© Provided by Washington Examiner U.S. Space Force got a boost when thousands of March applications for transfer arrived from the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, but other bureaucratic slowdowns may keep it from keeping pace with adversaries, experts say.
Former President Donald Trump created the newest armed service to focus exclusively on protecting the country's space assets as adversaries, including China and Russia, field platforms intended to disable and destroy U.S. satellites from Earth or space. While folding Air Force assets and personnel into the service, Space Force invited space professionals from other services to join in March, but experts say the bureaucracy is still moving too slow.
"We've handpicked about 6,400 people to join the Space Force, to transfer from the Air Force to the Space Force," Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond recently told the Washington Examiner.
"We are now in the process of onboarding those and transferring them and putting them on the books of the Space Force," he added. "We've had a significant response from the other services and, and I've had a significant number of applicants, in the thousands that want to transfer over."
New Space Force "guardians" will take on specialized jobs in areas such as cyberwarfare and space intelligence at one of its six main operating bases, including Peterson, Buckley, and Schriever Air Force bases in Colorado, Vandenberg and Los Angeles Air Force bases in California, and Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. Additional, smaller units are positioned globally.
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Space Force spokeswoman Lynn Kirby confirmed there are now 4,840 guardians. Just shy of 10,000 more Air Force and civilian personnel are administratively assigned to the force.
Raymond is hoping to grow the number of guardians to 6,400 by the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30.
So far, Raymond hopes some of the 21,000 space-focused troops in the other services will transfer voluntarily.
"That's going well, I'm very pleased with where we are," he said.
Heritage Foundation defense analyst John Venable believes the opposite is true.
"I certainly appreciate the want to assimilate people in a methodical manner," he said. "But for me, this is happening far too slowly."
"There are at least half of the satellites that do not belong to the Space Force within the Department Of Defense," he said, counting some 23 acknowledged satellites operated by the Navy and Army and another 54 operated by the National Reconnaissance Office.
Venable acknowledges that some NRO satellites must stay outside of Space Force control, but even those used by special operators should be transferred over.
Nebulous partnerships
Two months ago, Raymond reported 2,700 guardians on the books and was fighting off a public relations kerfuffle created when White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki appeared to mock the Space Force at a briefing. She followed suit with a tweet that invited Space Force leadership to brief White House reporters on "their important work."
Raymond said the following day he was open to speaking to anybody about Space Force, but he has yet to brief at the White House. In the days after, Psaki made statements emphasizing that President Joe Biden supported Trump's creation and viewed it as highly valuable. DOD followed suit, indicating Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was behind the initiative of a dedicated force for the space domain.
Venable believes the unfortunate incident was just part of the new White House coming up to speed. More important issues with standing up the force are now at hand.
Raymond's April 8 comments are part of the announcement of the standup of Space Systems Command, part of the folding of the Air Force space acquisition and launch assets into the new service. The command redesignates the Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base as the SSC headquarters.
The move is consistent with Raymond's vision of a slimmed-down force that knocks out organizational layers. In the past, Raymond has fought claims that the force is being manned up slowly, instead saying it is being selective to remain small and lethal.
The Space Force did not release a timeline for when the volunteers from other services will be transferred in. An online frequently asked question page indicates that volunteers will not receive special bonuses, ranks, or assignments for transferring.
Venable said that's not necessary. Service members want to be part of the new force.
"One is the opportunity to be on the ground floor of an organization that is obviously going to be important for the rest of the history of the United States," he said, comparing the opportunity to that of the creation of the Air Force in 1947.
"You have the opportunity to build and shape and direct the momentum of this organization. I think that's a huge incentive," he said. "For Army personnel particularly, you will go into a much smaller pool of assets, one that that will be highly prized, and you will be part of a culture that is right now being developed."
Deployments will still be possible, the Space Force says, but they will look different.
'Deployed in place'
"The topic of Space Force deployments is being reviewed by Space Force teams," its website states. For now, the force expects the majority of cyberoperations personnel to be "deployed in place."
"Deployed in place makes no sense," said Venable. "You're going to project the duties of your position from the same place where you've been projecting them from for the last year, two years, five years. And so, you're actually not deploying, that's just rhetoric that doesn't help anybody else out."
Venable said he can imagine Space Force personnel in the future being attached to units deploying into remote battlefields that require space assets, such as with soldiers rooting out ISIS combatants in Syria.
Presently, there is only one astronaut member of the Space Force, Air Force Second Lt. Mike Hopkins, who was selected by NASA to become an astronaut in 2009 and was sworn into the Space Force while in orbit on the mission at the International Space Station in December. Hopkins's future role with Space Force is unclear.
Raymond also addressed the transferring of capabilities from other services, a sticky issue that requires congressional approval.
"The last time we talked, I talked about the great partnership that we've enjoyed with all the other services and that we can't break the other services as we were setting up the Space Force," he said, describing discussions with the Navy and the Army, which retains valuable space capabilities at bases such as Redstone Arsenal in Alabama.
"That work is in progress," Raymond said. "We've balanced it right where we bring capabilities that are going to help us enhance our readiness and increase our capability while also balancing the readiness of the other services to make sure that they can do their multi-domain work."
Venable commends the fact that discussions are going well but warns that the assets belong under Space Force control if they are going to be protected adequately by the service designed to do just that.
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"Those are broad terms, and we don't know," he said of Raymond's comments.
"The Space Force is going to have, if they don't have already, the ability to direct and say, 'Hey, you need to maneuver the satellite now because it is under attack," Venable explained. "The Space Force currently doesn't have the capability to directly maneuver that. By transferring those systems over, they would get it."
Tags: News, National Security, Department of Defense, Pentagon, Space Force, President Trump, U.S. Army, Joe Biden, Navy, Marine Corps
Original Author: Abraham Mahshie
Original Location: Space Force is suddenly the go-to armed service