Standing Up Space Force: The Road to the Nation’s Sixth Armed Service
By Forrest L. Marion
(Naval Institute Press, 289 pages, $82)
In two much-publicized novels that envision the next world war, the United States is attacked first in space — by Chinese and Russian anti-satellite weapons and satellite supported cyber intrusions that interfere with our surveillance systems and communications. Some far-seeing strategists in the 1980s foresaw space as the next war frontier, but it was the Trump administration helped by a bi-partisan group of legislators that in December 2019 established the U.S. Space Force to become, in the words of President Trump’s Space Policy Directive No. 4, “the sixth branch of the United States Armed Forces … ” whose mission is “to deter and counter threats in space.”
President Trump in March 2018 announced a “new national strategy for space [that] recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain just like the land, air, and sea”
The complicated story of the creation of the U.S. Space Force is the subject of a meticulously researched and creatively written new book by Forrest L. Marion titled Standing Up Space Force: The Road to the Nation’s Sixth Armed Service. Marion, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute who is a retired U.S. Air Force Reserve officer and a historian, traces the intellectual roots of the Space Force to the early 1980s, when Lt. Col. Dino Lorenzini and Maj. Charles Fox, both U.S. Air Force officers, promoted the idea of a separate armed service for space in an article in the Naval War College Review. At around the same time, retired Lt. General Daniel O. Graham, who had been director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), headed-up High Frontier, a private organization that emphasized space as the next frontier in great power competition. Graham, one of the intellectual forces behind what became President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also supported the establishment of a separate Space Force. The end of the Cold War, however, paused U.S. efforts to militarize space. (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: (West Point Leadership Turns Its Back on ‘Duty, Honor, Country’)
Marion notes that while the Clinton administration “viewed military space as a low priority,” the rise of China and Russia’s anti-satellite development in the late 1990s led Congress, with the support of the Air Force leadership, to establish a commission chaired by Donald Rumsfeld to revisit America’s military needs in space. The Rumsfeld Commission concluded that the Air Force needed to “create a stronger military space culture, through focused career development, education and training, within which space leaders for the future can be developed,” and argued for the eventual establishment of a separate Space Force to avoid what geopolitical strategist Everett C. Dolman in his book Astropolitik called a “space Pearl Harbor.” Rumsfeld, Marion notes, became the incoming George W. Bush administration’s Defense Secretary and this was a hopeful sign for Space Force enthusiasts, but the September 11, 2001 attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq shifted priorities to the Global War on Terror.
A successful Chinese anti-satellite (ASAT) test in 2007 should have been a wake-up call for Washington, but Marion notes that while the Bush administration belatedly recognized the need to treat space as a domain of conflict among the great powers, the incoming Obama administration reverted to the Clinton view that space was a domain of international cooperation. “In contrast with the Bush space policy that emphasized U.S. dominance,” Marion writes, “Obama’s first term was characterized by … a willingness to explore bilateral and multilateral diplomacy regarding space.” Marion describes Obama’s approach to space as “self-imposed restraint.”
Meanwhile, China and Russia continued to upgrade their “counter-space capabilities,” which triggered efforts by some congressional and military leaders to resurrect efforts to establish a Space Force. Marion notes the work of “a tiny cadre of space-minded Air Force officers” and congressional leaders (especially Republican Mike Rodgers and Democrat Jim Cooper) to bring to light the “signs of increasing military capabilities in space on the part of China and Russia as well as their increasing aggressiveness.” Strategists such as Elbridge Colby, then a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, argued that the United States needed “to prepare for war in space.” Colby would become a key defense official in the incoming Trump administration who shifted our military’s focus from the Global War on Terror to great power competition. (READ MORE: Henry Wallace and the Progressive Link to Communism)
President Trump in March 2018 announced a “new national strategy for space [that] recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain just like the land, air, and sea.” And he hinted at that time: “We may even have a Space Force.” Behind the scenes, Trump officials and congressional leaders worked to overcome intense bureaucratic obstacles to establish the U.S. Space Force. “[A]fter six decades of not speaking publicly of space as a warfighting domain,” Marion writes, “the Air Force and official Washington — perhaps led by the White House — began doing just that.” On December 20, 2019, President Trump signed into law the nation’s defense bill which established the U.S. Space Force, which had bi-partisan support. It is one of President Trump’s most important accomplishments.
