Trump's Space Force -- going the wrong direction

In My Humble Opinion
1

About Trump’s ‘Space Force’ branch added to the Armed Forces.
Not just twittering about creating a logo that is an obvious copy of the Star Trek Spacefleet one…

But the whole idea of adding another service. That seems to be heading in the wrong direction. When the real historical military movement is toward reducing separate service branches. So in practice you see ‘Combined operations’, ‘Joint strike Forces’, ‘Theater Commander’ etc.

The trend is toward eliminating separate services (Army, Navy, Air Force, etc) and having one unified commander over all the forces in the conflict. This trend has been apparent ever since General Eisenhower was made 'Supreme Commander" over D-Day* in WWII. This has happened even more in recent conflicts, like the Iraq War coalition forces had a single general with authority over all the forces involved, naval, army, air force, even spies & resistance fighters inside the country. And military forces from various countries.

In fact, except for historical tradition (“it’s the way we’ve always done it”), there seems little reason for still having separate branches like army, navy, & air force at all’ They should be merged into a unified military. That’s what we do anyway every time there is a conflict – we appoint a Consolidated Command, with command authority over all forces in the theater, whichever service they are from. Even when they come from different countries, like in Iraq.

And every time, it takes a lot of effort to build that ‘unified’ command structure, and get it working, and there are glitches at first (which can cost both materials and lives), and can lose battles. We’d be better off to permanently eliminate the separate service branches and just run our military as a unified force.

  • A near-failure at D-Day was Omaha Beach, which was the toughest of the 5 landings. And much of the problems there were related to poor communications & coordination between the forces involved. The naval ships stayed too far offshore in their pre-invasion shelling, so it was ineffective – mostly didn’t hit the German defense forces. Then the ships also stayed too far offshore when launching the invasion forces, so that many of them capsized in the waves before ever reaching the beach (all but 1 of the tanks, for example). And the planes dropping bombs went too far past the beach; most of their bombs came down inland instead on the German beach defenses. (These pilots wanted to avoid dropping bombs onto american soldiers storming the beach. But the plane radios couldn’t talk to the army radios carried by the soldier landing parties, Nor could they speak with the gunners on the naval ships.)
2

I thought the whole point of having separate commands is so each branch procures what they actually want as opposed to what other branches tell them they want. The Army and Air Force post-WW2 were heavily in favor of getting rid of aircraft carriers and instead focusing on nuclear bombers as the primary means of national defense which was incredibly short-sighted in retrospect.

3

The OP is right, though I disagree with the idea of eliminating services. Space Force is a really dumb idea. We will look back in ten years and see that it is as big a conceptual mistake as the F-35, and count up the billions spent on bureaucracy that could have been spent on capabilities.

4

That seems historically incorrect. i.e. the Air Force used to be the Army Air Force until it became its own branch in 1945.

The concepts of “combined operations” you described (such as Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC) refer to a more integrated military doctrine to standardize things like communications and logistics between various branches to make it easier to coordinate operations. But each branch still has their own mission and particular needs regarding logistics, training, etc.
An argument can be made that a Space Force whose mission is to launch and maintain satellites has a different mission and logistics requirements from the traditional Air Force whose mission is primarily to conduct operations with fixed wing aircraft.

5

Everything Trump touches, withers and dies. Why should the “Space Force” be any different?

Trump is being humored until he is out of office by every serious military commander. If it takes a custom leather jacket in size XXL with a star trek emblem patch to pacify the big fucking baby, consider it mission accomplished for Space Force.

6

Trump want’s his name on, or at least attached to everything even if Trump had nothing to do with it. The air force was handling space missions jsut fine, but trump could not attach his name to it. Make it is’s own branch and he can.

Yes I suspect this is the only reason, and for the wall (Trump’s wall), and for other programs he discontinued just to install his own version.

7

Not only that - the uniforms are all wrong! They should be silver lamé jumpsuits, according to every reputable sci-fi movie ever made!

Yeah, he just wants something, anything, to take credit for, no matter how idiotic.

8

Not only that - the uniforms are all wrong! They should be silver lamé jumpsuits, according to every reputable sci-fi movie ever made!

Yeah, he just wants something, anything, to take credit for, no matter how idiotic.

9

Integrating the militaries into one command is a really bad idea. Inter-service rivalry is a major motivator of soldiers.

Canada tried integrating its military, with one standard uniform, etc. It was a disaster. I was in the Officer’s mess at CFB Edmonton when the first guy came in with his new, re-established air force uniform, and the place erupted in cheers.

Also, you really want the people at the top of the chain of command to have experience in that service. You don’t want the Navy commanded by an ex-Air Force guy just because he’s most senior.

Also, centralization of anything brings as many or more problems than keeping things more decentralized and distributed. Duplication may be inefficient, but it also adds redundancy and fault tolerance. Having multiple competing services also accelerates innovation and compartmentalizes dsyfunction in leadership.

10

You seem to be basing your argument on a simplistic and inaccurate view of how the US military is actually structured.

In the wake of WWII we started the move to establish what are called Unified Combatant Commands. That general concept morphed along the way until the establishment of the current system in the 80s. UCCs are not just wartime commands. The exist in both war and peace to be responsible for a specific geographic or functional area. (US Special Operations Command is an example of a functional UCC with worldwide missions.) Since the last major change in the 80s the UCCs dont fall under the Joint Chiefs or the service departments within DOD. Their commanders take orders directly from National Command Authority which is by law the combination of the President and Secretary of Defense. The UCCs are joint.

UCCs can establish mission specific joint headquarters called, without creativity, sub-unified commands. Those are also joint. US Forces Korea is a good example because it avoids most of the complexity that comes with typical coalition command structures formed with our allies and partners. There can still be bits of weirdness like special operations forces in Afghanistan since 9-11 that can cause friction. Some of those special operations forces have operated directly USSOCOM and some have been assigned to the US Central Command (CENTCOM) sub-unified command in Afghanistan.

Then there is where the bulk of forces in those UCCs fall still to this day. They are in service component commands. Those are mostly service specific organizations under the UCC. Without digging through each COCOM for changes, that is how all of our geographic UCCs are organized. Those units that you think of as joint, because at the four star level they are, aren’t very joint from the three star level down. Unless assigned to an established joint sub-unified command those units train and operate non-jointly until task organized for specific missions that fall below the threshold of establishing a sub-unified command. In EUCOM (US European Command) the army brigades fall under USAREUR (US Army Europe) on a day to day basis.

Then there are forces that don’t fall under any of the UCCs. A great example of that is US Army Forces Command. It currently consists of about 780k Soldiers from all three Army components. That is out of a little over a million Soldiers in the total army force. The role of FORSCOM is to provide trained and ready forces to the geographic UCCs as needed. There are comparable organizations for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. There are also organizations in the various services that perform other important service specific institutional tasks like Training and Doctrine Command and Army Material Command within the US Army. Again those are non-joint organizations that don’t work directly for a Combatant Commander.

We still mostly have forces under service specific command. We don’t just do things this way because of institutional inertia, although those forces can be easier to identify. There are real benefits to having interoperable services that are ready to fight and fight well together. There are also real benefits to having subject matter expertise to train, prepare, and equip units within in their specialty. You cant maximize both. There are costs and benefits associated with every place on the continuum from wholly unified military to a wholly service specific military. We have been on a historical trend away from a service specific model near one extreme towards a balance. That is not the same as drawing a lesson that the best solution is necessarily continuing that trend off to the opposite extreme of a wholly unified military.

There is also some balancing we needed to look at in how we deal with the growing importance of space in military operations. We tried a couple different organizations to knit together the space focused forces across all the services since 1985. The was a subunified space command.There was even an Air Force service specific major command focused on space before that point. Creating a separate service as an option predates Trump running for president. Trying to organize in a way that knits together the relatively low density of forces working in the domain is important. What we had wasn’t necessarily getting the job done well when run through existing intra and inter service rivalries. Trying to have a good match between the power of the organization to fight those battles and the importance of the mission mattered.

It looks to me like we didn’t hit a good balance point. It is hard to tell because we didn’t have a good public, but mostly ignored, discussion of how to do better. Instead we got a deeply unpopular president weighing in publicly with a position about a discussion most were ignorant was even going on. The usual suspects started dominating the public discussion in a great example of the Dunning-Krueger effect. It was either the best idea since sliced bread or an idea as idiotic as suck starting a jammed pistol depending on partisan loyalties.

I was leaning towards moving space from a sub-unified command under US Strategic Command to a full UCC based on what I had seen. It certainly seemed like it might be time to try a change from what wasn’t working all that well. A UCC like a good balance between increasing their organizational power and not adding too many extra inefficiencies. It is not nearly as simple as the OP though.

11

I was in the AirForce in the '80s and remember when Space Command was created, and it was a part of the Air Force.

I think it should have stayed that way.

12

The entire point of the Space Force is to divert money from NASA to the military. It that regard it will doubtless be a success.

13

Except the F-35 is a real airplane that can actually fly, while the Space Force is a Saturday morning cartoon. If they ever actually build anything, it may likely be something like the orbiting nuclear-armed space station that the Nazis originally envisioned thanks to the influence of Wernher Von Braun, and that he revived and wrote about in 1952 as a way for the US to militarily dominate the world. Maybe it will be spherical in shape and we can call it the “Death Star”. One wrong move, one piece of bad intelligence, one misinterpretation, one accident – and a whole major city or a country is eliminated from the face of the earth in a massive blast of radiation that will circle the globe and bring swift retaliation! This ought to do wonders for world peace, like most of Trump’s ideas! :rolleyes:

14

It will be a great success! It will be the greatest success in the history of presidenting! Rather than sending a lander to Europa to search for undersea life, or the more sophisticated life-seeking robot currently being planned for Mars – all of which are boring to Trumpists who are contemptuous of science – wouldn’t it be much more fun to have a Death Star circling the earth that could, ultimately, wipe out the entire planet?

15

That is just silly. You are basically just building off the notions floated by those ignorant of the goals and unable to think past science fiction movies.

The Space Development Agency, which stood up before Space Force but is slated to be moved under it by law, is pursuing pretty aggressive plans to significantly increase the numbers of military satellites in orbit. We are looking at potentially dozens of new satellites by late 2022 if the contracts are approved on schedule this summer. The vision is hundreds of new satellites in orbit by 2024 creating new communications and detection arrays for key regions. Full global coverage of those new arrays is targeted for 2026. We could easily be looking at an order of magnitude increase in the numbers of US military satellites from our current total of 123. That increase would be in just the first years of Space Force.

They will also be taking over the US Air Force run Global Positioning System. You may be aware of that system. :stuck_out_tongue: While the Air Force started the Block III upgrades to the system, guess who is going to be responsible for completing the build out of the constellation? While some of the upgrades are military specific, some focus on increasing reliability, accuracy, and interoperability for civilian users around the world…like you. The civilian improvements won’t be operational until 2022 or 2023.

If Space Force is even partially successful at meeting their currently identified and inherited goals, I would clearly say they built something. It will be something that clearly improves their capability to perform their missions and support the rest of DOD. We will see.

16

It isn’t a cartoon. There are airmen assigned to the Space Force today who are doing exactly the same thing they weee a month ago: monitoring GPS, comms, and early warning satellites. And in five years, members of the Space Force will be doing the same thing. The same real thing, but with different uniforms. And more bureaucracy.

17
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Or maybe not. The “Space Force” is so new, and created so suddenly at Trump’s whim, that it is not very well entrenched yet and will probably take longer than a year to get fully established. If Trump is gone by then, quite possibly the “Space Force” will simply be shut down and forgotten, like it never happened, when a sane administration takes over.

Somebody help me out here: Did Congress create this Space Force? I can’t imagine that, with Democrats running the House. Did Trump single-handedly create it by fiat? If so, then I suspect all the more it will be gone when Trump is gone, if Trump is gone in January 2021.

19

https://www.military.com/space-force

So it will take an act of Congress to disband the Space Force.

20

The part of your post wondering if Congress created this has been answered. The notion that this was merely a Trump whim is wrong.

I will point to my post that looks some at the 2001 report from the Space Commission over how to reform the organization of our space focused forces within DOD. That report included taking a Congressionally mandated looks at creating a wholly independent department and another where a Space Force is created in the same manner we just did. While the commission was not particularly supportive of either idea they believed we should structure the changes we did make in a manner that allowed easily creating a wholly independent Space Force later.

The mandate for that commission and its tasks was in the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2000 signed into law in October 1999. Both houses of Congress had Republican majorities but a majority of Democrats voted for the final bill. It was then signed into law by Bill Clinton.

I would agree that Trump seems to make decisions from the gut without carefully listening to his advisers. In that sense, there is an aspect of whim in every decision he makes. The idea itself wasn’t a whim that originated with Trump, though. It had proponents in government long before Trump was in the picture.