DigitalSea wrote:

I'm all for the US Space Force. Space Dominance is what has allowed us to keep such a watchful eye over the world. With it getting cluttered with adversaries, we'll need to take a step back and re-evaluate our methods of control. (Of course, I'm welcoming Ozair's input on this subject because he's always a source of plentiful knowledge on these forums. Please do post in response to this!)

Seabear wrote:

So when the Space Force establish its own Academy... complete with Space Cadets?

Tugger wrote:

The Air Force already has a good name and group for what has been the US military's connection to space: Space Command
A coordinating command that works to ensure the aspects the military needs addressed in space or by spaced based elements are covered and managed appropriately. They work with partner nations and within agreed protocol to achieve the needed goals. Without directly militarizing space.

Tugg

Dutchy wrote:

Will not happen, even the Pentagon is against it. I think people are just shaking their heads and leave it at that.

Seabear wrote:

USA TODAY: Space Force: Pence announces new military service

https://usat.ly/2KF7a88

So when the Space Force establish its own Academy... complete with Space Cadets?

DL717 wrote:

That’s each branch defending its turf. There is a ton of rediculous and wasteful overlap that could be reduced may making changes to how the military is presently structured that would save billions. There was nothing more amusing then ordering a part for something and seeing 4-5 different prices between the branches for the same exact part.

LMP737 wrote:

DL717 wrote:

That’s each branch defending its turf. There is a ton of rediculous and wasteful overlap that could be reduced may making changes to how the military is presently structured that would save billions. There was nothing more amusing then ordering a part for something and seeing 4-5 different prices between the branches for the same exact part.

And adding another branch will solve that?

DL717 wrote:

I’m actually talking about a full restructuring of the military to eliminate duplication and waste.

Flighty wrote:

Yes, the Russians and Chinese have demonstrated anti-Sat weapons. It is unclear what the whole scenario might be.

I believe that as a precautionary measure, the US military has redundant communication systems to deal with an internet outage and orbital damage. To the extent that's NOT true, clearly that is a worry for us, and we need to firstly make sure our things in orbit are safe. And anyhow, losing important sats will wreak havoc for civilians. We probably should not make it easy to go into that scenario.

trpmb6 wrote:

It's kind of that mutually assured destruction scenario that prevents everyone from taking out satellites. At least via destructive means. If US destroys a Russian satellite it doesn't do us much good as we then put all of our satellites in danger of debris. There may be a short term gain. But long term is negative.

That being said, I'm guessing we have the capability to dock to satellites and render them inoperable. It's just costly and, as noted, everyone has redundancies.

trpmb6 wrote:

Yeah, while a lot of people seem to kind of brush the whole idea of a space force off as a big joke. I do kind of see a need to protect our satellites. They are just that important.

Imagine the hysteria if another country took out just a few of our communication sats. The headlines (which you probably wouldn't be able to view, at least easily) would be: "Why hasn't something been done to protect our satellites!"

trpmb6 wrote:

I was not thinking about protecting satellites from existing debris floating about. Though that is of concern! Fortunately there are already commercial ventures that are working on that exact problem.

I am more concerned about the weaponizing of space and what that could mean for our own, extremely important to national security, satellites. I assume there are protocols in place should all of our communication satellites, GPS satellites, etc, were to be knocked out. But what if one of those protocols was to ensure that they were never destroyed in the first place?

You're right though. Where do you draw the line between peaceful defender and threatening aggressor. At what point does a missile defense system go from being a defender to an aggressor "system". Just a bit of software right? Maybe a hardware addon. I imagine it wouldn't be that difficult.

Creation of a Space Force as a sixth branch of the U.S. military will be less about traditional military structure than about development and acquisition of weapons and other systems to address the now militarily contested arena of space, according to Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan.

“The Space Force has been about, ’How do we accelerate providing new space capabilities?” Shanahan said. “And so most of the conversation has been around, how do we change our development and acquisition process?”

Speaking with a small group of reporters from across the county by video conference late last week, Shanahan said the Space Force championed by President Donald Trump would be far smaller than other services. The combined military and civilian force would comprise about 20,000 people — approximately the size of Eglin Air Force Base, Shanahan noted.

Shanahan said the 20,000-person figure is based on the number of people across all of the military services now doing jobs that would be part of the Space Force mission.

“And you know, from where I sit, there’s not a lot of extra money to go around,” Shanahan said. “So we’re not going to go big.”

Another aspect of the Department of Defense’s approach to space is something called the Space Development Agency, which will be designed to eliminate duplication of efforts among the different military services’ pursuit of space defense technology, Shanahan explained.

“And why that, to me, is really great as a taxpayer is that we’re going to solve the same problem maybe once, instead of four or five times,” Shanahan said.

The agency also will work to take advantage of commercially developed space technology, Shanahan explained.

“If we think about how SpaceX has transformed getting to space, because it’s now much lower cost, people can put more satellites into space so that whole economics are changing,” Shanahan said.

“This is a reversal of, in the old days, (when) government would develop the technology and then commercial (enterprises) would adopt it,” Shanahan said. (The commercial world) has developed the technology, now we’ll tailor it to our military applications.”

The Pentagon hasn’t released its official cost estimate to stand up a brand-new space service, but a top defense budget analyst has crunched the numbers and believes it may cost $550 million more per year for a Space Force — at most.

In order to add the headquarters staffing needed to run a Space Force, the Defense Department would need anywhere from an additional $300 million to $550 million per year on top of the money it already budgets for space personnel, operations and procurement, according to a new report by Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

All told, that amounts to a boost of $1.5 billion to a total of $2.7 billion over a five-year period.

That figure is roughly in line with Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan’s public statements last week that the initial costs of a Space Force could be as low as $5 billion and definitely within the “single digits” of billions of dollars.

And it’s a rebuke of the Air Force’s own estimate, signed off by Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, which predicted almost $13 billion in additional cost over the first five years of the Space Force’s creation.

The Air Force’s estimate initially sent a wave of panic among members of Congress, but Harrison decried the Air Force figures as “malicious compliance” meant to kill the Space Force plan by overinflating its costs — a characterization he stands by.

“They were not asked to produce that cost estimate, and they did it with the largest possible scope, without sufficient caveats to let people know that that was much more than the cost of the Space Force,” he told reporters in a Nov. 19 briefing. “And they previously made it known that they don’t like this idea.”

Wilson, for her part, defended the Air Force’s cost estimate last week, saying it was scoped appropriately to reflect the wishes of President Donald Trump to create a completely independent space force.

“Whatever is put forward needs to implement the president’s proposal. What we put forward was in the cost estimates to implement a standalone department," she said Thursday. "Our estimate that we gave to a lot of people in the Pentagon in September was the cost of a fully fledged stand-alone department and also a unified combatant command.”

Wilson’s choice to include the new combatant command — U.S. Space Command — and new procurement organization, called the Space Development Agency, in its proposal is an important distinction from Harrison’s estimates, which include neither.

Nor does Harrison’s assessment include a near-term bill for creating a Space Force, though he believes that the costs for one-time items like designing a uniform, emblem and flag would be incidental.

“Most of this is just a simple matter of organization and whether or not you think that is needed. The added cost is, you know, a handful of F-35s, or less than the [Defense Department] audit” he joked. “I don’t think cost actually should be that big of a factor in their decisions. I think the bigger factor is whether or not people think it’s needed. That’s what the debate should be about.”

To create his cost estimate, Harrison put forth three different options of how a space service could be organized.

The first, a Space Corps, would function independently but fall under the Department of the Air Force, similar to the Marine Corps’ placement under the Department of the Navy. The Space Corps would be comprised of the entirety of the Air Force’s space units, known at the 14th Air Force. Harrison estimates a total cost of $11.3 billion per year for that option, with only $300 million in new funds needed per year.

The second option, termed “Space Force Lite,” includes all of the Air Force’s space units as well as the space functions of the Navy and Army: the Army’s 1st Space Brigade, the Navy’s Program Executive Office Space Systems and the Navy Satellite Operations Center at Naval Air Station Point Magu. For that concept, an additional $400 million would be needed for a total of $13.4 billion annually.

Finally, a “Space Force Heavy” would add in some functions from the Army and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency used for space situational awareness and midcourse missile intercept capabilities. That would cost $21.5 billion total per year, with $500 million in new funding necessary.

So where do the new costs come from? New headquarters staff, and for the Space Force options, staffing for the secretary of the Space Force, Harrison said.

To arrive at those numbers, he set a baseline of 500 personnel for headquarters staff and added 5 percent of the services’ anticipated workforce size — coincidentally, about the same ratio of Coast Guard personnel to its own headquarters staffing, Harrison said.

Much of the cost growth cited in the Air Force’s own estimate is linked to an increase of about 13,000 personnel for new headquarters staff, direct reporting units and forward-operating activities, a “Space Force element,” and more staff for U.S. Space Command.

Harrison criticized the service’s proposal as being unclear on the role those new billets would perform.

“The Air Force was either adding new activities — things that aren’t being done today — which is a separate question from creating a new service, so they should not included them; or they are not transferring over all of the people who do space-related jobs in the air forces,” Harrison said. “They could be assuming that they’re going to keep some of those people and not move them over.”

If that’s the case, it could rack up the Defense Department budget. Increasing the headquarters staff of the Space Force or U.S. Space Command is another potential way to increase costs, Harrison said, but Congress has some power to limit that by putting staffing limits in place.

Whether the Space Force becomes a reality will be up to Congress, which is the only part of government able to create a new military service. With the Democrats controlling the House, successful passage is a “coin toss” that will be dependent on the specific proposal put forward in Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget, and how much support it seemingly has in Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Shanahan, Harrison said.

“How big of a scope do they envision? How disruptive is it going to be perceived as being? And I think another political factor, quite frankly is: Is this seen as being Trump’s Space Force, or is this something that the military is seen on get on board with?”

A pair of California lawmakers are concerned that the Defense Department’s focus on the newly established Space Development Agency could erode the progress of its legacy space technology procurement arm, the Space and Missile Systems Center.

In an April 16 letter to acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan and obtained by Defense News, Reps. Ted Lieu, a Democrat, and Ken Calvert, a Republican, wrote that the current iteration of SDA is duplicative and risks undermining the recent organization of Space and Missile Systems Center, otherwise known as SMC.

"The SDA as proposed raises questions about how it will fit with our existing military space structure. Specifically, it is unclear how the SDA as proposed will impact the role of SMC, a unit of Air Force Space Command and the longtime center of technical excellence for developing, acquiring, fielding and sustaining military space systems,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter.

Rather than creating a new organization in SDA, Lieu and Calvert proposed an expansion of SMC that would “leverage the existing aerospace ecosystem built around SMC and create new synergies with those entities.”

SMC is located at Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo, California, which Lieu represents on Capitol Hill. Calvert represents the Riverside region of the state, located between Los Angeles and San Diego.

"The notion that moving a piece of SMC's space portfolio out of the aerospace hub in southern California will have a net-positive impact on military space acquisition fails the test of logic,” they wrote.

“A new name on the door and less proximity to innovators and expertise will not help the department address the fundamental challenge with space acquisition: the Pentagon's procurement regulations. SDA seems to be an organizational solution to a process problem that will most likely result in more bureaucracy, not more capability."

...

The Pentagon will stand up a new combatant command before the end of the month, with the official launch of U.S. Space Command set for Aug. 29.

Speaking at a meeting of the National Space Council on Tuesday, Gen. Joe Dunford, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced the date for the standup of the new organization, the first combatant command to be fully stood up since Africa Command was created in 2009.

Upon its standup, SPACECOM head Gen. Jay Raymond will inherit 87 units, covering “missile warning, satellite operations, space control and space support," Dunford said. Raymond has previously said he expects to start with about 642 personnel pulled from U.S. Strategic Command. Army Lt. Gen. James Dickinson has been nominated to become the deputy commander.

Raymond has acknowledged that the standup of the new organization won’t be easy, telling members of Congress in written testimony from June that “my first priority will be to ensure the seamless transition of the command and control of critical space capabilities that the nation and the joint force depend on each and every day. Simultaneously we need to ensure we take steps to strengthen readiness and lethality as we complete our shift from a permissive environment to a posture for warfighting.”

...

Ozair wrote:

Space Command is happening and set for 29th of August. This is the first big step now towards a Space Force.

Important question, will all the staff wear zoom bags…

Space Command to launch Aug. 29

The Pentagon will stand up a new combatant command before the end of the month, with the official launch of U.S. Space Command set for Aug. 29.

Speaking at a meeting of the National Space Council on Tuesday, Gen. Joe Dunford, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced the date for the standup of the new organization, the first combatant command to be fully stood up since Africa Command was created in 2009.

Upon its standup, SPACECOM head Gen. Jay Raymond will inherit 87 units, covering “missile warning, satellite operations, space control and space support," Dunford said. Raymond has previously said he expects to start with about 642 personnel pulled from U.S. Strategic Command. Army Lt. Gen. James Dickinson has been nominated to become the deputy commander.

Raymond has acknowledged that the standup of the new organization won’t be easy, telling members of Congress in written testimony from June that “my first priority will be to ensure the seamless transition of the command and control of critical space capabilities that the nation and the joint force depend on each and every day. Simultaneously we need to ensure we take steps to strengthen readiness and lethality as we complete our shift from a permissive environment to a posture for warfighting.”

...

https://www.defensenews.com/space/2019/ ... ch-aug-29/