While Rogers, Shanahan, and other figures with ties to military space contractors have been pressing for the Space Force, the Air Force lobby has been pushing back. No surprise there, since that service has always wanted to control the military's space funding and fears that a rival service would compete for, and perhaps capture, some of "its" funds.
Bryan Bender and Jacqueline Klimas of Politico note, for example, that congressional defense hawks Mike Coffman (R-CO) and Steve Knight (R-CA) have paired up to lead a "rebellion" against the president's Space Force, "one that some observers believe bears the fingerprints of the Air Force and its contractors." Knight, whose district adjoins Edwards Air Force Base, is quoted this way: "This is something where, boy, I gotta disagree with the president... I'm standing up for the U.S. Air Force here. There's nobody on the planet that does this better than they do."
Coffman and Knight are hardly alone. Last year, Ohio Congressman Mike Turner, a proponent of all things nuclear (whose Dayton-area district includes Wright Patterson, the Air Force's largest domestic air base), led an effort to block legislation sponsored by Rogers to create a Space Corps, a more modest version of the Space Force idea that would have been embedded in the Air Force, much as the Marines are still officially embedded in the Navy.
Turner, who votes with the Trump administration 94% of the time, has now derided the Space Force idea and claims support from Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson as well as Secretary of Defense Mattis. Whether opposition within the military will continue in a sub rosa fashion now that the president has put his stamp of approval on the force -- or even if Mattis will be around much longer -- remains to be seen. Turner's claim is, however, consistent with that 2017 Mattis letter to Congress and Wilson's initial position, which she expressed in July 2017 this way:
"The Pentagon is complicated enough. This will make it more complex, add more boxes to the organization chart, and cost more money... I don't need another chief of staff and another six deputy chiefs of staff."
Key industry figures have similarly weighed in against the force, including Eric Fanning, president and CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, the major U.S. defense and aerospace trade group. He typically complained:
"Is this going to get us something faster or is it going to slow us down more? And secondly, who's going to pay for this?... The aerospace and defense industry builds things. It's not going to benefit by money going into creating new headquarters, new organizations."
Now that Trump has upped the ante, the political battle between the Air Force, its boosters, and Space Force advocates will undoubtedly intensify, even if largely behind the scenes. This month, Air Force Secretary Wilson switched gears, publicly endorsing the administration's move, though leaving room for bureaucratic maneuvering and delay when she noted that "it has to be done the right way." According to an internal Air Force memo leaked to the publication Defense One, Wilson's vision of "the right way" involves keeping as many military space functions in the Air Force as possible in order to reduce the size and clout of the proposed force.
Meanwhile, Wilson has just released a plan calling for an increase by 2030 in the number of squadrons -- composed of planes of all types, including surveillance and refueling aircraft, fighters and bombers -- of nearly 25%. Center for Strategic and International Studies budget expert Todd Harrison estimates that the additional operating costs for such an expanded fleet, including added personnel, would total roughly $18 billion annually. Absent another huge hike in the Pentagon budget, such spending would certainly compete for resources with the new Space Force.
The fight over that force poses a dilemma for some major contractors as well. Take Lockheed Martin. Its fighter jet, the F-35, slated to be the most expensive weapons system in history, will absorb more than $400 billion in research, development, and procurement funds through the mid-2030s. It's Lockheed's biggest program and a core element in the Air Force budget. Nonetheless, the company is also heavily involved in developing military satellites and missile defense programs, two areas that might get far more money in the Space Force era if a determined new bureaucracy is embedded in the military and advocating for them.
Lockheed Martin's executives are, of course, all for more spending on military space programs -- unless that funding were to come at the expense of the F-35. The solution to such a conundrum would assumedly be radically higher Pentagon spending. And count on one thing: the company and its cohorts will be lobbying in earnest for just that in the run-up to the 2020 presidential elections. As it happens, the Trump administration and Congress have already increased Pentagon and related spending to a near-record $716 billion. More increases to fund the Space Force and other new initiatives could prove a tough sell in a country whose basic infrastructure is rotting out.
The Real Danger: Weapons in Space
Donald Trump's enthusiasm for the Space Force and the militarization of space has already given new life to spectacularly bad ideas shelved years ago. A case in point: the claim of Pentagon Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin that it would be "relatively easy" and affordable (at least by Pentagon standards) to construct space-based interceptors that could shoot down nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in their "boost phase"; that is, shortly after launching. But a 2012 study by the American Physical Society estimated that it could cost $300 billion to build the system of hundreds of space-based interceptors needed to counter even a handful of North Korean missiles in boost phase. And yet Congress did indeed pass an amendment to the 2019 defense bill calling for the Pentagon "to develop a space-based intercept layer."
Putting such weaponry in space could, of course, lead other powers (think Russia and China) to assume that their satellite systems were at risk and so spark a new Cold War-style arms race in space that would not only cost a fortune, but increase the odds of hair-trigger systems prone to mistakes launching a war there. Military and communications satellites, like those crucial to U.S. military operations across the planet and those the global economy couldn't do without, would be uniquely vulnerable in such a situation.
John Tierney and Philip Coyle of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation have summed up the potential consequences of putting missile interceptors in space this way: "Space-based missile defenses would motivate U.S. adversaries to increase their nuclear arsenals and expand their anti-satellite capabilities to neutralize the new space infrastructure."
In other words, the president is now urging Congress and the military to embark on a project that could cost countless hundreds of billions of dollars and, in return, make America -- and the world -- less safe. And if that isn't a Trumpian bargain of the first order, what is?
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