US Space Force: what you need to know on its first anniversary

The US Space Force is now one year old and continues to consolidate operations focused on the Pentagon’s orbit, from satellite launches to managing the GPS constellation to the flight of the secret X-space plane. 37B. Cape Canaveral is now a Space Force base.

To many people, the name “Space Force” sounded like a punchline. Think “space cadet”. Spaceballs. Marvin the Martian’s Q-36 explosive space modulator. Netflix has appropriated the name of a comedy with Steve Carell. the Twitter snark flew into the stratosphere – it didn’t help matters when William Shatner got angry on the Space Force rank structure.

But this is serious business. The raison d’être of the formation of a new branch of the American armed forces was to highlight and formalize the treatment of military matters in Earth orbit. No, that doesn’t mean sky soldiers rummage with laser blasters, Moonraker-style. It has much more to do with the use and protection of satellites which are essential to modern warfare – and 21st century economies – especially for high-tech countries like the United States and some of their potential adversaries.

As President Donald Trump, the Space Force’s first and greatest champion, prepares to step down, the Space Force continues to grow and is poised to outlast the administration that brought it aside in a speech to an established military reality. The first wave of direct recruits to the branch begins their new roles as space systems operations specialists: the first seven recruits graduated from Basic Military Training at a ceremony Dec. 10 in San Antonio, Texas. They join over 2,000 others who are already serving under the Space Force banner, and now to be known as “keepers”. At full power, the branch should eventually number around 16,000 people.

“A year ago, the Space Force was an idea,” Department of the Air Force Secretary Barbara M. Barrett said in a statement in October. “There has been a big shift in mindset, and we have to build on that.”

Here are the key things to know about America’s all-new fighting force.

What exactly is Space Force?

The Space Force was established on December 20, 2019, with the National Defense Authorization Act of 2020 providing $ 40 million to get things done, and it is commissioned – or “stood up,” speaking of the Pentagon – over 18 months, which brings us to mid-2021. Its responsibilities, according to the information sheet of the new branch, include “the development of military space professionals, the acquisition of military space systems [and] mature the military doctrine of space power. ”

This doctrine, titled Spacepower, was published in June 2020 and highlights the value of “control and operation of the space domain” for surveillance, the achievement of strategic and military objectives and for preserving “prosperity and security of the United States ”.

“Personnel conducting space operations, engineering, acquisitions, intelligence and cybersecurity constitute the space combatant community and therefore must master the art and science of warfare – these are the combatants of the nation’s space, ”the document said.

At the controls is General John “Jay” Raymond, the country’s first chief of space operations – and the very first member of the Space Force.

It is the sixth branch of the United States military, so in that sense it is the equivalent of the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. . There is a bureaucratic nuance to this: Space Force reports to the Secretary of the Air Force, just as Marines report to the Secretary of the Navy.

In this initial phase, he relies heavily on this brother. What is now the Space Force was the current Air Force Space Command, and its space-related Air Force members who transferred throughout 2020. Eventually, the new branch will consolidate the missions spaces of all US armed forces. (The Army and Navy currently have their own operations).

“This first year has been about inventing force. This next year… we’re really focused on integrating that force into our joint partners,” Raymond said.

What has Space Force accomplished so far?

The start was a little rough in January 2020 when Trump revealed the Space Force logo, which took a lot of trouble on social media for its striking resemblance to the Starfleet Command logo from the Star Trek series. There were also the ribs that followed when Space Force offered a glimpse of the pretty earthy camouflage design of his uniforms.

More to the point of what the new branch is: On March 26, Space Force achieved what it called its first launch of the national security space, putting into orbit a military communications satellite, built by Lockheed Martin, which is part of a network of six satellites of encrypted and anti-jamming systems.

On May 17, Space Force launched the secretive X-37B space plane into orbit. It’s carrying experiments for NASA and the military, including one studying the effects of radiation on seeds and another looking at transforming solar energy into radio frequencies that can be transmitted to the Earth’s surface.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has helped Space Force launch new GPS satellites over the past year. The first four of the GPS III generation of satellites all became operational in 2020.

In April, the US Air Force Academy’s graduating class of 2020 included, for the first time, officers being commissioned directly into the Space Force. Of the more than 960 graduates, 86 were tabbed to become Space Force’s first company-grade officers. As of May 1, Air Force members already on active duty could volunteer for transfer to the Space Force, with those transfers expected to begin around the start of September. Those eligible to transfer include officers and enlisted members in fields including space operations, cyberspace operations, geospatial intelligence, signals intelligence and targeting analysis.

Space Force aims to have about 2,500 members in space operations career fields by the end of calendar year 2020. It’s on track to have around 6,500 members by the end of the 2021 fiscal year on Sept. 30, 2021.

On Dec. 20, Vice President Mike Pence announced that members of the Space Force will be known as guardians.

How did Space Force get started?

The idea for a cosmic military branch captured widespread attention after an aside by Trump, who first used the term “space force” in public during an address to US Marines in March 2018.

“We’re doing a tremendous amount of work in space, and I said, ‘Maybe we need a new force. We’ll call it the Space Force,” Trump said during the speech. “I was not really serious, and then I said, ‘What a great idea. Maybe we’ll have to do that.'”

Three months later, Trump made it clear he was serious. At a meeting of the National Space Council, chaired by Pence, the Department of Defense was directed to begin the process of forming a sixth branch of the military.

“It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space,” Trump said. “We must have American dominance in space.”

The president doesn’t have the authority to create a military service on his own. That’s a job for Congress, which hadn’t done so since 1947 when, with President Harry Truman’s signature, it spun the Air Force out of the Army.

In October 2018, the National Space Council approved six recommendations to send to the president, which would become part of Trump’s fourth Space Policy Directive, which he signed in February 2019. The recommendations laid the groundwork for the Space Force by establishing a new, unified space command and a new space technology procurement agency.  In August 2019, Trump formally reestablished the US Space Command as a division within the Department of Defense. It was one of 11 unified combatant commands, each of which oversees a certain geographical or functional area — for instance, the European Command and the Cyber Command.

In addition, Pence said during his speech announcing the plan that the Space Council would work with the National Security Council to “remove red tape” around the rules of engagement in space. This could be construed as looking for a way around the insistence of the international Outer Space Treaty that all activities in space be peaceful.

So this didn’t come out of nowhere. What exactly has the military been up to?

Before the Space Force, there was a US Space Command established as part of the Air Force in 1985 during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who had some controversial ideas about space-based defenses. Space Command merged with US Strategic Command in 2002 following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The US military has been involved in space-related projects for decades. In the 1960s, at the same time that NASA was working toward a moon landing, the Air Force even had a parallel manned space program with its own astronauts, although none of them ever launched, as far as we know.

More recently, the Air Force, Navy, and Army have had their own units focused on elements of space operations. A Pentagon note obtained by Defense One indicated that the Trump administration’s initial proposal for a sixth military branch called for the Space Force to absorb the Naval Satellite Operations Center, the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. , parts of the Air Force Space Command and the 1st Army Space Brigade, which was specially created to “enable the delivery of decisive combat power” and includes two astronauts who are essentially on loan at NASA.

A significant portion of US military space-related activity has resided in the Colorado-based Air Force Space Command, with more than 30,000 personnel worldwide and launch facilities in Florida and California. The command manages missions that include satellite communications, missile warning systems, surveillance of space activities and projects such as the X-37B space plane.

In October 2020, Raymond formally established the Space Operations Command at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, which will be the first of the three field commands of the US Space Force.

Why do we need this?

Trump administration officials have argued that space is already an “area of ​​war” and that other world powers like Russia and China are already treating it as such. This phrase echoes what some members of the Air Force have been saying for several years.

The stakes are high. Much of our 21st century economy and way of life – from banking and weather forecasting to television services and GPS – depends on 24-hour, non-stop satellites. The army also depends on them. But space right now is a lot like the Old West, with a wide array of government and commercial satellites all sitting ducks.

We even saw an example of target practice: in 2007, China shot down one of its own satellites – mission accomplished in its own right – and littered orbit with potentially destructive space debris. Many saw this 2007 operation as a veiled display of military might.

“Our opponents are acting deliberately and quickly to reduce our advantage [in space]Raymond said at a conference in September 2020. “I’m not sure we can win, or even compete, in a modern conflict without space power.”