Army Gen. James Dickinson, the head of U.S. Space Command, believed that permanently basing the command in Colorado Springs was important to keep the numbers of qualified personnel required to head off the Chinese space challenge to the U.S.–personnel that SPACECOM could lose, if the command moved to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala.–a decision announced in January 2021 by the Air Force in the waning days of the Trump administration.
U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall favored Alabama because of projected cost savings of construction and operation of a new SPACECOM headquarters at Redstone Arsenal and training measures for a new Alabama workforce in the next five years.
The above revelations and others came to light at a Sept. 28 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) chaired by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.).
Other testimony revealed that Colorado Springs’ provisional SPACECOM headquarters would not be sufficient and that a new 464,000 square-foot building for 1,450 workers would be needed there as well. In addition, Kendall testified that President Joe Biden assumed the decision making authority from the secretary of the Air Force shortly before Biden’s July 31st announcement that SPACECOM’s permanent headquarters would be Colorado Springs.
In the spring of last year, the Government Accountability Office and DoD Inspector General finished their reviews of the decision to move SPACECOM to Alabama–reviews that found errors in process but said that the decision was reasonable. Kendall testified on Sept. 28 that he charged the Air Force’s strategic basing team to re-assess the decision in May last year.
“All six locations were reasonable alternatives, but Huntsville was lower cost, while remaining in Colorado posed the lowest operational risk,” Kendall said. “The disruption associated with moving the headquarters became a factor to consider. There would be some operational risk associated with moving the provisional headquarters in Colorado to any other location. Gen. Dickinson expressed the view that the operational risk was significant. The Department of the Air Force’s strategic basing team believed that potential mitigation measures were available, and I concurred with that conclusion.”
SPACECOM was to achieve full operational capability at the provisional headquarters–leased and government-owned space–in Colorado Springs last month. Kendall said on Sept. 28 that the date “has slipped.”
“My assessment was that the projected cost savings [at Redstone Arsenal] together with the availability of potential mitigation measures outweighed the operational risks that have been identified “Kendall testified on Sept. 28. “As the combatant commander, however, for SPACECOM, Gen. Dickinson assessed these considerations quite differently.”
“I fully support the president’s judgment in this matter,” Kendall said of Biden’s July 31 decision. “Given the intensifying threat and with a final decision having been made by the president, we are prepared to move forward with the implementation of this [Colorado] basing decision.”
In response to a question from Rogers, Dickinson said that he was concerned that permanently basing the SPACECOM headquarters in Huntsville could reduce the combatant command’s readiness toward the end of the construction process when civilian workers at the provisional headquarters in Colorado Springs could decide to leave SPACECOM instead of moving to Alabama.
Toward the end of building a new headquarters at Redstone Arsenal, a portion of the “60 percent of the headquarters that’s civilian would start making decisions that they no longer wanna work there and seek employment elsewhere, given the predictability, and their personal desire that they would not want to go to Huntsville,” Dickinson said.
In response to a question from Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.), Kendall testified that SPACECOM basing deviated significantly from the standard Air Force basing process, as former Defense Secretary Mike Esper directed states to submit bids to base SPACECOM in their respective states during the Trump administration.
Rogers said at the end of the hearing that he will move to have the DoD IG investigate Biden’s July 31 decision and will try to insert a provision in the defense authorization bill to prohibit building the SPACECOM permanent headquarters in Colorado Springs.