With the impeachment debate moving full
speed ahead, President Trump may be
hard-pressed to move forward on his larger agenda
in the months to come. But a few key policy issues
are likely to continue to be the subject of
intense debate. One, of course, is the president’s
much-touted and ill-conceived “wall” on the
U.S.-Mexico border. Another, less discussed but
also close to his heart, is the president’s desire
to build a Space Force as a sixth branch of the
U.S. armed forces,
alongside the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and
Coast Guard.
How quickly the Space Force
develops will depend in part on the
outcome of this year’s National
Defense Authorization Act, or
NDAA, which
in the short term at least is focused
on parallel proposals to create a “space
corps” in the House or a “space
command” in the Senate under the
supervision of the Air Force, which
may or may not be a stepping stone
towards a full-fledged Space Force.
As members of the Center for
International Policy’s
Sustainable Defense Task Force, we
have strongly urged that a Space Force
not be created, because it is
likely to increase bureaucratic waste,
encourage the development of costly
and unworkable high-tech weapons
systems, and to focus attention on the
further militarization of space rather
than how best to cooperatively manage
the risks to America’s civilian and
military space assets. It is also
likely to be costly—recent
reporting by Bloomberg
indicates even the limited Space
Development Agency would cost nearly
$11 billion over the next 5 years.
We’re far from the only ones
worried this will turn into another
bureaucratic nightmare. The House
Defense Appropriations subcommittee
expressed concerns about the “many
unanswered questions” left by the
Department’s proposal. The
subcommittee noted that “It is fully
within the Department’s current
authority to make space a higher
priority without creating a new
military service,” that would create
“additional overhead cost
and disruption.”
How did the Space Force rise to its
current place on the policy agenda in
the first place? There are two answers
to that question, one political and
one bureaucratic.
On the one hand, President Trump
has
embraced a proposal that he sees
as offering a sweeping military
initiative that he can point to, one
that will fulfil his fascination with
space vehicles while simultaneously
exciting his political base. The
latter was evident at a series of
political rallies that occurred in the
wake of the President’s introduction
of the Space Force concept, when
chants of “Space Force, Space
Force,” rippled through the crowds.
Trump’s support for the Space Force
concept gave a boost to an initiative
that members of Congress like Rep.
Mike Rogers, R-Alabama, and Rep. Jim
Cooper, D-Tennessee, had been
promoting for several years.
The second driver of the Space Force was
bureaucratic – an attempt to ensure that
military space priorities were not given
second place to highly costly, traditional Air
Force priorities like bombers and fighter
aircraft. In his role as chair of the National
Space Council, Vice President Mike Pence has
been a big booster of the Space Force, as was
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan
during his time at the Pentagon. Not
surprisingly, the concept has also been
supported by companies like Boeing, Shanahan’s
former employer; Lockheed Martin, whose CEOs
sit on the
advisory group for Pence’s Space Council;
and the companies’ joint venture, United
Launch Alliance, which
benefited from billions in taxpayer subsidies
and a previous space launch monopoly
There are a number of reasons to think
twice about building a full-blown Space Force.
The first can be expressed in two words:
excess bureaucracy. Former Secretary of
Defense James Mattis acknowledged this risk in
a 2017
letter to Congress on a prior iteration of
the Space Force concept, when he stated that “
at a time when we are trying to integrate the
Department’s joint warfighting functions, I do
not wish to add a separate service that would
likely present a narrower and even parochial
approach to space operations.” Mattis
acquiesced once it became clear that
developing a Space Force was the
administration’s party line – but he got it
right the first time.
Recent history is instructive. Despite a
laudatory goal—defeating improvised explosive
devices killing American troops—the new
bureaucracy created to combat that threat came
to be understood to be the
Manhattan project that bombed. The
Government Accountability Office found
that they failed to have a unified strategy,
and other military services continued to field
programs under their own banner.
The second reason to question the need for
a Space Force it is likely to increase the
risks of waste. Taxpayers should be wary of
proposals to accelerate development through
reduced accountability. In the case of the
Missile Defense Agency, the Union of Concerned
Scientists has indicated that a similar
approach meant that major missile defense
programs were “shielded
from oversight.”
A military-led effort may also undermine
our significant civilian concerns in space.
The vast majority of our satellites in space
are civilian, and we should be wary of efforts
to further weaponize the space domain.
Creating a separate service ultimately just
adds more bureaucracy between the troops and
the support they need. Congress, the
administration, and the contenders to serve as
Commander-in-Chief starting in 2021 should
bear this in mind before jumping on the Space
Force bandwagon.
William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms
and Security Project at the Center for
International Policy and a senior adviser to the
Center’s Security Assistance Monitor. He is the
author of the Monitor’s March 2018 report, “Trends
in Major U.S. Arms Sales 2017: A Comparison of the
Obama and ...
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Mandy Smithberger is the Director of the
Center for Defense Information at the Project On
Government Oversight.
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