Pre-9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld proposed a sweeping overhaul of the Pentagon’s space programs, sharply increasing the importance of outer space in strategic planning. The New York Times on May 8, 2001, wrote, “In his first major policy announcement, Mr. Rumsfeld will call for the establishment of a new Pentagon post for a four-star Air Force general to serve as an advocate for what could become a new space force.”
The Times’ article continued: “Consolidating and reorganizing the programs will give them a higher profile in the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy and make it easier for them to compete for dollars, aides to Mr. Rumsfeld argued. Mr. Rumsfeld and to a lesser degree President Bush have publicly expressed interest in developing costly and complicated space weapons systems, including lasers capable of shooting down ballistic missiles and satellites designed to attack other satellites.”
There were plans being tossed around even then to make the Air Force the lead service in organizing, training, and equipping a space force, which up until then had been split among all the services.
In his first major speech on military policy in February 2001, shortly after his inauguration, President Bush said: “In space, we’ll protect our network of satellites essential to the flow of our commerce and the defense of our common interests. All of this requires great effort and new spending.” At the time, space programs represented only eight billion of the Pentagon’s $310 billion annual budget and were splintered among a hodgepodge of offices. The Pentagon spent billions of dollars more in conjunction with the CIA on space surveillance programs, including spy satellites (those budgets were classified).
The Militarization of Space Is Older Than You Think
There’s been a lot of misinformation put forward in the intervening years, but one thing is clear to paraphrase the narrator of the film Fight Club: the idea (for a space force) had been on the tip of everyone’s tongue, the president just gave it a name. In fact, even giving the president credit for the name is a stretch, despite his anecdote about saying to himself, “Why don’t we call it the Space Force?” Mostly, it is safe to say that he sanctioned it. By signing the four space directives and ultimately issuing the executive order to create the Space Force, he just injected rocket fuel into the gas tank of a vehicle that had already been in motion. “It’s really what we’re already doing but giving elevated status to the mission,” said American University space expert Howard McCurdy.
The Space Force is now one year old. Yet, the idea for its creation and the military-space relationship stretch so much further back that it’s hard to really pinpoint when. Christopher Columbus, that much-maligned Italian explorer, used his knowledge of a lunar eclipse in 1504 to intimidate natives of Jamaica. Far from reaching China, Columbus and his men were stranded on the island and in need of a continuous food supply, which the natives were happy to provide for six months. When they stopped, Columbus consulted an almanac and told the natives they had angered God, who would give a sign of his displeasure – the fiery red moon of the lunar eclipse. The natives relented, Columbus and his men received six more months of food until rescue arrived, and just like that, space was weaponized.
Some four hundred and forty-odd years later, German graduate student Wernher von Braun’s research into the military use of long-range rockets resulted in the Vergeltungswaffe 2, or V-2 rocket. Post-war, both the Allies and the Soviets captured V-2 hardware, the U.S. poached von Braun, and the space race was on. A V-2 rocket was the first artificial object to travel into space. In 1946, the first photo of earth from space was taken from a V-2 rocket. The V-2 paved the way for the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik 1, which was launched by the Soviets in 1957. The military-space relationship continued to grow.
The next year, Eisenhower sent a note to Congress calling for a civilian-led National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). Interestingly, he chose not to assign space to the military because he believed a civilian agency would be more effective. Perhaps due to his own military experience, he believed inter-service rivalries would stand in the way of launching a satellite. Out of that era grew the origins of space policy, specifically, the principle of “freedom of space.”
From there, it’s a lengthy list of space milestones, both major and minor. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The moon landing in 1969. Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Star Wars. Laser-guided smart bombs in the Gulf War. China and the U.S. both firing rockets to shoot down respective satellites in 2008. Strung together, they begin to sound like alternative lyrics to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire:” We didn’t start the space war / It was always ragin’, since the world’s been gazin’ / No we didn’t light it, but we’re gonna fight it.
Turning a Blind Eye
Return to the near present, in 2017, when the president had been in the White House for a year. In Congress, Rep. Rogers saw the space corps idea once again encountering resistance, stripped from the fiscal year 2018 defense authorization bill. Not to be deterred, he vowed to continue fighting. He and other like-minded members of Congress believed that a separate force was needed to focus on space dominance, unhindered by a slow bureaucratic acquisition process and given its own funding stream. While some in Congress and the military opposed the creation of a separate space corps, including then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, almost all agreed that the process of acquisition was sluggish at best and U.S. space-based weapons technology was stagnating as a result.
Had the White House’s plan for a space corps been approved by the Senate and included in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2018, the Air Force would have been required to establish it before January 1, 2019. As recent history proved, that date came and went without a space force. Perhaps what helped in the next year’s push were some of the now well-known turnovers in the administration.
On December 20, 2018, then-Defense Secretary Mattis met with the president and handed him a letter, in which he tendered his resignation effective February 28, 2019, citing “no choice but to leave.” His decision to depart was not due to anything associated with space, but rather over a disagreement on foreign policy, specifically Syria. A Mattis quote from June 2017, during an Oval Office meeting of administration personnel, inadvertently gives a good reason to get behind the case for the Space Force: “We are grateful for the sacrifices our people are making in order to strengthen our military, so our diplomats always negotiate from a position of strength.” While he also felt that a Space Force would add “additional organizational and administrative tail” to the military, it cannot be denied that it would assist in allowing diplomats to negotiate from a position of strength, given the increasing relevance of space.
Just as war is said to be “the continuation of politics by other means,” is not space the next expansion of the warfighting domain? To maintain our “position of strength,” it is necessary to have dominance in air, land, sea, cyberspace, and space. The fact is that creating the Space Force was no more the president’s idea than it is possible to show strength as a country without a formidable force in space. It was inevitable. The American military was on a course set for the stars long before the president teased the Space Force in the summer of 2017.
On March 13, 2018, the online magazine Intelligencer ran the headline: “Man-Child President Calls for ‘Space Force’ to Fight Wars Beyond the Skies.” Underneath it was a photo from the film Starship Troopers with the oh-so pithy caption, “Maybe the president saw Starship Troopers back in the day.” Not to be bothered with going much deeper than that, the article, like so many other pieces that have been published since, would have readers believe anything that comes from the president’s mouth is inherently wrong, bad, or insane. The Space Force among them. But who can blame them? They have what I call “intellectual scotoma,” like normal scotoma, in which a person experiences a partial loss of vision or a blind spot in an otherwise normal visual field. Yet, intellectual scotoma affects the mind.
To be clear, this is not a blanket defense of the president or his administration’s decision-making or policies. The fact is that Space Force is needed, and its origins stand apart from any political ideology that seems to have driven so many writers to sacrifice facts at the altar of feelings.
This is Part II of a multi-part series on the United States Space Force. You can read Part I here. Read Part III here.
COMMENTS