The Air Force doesn’t want to let go of its control over space operations. Doug Loverro, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense For Space Policy and career-long Air Force space officer, emphatically disagrees with the Air Force Association. He agrees with the administration that we need a separate “Space Force”, but the Air Force is fighting to keep this turf under its own control.
Writing an opinion piece in SpaceNews, he explains the AFA’s argument as follows:
According to the theory of warfare promulgated by the Air Force Association (AFA), Congress should reject President Trump’s proposal to establish a U.S. Space Force since it cannot apply lethal kinetic force. There is no point, they contend, in having a space service until we are ready to send troops into orbit or deploy weapons from space. Their policy position reflects the view, shared by many, that space is simply a supporting capability — a critical one to be sure — but not one merits its own military service.
He goes on to explain how the Air Force is using an obsolete view of modern warfare to argue their position.
Perhaps the most disappointing facet of the AFA thesis is that it reflects the same kind of anachronistic thinking that characterized Army criticisms about an Air Force – that air forces could not seize and hold territory and therefore could not be considered a separate service. That was a notion intended to undermine the value of what air power could do by accentuating what it could not. Thankfully, military thinkers and insightful legislators at the time recognized that these were hollow arguments that looked more backward than forward on the character of war and rejected them as a reason to not create the Air Force. The same holds true today.
Mr. Laverro makes a very strong case that the Air Force, in its parochial zeal, misunderstands how the whole system of modern American military war doctrine works together.
It is absolutely certain that if they wanted to, space forces could bring kinetic effects from space. But the true power that space brings to the modern battlefield is not measured by the size of its bombs, but by the range and depth of its impact acting in concert with the other three domains.
NASA is the “National Aeronautics and Space Administration”, but for quite some time we’ve lived with the fiction that NASA has any significant impact in the aero domain (although they do have some low-funded research programs). Clearly the Air Force would like to rename itself something like the Aerospace Force, so that they can claim this domain as their own. Turf is power and funding. But is that really a reasonable position? Operations in the atmosphere and operations in space are even more fundamentally different than the land versus the sea.
I agree with the author that its time that to separate these entities so that each can concentrate on the unique requirements of its job. We do not need emulate Hollywood and paste a “Stargate Command” onto a military branch that does its work with air-breathing jet engines attached to wings as opposed to fire-breathing rockets attached to any shape you’d care to imagine.
3 replies on “Space Turf War”
What would the Space Force protect us against? ET?
Listen, I’m a born and bred scifi lover. But the idea of a Space Force is silly. The Air Force can do whatever needs to be done right now. If the situation in Space changes, I’ll re-evaluate my position.
Time to re-evaluate your position. We’re not fighting ET, we are fighting human enemies who use the space domain. Or would you prefer to let China place weapons to accomplish EMP attacks or direct physical attacks from orbit? Or (longer term) establish enough of a presence on the Moon that they literally claim it for themselves? How about cyber control of the communication networks that are about to be deployed, and will eventually become the backbone of all communications on Earth?
I don’t want to pick solely on China as an adversary. There are several up-and-coming space-capable polities, including Iran, India, and Korea. The cat is out of the bag. SpaceX is breaking the trail not just for Blue Origin, but for everybody else who lusts for a controlling presence above our planet.
China’s intentions are not benign. I don’t know how much of this discussion you can follow, but China is most clearly signalling that they want total control over the world, and this is just one part of it:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/a-mysterious-hacker-gang-is-on-a-supply-chain-hacking-spree/
Operations and equipment for use in space are vastly different than those used in the air. The engineering is different, the physics is different, and the methods are different. It’s better to develop a close cadre equipped with the mindset and education to deal with it.
What has been going on is that the Air Force is letting their space asset groups wither for funding, because the fly guys have control. This is a fight that’s been going on for over a decade, and it’s only visible now because Pence and Trump made a big deal of it.
I too thought it sounded kind of silly when Trump first brought it up several months ago. Having thought about it, and studied the problem a bit, I no longer think it’s silly. In all seriousness, I think that there is a marketing problem with the term “space force.” We need a better term that doesn’t evoke such a visceral “sci-fi nonsense” reaction.
Terminology aside, we now have a legitimate need now for a military presence in space which we did not have even ten years ago. For the last fifty years, we were pretty much the only space-going country. (Okay, Russia, but they were far, far behind us.) Back when we were the only people who had visited the Moon, we could pretend that it was like Antarctica and issue platitudes about how space “belongs to everyone” and is only about scientific discovery. But that was always nonsense, we could just afford to pretend because we had no serious competitors.
That has changed and is further changing rapidly. We are in the midst of a new space race with bad state actors. Also a few benign state actors, and commercial actors. It’s getting suddenly crowded and the only way we can defend ourselves in the future is by being proactive now. NASA itself may be arguably obsolete, but the need for a military presence in space is becoming acute.
(Full disclosure: I grew up very near JSC, went to school with astronauts’ kids and had many friends and relatives who worked at JSC or for NASA contractors. I was always a huge fan of NASA and whenever accidents happened, it affected me and my community personally. But like Bill I have come to understand that NASA became a victim of its own culture and bureaucracy and went from leading technological development to watching it pass by.)