President Trump has directed his military advisers to create a sixth military branch devoted to the cosmos, but doing so may require an act of Congress.<\/b>
\nAt about 8 a.m. on Monday, reporters called into a press conference with White House officials to discuss the day\u2019s main event: a meeting of the National Space Council at noon. The conference was convened to discuss a spate of new proposals by the administration for, among other things, improving management of satellite traffic and cleaning up debris in Earth\u2019s orbit. Not exactly thrilling stuff.
And so reporters went into the meeting ready to hear what had been outlined for them, without expectations for anything more exciting.
Then the president took the lectern.
\u201cWhen it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space,\u201d Trump said. \u201cI\u2019m hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the Armed Forces. That\u2019s a big statement. We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force\u2014separate but equal. It\u2019s going to be something.\u201d
The president then singled out the man for this job. \u201cGeneral Dunford, if you would carry that assignment out, I would be very greatly honored,\u201d Trump said, turning around to look for Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, behind him. \u201cWhere\u2019s General Dunford? General? Got it? Let\u2019s go get it, general.\u201d
Despite this enthusiastic proclamation, there was no mention of a space force in the space-policy directive the president signed on Monday. So what exactly is Trump saying when he directs Dunford to go forth, to \u201cgo get it\u201d?
\u201cIt\u2019s unclear to me exactly what he\u2019s directing,\u201d said Richard Wolf, the director of the Air Force Historical Support Division. \u201cIt\u2019s always going to be subject to interpretation by the various agencies involved. You never know whether he\u2019ll just forget about it or if he\u2019ll actually carry it out.\u201d
Trump has been talking about establishing a new military branch for space for several months now. The proposed branch would assume the responsibility for military space operations, which currently fall under the purview of the Air Force and some other agencies. The concept usually comes up when the president\u2019s eyes stray from the teleprompter and he starts ad-libbing. He\u2019s even described it as something that came to mind quite suddenly. \u201cI was saying it the other day\u2014\u2019cause we\u2019re doing a tremendous amount of work in space\u2014I said, maybe we need a new force. We\u2019ll call it the Space Force,\u201d Trump said during a speech in March. \u201cAnd I was not really serious. And then I said, what a great idea. Maybe we\u2019ll have to do that. That could happen.\u201d
It\u2019s not clear whether Trump\u2019s military advisers will actually establish what would be the newest military branch in about 70 years. But if they did, how would they do it?
A straightforward answer is surprisingly elusive, particularly because all five of the armed forces\u2014Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Coast Guard\u2014formed under different circumstances, not to mention completely different eras. The Army and Navy, for example, were enshrined in the Constitution. The law that established the Air Force reshuffled the country\u2019s defenses in response to World War II. The forces that shaped these services are no longer relevant today.
Wolf was thinking about this question when I called him on Monday. Not long after the president\u2019s rather surprising decree that day, the Air Force\u2019s office of the chief of staff asked Wolf to dig into the country\u2019s history and find out how the United States did it last time: in 1947, with the Air Force. \u201cThings happen quickly sometimes,\u201d Wolf said, dryly.
This is not a feasibility study, Wolf said. The United States hasn\u2019t thought about establishing a new military branch in some time; they could use a refresher. \u201cThey just want to know: How did we do it? Who did it? How did they organize?\u201d he said.
During World War I, military aviation operations were carried out by the U. S. Army. After the war, aviators started chafing at their Army management. \u201cIt was a growing realization that the people who governed them within the Army didn\u2019t understand what aviators did and why they needed things that were different from the Army,\u201d Wolf said. \u201cThe Army is pretty conservative when it comes to changing things, and the aviators were very forthright about wanting to change.\u201d
Politicians in Congress heard them. Between 1926 and 1933, lawmakers introduced 29 unsuccessful bills that sought to grant air operations more freedom outside of the Army, according to Jeffery S. Underwood\u2019s The Wings of Democracy: The Influence of Air Power on the Roosevelt Administration. Their wish came true in 1947, when the National Security Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Harry Truman, reorganized much of the country\u2019s war infrastructure and funneled all air operations into a stand-alone division.
Like the Air Force, a Space Force would require action by Congress to exist. \u201cOne would assume that\u2019s how [Trump] would ordinarily handle it,\u201d Wolf said. But \u201cthis is no ordinary president. So you can\u2019t say that\u2019s how it will happen, but that\u2019s how it has happened in the past.\u201d
The concept of an armed service dedicated to space first emerged in earnest in 2000, as a recommendation from a military-reform commission led by Donald Rumsfeld, but was quickly forgotten after 9\/11. It reappeared in earnest last June, when House lawmakers proposed legislation that would direct the Defense Department to create a \u201cspace corps\u201d as a new military service inside the Air Force. The proposed agency would absorb the responsibilities of the U. S. Air Force Space Command, a unit inside the Air Force that supports most of the country\u2019s military operations in space. \u201cThe military has not done a good enough job looking after space with all its other distracting priorities,\u201d Representative Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat, argued at the time.
The Pentagon groaned in response. \u201cThe Pentagon is complicated enough,\u201d Heather Wilson, the Air Force secretary, told reporters . \u201cThis will make it more complex, add more boxes to the organization chart, and cost more money. If I had more money, I would put it into lethality, not bureaucracy.\u201d
The House measure to create a space corps eventually failed, though the bill\u2019s supporters remain optimistic\u2014especially because of Trump\u2019s support. Pentagon officials, meanwhile, have stayed mum about the idea, wary of publicly disagreeing with their commander-in-chief. The more Trump talked about an American space force, the further they have retreated.
Trump\u2019s remarks on Monday garnered a fair share of ridicule on social media from people for whom the sound of \u201cspace force\u201d invokes lightsabers and other Star Wars things I don\u2019t know about because I haven\u2019t seen all the movies. But the space around Earth, a place swimming with satellites, can host conflict like any other place humans have inhabited, especially as technology evolves. Humans couldn\u2019t fathom fighting wars in the sky until they took flight, after all. Perhaps in another 70 years, the thought of space-force cadets flying above Earth, patrolling the darkness and dodging satellites, won\u2019t seem so far-fetched.<\/p>\n

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