A new RAND study advises U.S. Space Force (USSF) to encourage or require its Guardian officers to have a third skill area to reduce the effects of a limited supply in the service of cyber and intelligence personnel.
The Space Force’s 2020 capstone document laid out four service warfighting mission areas for space operations personnel–orbital warfare, space electromagnetic warfare, space battle management, and space access and sustainment. In addition, the capstone drew upon the Air Force structure to establish five operational disciplines/competencies for personnel–space operations, intelligence, cyber, engineering, and acquisition.
“In our view, the original 2020 capstone publication’s approach does not go far enough to address the potential negative effects of the USSF having a very small number of intelligence and cyber officers,” according to the new RAND report, Designing A New Framework for the U.S. Space Force Workforce. “We therefore incorporate this second element (cross-skilling each officer to build depth in a third specialty area) into the framework in part to address the potential negative effects.”
“Having occupational competency areas with such small numbers of officers poses three potential risks,” RAND said. “First, even a few personnel losses from a highly technical force that is small in number can have profound and undesirable effects on the already-small grade pyramid of intelligence and cyber officers, by shrinking an already-small pool of qualified experienced officers from whom to select for positions of greater responsibility. Second, the small grade pyramid in these fields creates either perceived or actual developmental challenges that can negatively affect the morale of junior intelligence and cyber officers and their development into senior intelligence and cyber leaders. Third, intelligence and cyber officers—as small groups within a USSF overwhelmingly dominated by space operators, engineers, and acquisition officers—may naturally be drawn to identify more closely with their own subgroups than with the Space Force overall, potentially (and unintentionally) fostering division rather than unity.”
Last November, Col. John Smail, an adviser to the chief of space operations on the Space Force’s cyber, spectrum and warfighting communications policy, strategy and operations said that the U.S. needs to prepare for cyberspace defense against Russia and China and that cyber operations are “critical” to enable U.S. space power (Defense Daily, Nov. 8, 2022).
Long-term technical specialization “often leads to de facto stove-piping of personnel into different technical tracks—an outcome that many USSF leaders in our interviews said they want to avoid,” RAND said in the new study. “The opposite end of the spectrum would be to have no technical specialization and instead rotate officers through every type of technical specialty to give them breadth of experience.”
Space Force leaders told RAND that they also wanted to avoid this “jack of all trades, master of none” approach.
“In addition to associating every new USSF officer with both a warfighting mission area and occupational competency, the USSF should either encourage or require all USSF officers who continue
beyond an initial service commitment to broaden their expertise into an additional warfighting mission area or an additional occupational competency,” according to the RAND study. “In other words, they would be broadened to acquire a third skill area. Once broadened in this way, a USSF officer would
have either two warfighting mission areas and one occupational competency or one warfighting mission area and two occupational competencies.”