Command.”
