A Cyber Force makes more sense than a Space Force. The need for cybersecurity is constant over all of the existing branches of the Service, as well as for non-military American targets (like, say, social media platforms that can be hijacked for propaganda purposes to influence US elections). And the skills needed in that domain have no overlap whatsoever with the skills needed for the conventional roles of any of the other services.
But really, creating any sort of new branch of the military is going about matters in exactly the wrong way. In modern militaries, all of the forces work together, constantly in support of each other. If anything, we should be unifying all of the current branches of the military into a single service.
Oh, of course. But you said that your friend told you that the Space Force has less restrict funding lines. This is factually untrue at this point in time, and there’s no reason to believe that they will have any more flexibility with funding lines in the future. Congress has simultaneously been giving broader acquisition authorities to the other services and taking away flexibility in funding lines, so anyone’s best guess is that Space Force will be treated similarly. There is literally nothing inherent about the Space Force, either in concept or legislation, that backs up his assertion.
Thinking about this further, maybe he was thinking of the Space Development Agency, which was created last year, and originally intended to be a kind of hybrid of DARPA (which does have a great degree of funding flexibility) and a centralized authority for all space acquisitions for the Space Force and others. It has been scaled back to being only about one highly suspect satellite program, and no longer having any reporting to the Air Force or Space Force.
The irony of this terrible idea is that the Space Force bureaucracy - whether it costs half a billion per year or two billion a year - will steal money from all other military programs. In other words, instead of spending a billion more per year on satellites and whatnot, we will spend it on overhead. Another reason why this is such a fundamentally dumb idea.
But fiefdoms. More services / bureaus / forces means more admins with realms to control and more competitors to wrassle for funding and influence. Combining such units threatens massive redundancy. All those general officers will have to find honest jobs!
Do we know how a USSF was presented to this POTUS? Who designed the animations?
So, speaking with him tonight, it’s more of a “There was no 4-star General advocating for Space capabilities within the DoD. Space capabilities were at the whim of the AF, who would rather have money for traditional AF things, and since the 3-star AF Programmer is always a pilot, money always went to non-space AF capes first.”
Oh sure, I’ve heard this before. A few problems with it:
The last two SecAFs were off-the-charts pro-space. Investment in space programs went up by something like 30 percent over the last two years.
Congratulations, you now have the weakest four-star general in the Pentagon. Let’s see how powerful he will be.
There’s a one-to-one relationship with increasing overhead costs and losing buying power. The defense budget is likely to be flat for the next several years, so we are actually moving backward on buying any capabilities, be they space, air, land, or whatever.
The overriding problem with space capabilities is NOT money. It is acquisition problems. SBIRS is probably the worst acquisition program in DoD history. GPS III satellites were robustly funded, but the PNT payload was screwed up so the whole program was delayed; and oh yeah, the ground control system doesn’t work, was supposed to cost $2 billion, and is now costing $6.5 billion and rising. And, the Pentagon created a monopoly on military space launch on purpose and years later we ended up paying two to three times as much as we should have for rocket launches (though with extreme reliability!) Those are not money problems, and arguably they are the result of too much money.
The main problem with space isn’t that there aren’t enough satellites. The problem is that we have a long way to go with integrating space into war fighting, and need to come up with better options for what happens when we lose access to space because the Chinese or Russians are blowing up, blinding, or jamming our satellites. The bulk of those issues (not all) are best dealt with through the new combatant command. The loss of access to space is actually best dealt with by non-space people. For example, the Army has been doing interesting work on surviving the loss of GPS.
Anyway, I know we agree on this. I just had to get it off my chest.
In time , it will absorb the airforce. The jump from 5 gen to 6 gen fighter is going to be more aerospace than pure airbreather, while the follow on bomber to the B-21 will be aerospace as well.
Pure airforce missions will be allocated to cargo flights and predator drones and will most likely be National Guard.
Time on station beyond 5 days and exo orbital will be Navy.
Not to detract from the piledriving Trump, but isn’t he just giving everyone on the planet carte blanche to militarize space and escalate henceforth ? I thought that was a big no-no since the Cold War. Also I thought they were treaties about that (not that it matters one iota to Trump obviously, but yanno) ?