vox | “What was once peaceful and uncontested is now crowded and adversarial,” Vice President Mike Pence said in an August 2018 address
at the Pentagon announcing initial plans for the force. “It’s not
enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have
American dominance in space. And so we will.”
Bringing that vision to pass has not been easy for the Trump administration.
The executive branch does not have the power to
unilaterally create new branches of the military; the Constitution gives
Congress the sole power “to raise and support armies.” And as Ward has reported,
the White House faced a military that was not in favor of a Space Force
— a former Navy secretary said it was “a solution in search of a
problem,” and then-Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told
reporters last summer: “The Pentagon is complicated enough. This will
make it more complex, add more boxes to the organization chart.”
In a sort of compromise, rather than delivering on the
administration’s initial grandiose vision for space dominance, Congress
attempted to answer both the White House and Pentagon’s concerns.
“Part of the argument for Space Force was that space was
kind of getting lost within the Air Force, with its focus on air
dominance,” Kaitlyn Johnson, an associate fellow and associate director
of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, told The Verge.
The Space Force, then, will focus just on space — and on
countering Russia and China there — as the Trump administration wanted.
But, in response to military concerns, it will not add a completely new
structure to the Pentagon, housed as it is in the Air Force. (Its
leaders will, however, have the authority to make operational and
training decisions without consulting the Air Force.)
Beyond the creation of a chief of space operations, the
Space Force will give the military a few other new top-level officials,
most notably, assistant secretaries dedicated to developing new
technologies and creating strategies for orbital warfare.
