U.S. Space Force officials are meeting with their counterparts in the Army and Navy to work out final details on transferring Army and Navy space capabilities to the new service.
“To the 90th percentile, we’ve agreed on most of those transfers and most of those capabilities,” Air Force Lt. Gen. David Thompson, vice commander of Space Force, said during a virtual National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) Space Warfighting Forum on Aug. 20. “We have a few final details to work out with a couple of those functions and a couple of those units. We are expecting later this month…we have a session with the leadership of the Office of the Secretary of Defense to go through that in detail among us and with them and make final decisions. The expectation is that we will come to agreement in the next few weeks and then begin to work on the details to transfer those in the next fiscal year so sometime in fiscal ’21 we’ll begin executing the transfer of those functions, those organizations and those resources over to U.S. Space Force.”
The Title 10-authorized Space Force will have three echelons of command–field commands, deltas, and squadrons, whereas the Air Force currently has five echelons. The structure is to consolidate, align, organize, train and equip mission execution from former Air Force space-related units.
The Space Force will have three field commands–Space Operations Command (SpOC) and Space Systems Command (SSC), led by three-star generals–and Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM), led by a two-star general.
It is possible that the commander of Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) at Los Angeles AFB, Calif. will be dual hatted as the commander of SSC. Space Force’s Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond has been discussing options for SSC with Lt. Gen. J.T. Thompson, the commander of SMC, and Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett will decide which option to pursue. “That final decision has yet to be made,” Lt. Gen. David Thompson said during the NDIA forum.
The Space Force, the sixth military service established last December, does not yet have its own Service Acquisition Executive (SAE), and there has yet to be a nominee for an Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration who could serve as the Space Force SAE.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration Shawn Barnes is performing the duties of the assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration until a nominee is identified and confirmed by the Senate.
The fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act mandates that the Space Force have its own SAE by Oct. 1, 2022.
During the NDIA virtual forum on Aug. 20, Thompson praised Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper’s leadership and vision for the future of the Space Force and space capabilities but said that a Space Force SAE would help the fledgling service negotiate technical complexity, the need for new capabilities, and the entry into new mission areas.
“The challenge he [Roper] faces and others face is just the growing scope and breadth and span of control and complexity of not just space capabilities but couple with that all of the multiple air missions–air superiority, mobility, strike, cyber, strategic capabilities with GBSD [Ground Based Strategic Deterrent]. It’s just a huge scope of responsibility.”