Embracing Space Force Exceptionalism

Congress created the Space Force in 2019 to restore the US military’s focus on space and accelerate efforts to counter the threats China and Russia pose in space. In the years since, overall funding for space in the DoD budget has more than doubled from $12.6 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2018 to $32.9 billion in FY2024 (in then-year dollars) and the Space Force has begun building a new space architecture that is more resilient to attack.¹ For the first time, military space forces and programs are aligned under a unified chain of command, and the space cadre of military and civilian guardians has the independence it needs to develop a new warfighting culture.

The hard work of building the Space Force, however, is far from complete. This chapter offers a vision for the Space Force with a more expansive mandate than it currently has. It explores alternative force-planning constructs for space, identifies new mission areas the Space Force should pursue, recommends reforms to the Space Force’s personnel and readiness systems, and analyzes the budgetary resources needed to implement these changes. A recurring theme is that the Space Force is fundamentally different from the other services, and it should not settle for being bound by the same rules, processes, and constraints. The Space Force should embrace its uniqueness and the opportunity it has over the coming years to fully realize its destiny as the exceptional service.

Force Sizing for Space

One of the Space Force’s distinctive characteristics relative to the other military services is how its capabilities scale under different force-planning assumptions. The military’s force-planning construct describes the force size and capabilities necessary to execute its strategy. At the end of the Cold War, the United States adopted a two-theater planning construct based on the idea that the US military should be able to fight two major theater wars nearly simultaneously.² However, this has evolved over the past three decades to become what is effectively a “one-plus” construct—a military sized to defeat one adversary while reserving enough forces to deter (but not necessarily defeat) a second aggressor.³ The Commission on the National Defense Strategy concluded in its 2024 final report that “the current force-sizing construct is inadequate for today’s needs and tomorrow’s challenges” and instead proposes a “multiple theater force construct.”⁴

Forces in other domains tend to scale roughly linearly with the number of theaters they need to support simultaneously, meaning a two-theater planning construct requires about twice the forces as a one-theater planning construct (depending on the scale and simultaneity of the wars assumed). Space capabilities, in contrast, tend to be global and therefore highly nonlinear in how they scale. For many space missions, a two-theater construct requires significantly less than double the forces (i.e., satellites and operators) of a one-theater construct.⁵

One reason for this is the absenteeism problem—the fact that satellites in orbits that constantly move over the Earth’s surface (i.e., non-geostationary orbits) spend most of their time over areas other than the theater of interest. Designers must account for absenteeism when sizing satellite constellations, which means more satellites are needed in a constellation to maintain continuous coverage over one theater.⁶ The absenteeism problem becomes an advantage in a multiple theater force-planning construct because a satellite constellation large enough to support one theater inherently provides coverage and capacity for other theaters. As satellites orbit the Earth and pass out of range for one theater, they pass over a different theater.⁷ GPS, for example, needs only four satellites over a given point on Earth to enable precision positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT). Because GPS satellites are in constant motion, orbiting the Earth every 12 hours, the GPS constellation needs at least 24 satellites in total to ensure at least four are always visible at any given point on the surface. But this also means that a GPS constellation sized for one theater inherently covers all theaters.

Another example of the differences in how space capabilities scale compared to other domains is the ground moving target indication (GMTI) mission that the Air Force has supported for decades using the E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) aircraft. To have a sufficient fleet of aircraft to simultaneously perform this mission in two theaters requires roughly twice the aircraft (and supporting systems, crews, and other assets) as a one-theater force.⁸ When the GMTI mission is moved to space, however, the satellites needed to cover one theater can also cover other theaters because they are constantly moving relative to the Earth’s surface. As a satellite in the constellation passes over the Indo-Pacific, for example, it covers that region. Minutes later that same satellite may be over Europe while other satellites in the constellation are now over the Indo-Pacific region. Moving the GMTI mission to space makes it inherently multi-theater—and unlike aircraft, satellites provide continuous coverage that is indefinitely sustainable.

Other important force-planning characteristics for space, such as the need to be resilient against different forms of attack and maintain a high degree of space situational awareness, are also not closely correlated with how many theaters can be supported simultaneously. The level of protection required, for example, is based on the worst anticipated threats in any theater, and all satellites of a given type and the system as a whole (including ground stations) need the same protection regardless of how many theaters they support. Additional capacity and attrition reserves may be needed for certain capabilities, and additional space situational awareness sensors and processing may be needed to track more adversary actions simultaneously. But these increases are relatively small in magnitude relative to the overall force—and they are arguably needed regardless of the force-planning construct assumed.

A multiple theater force-planning construct is therefore much easier to implement for the Space Force than for the other services. Moreover, a multiple theater force becomes more achievable if additional missions are moved to space (when possible). While the other services struggle to scale in size, the Space Force can focus its resources on improving its capabilities and resilience and expanding into more missions.

New Space Force Missions

This leads to a second factor that sets the Space Force apart from the other services: it is better positioned to take on new missions in a multiple theater force-planning construct. This includes relatively new missions for the military—such as offensive and defensive counterspace—and existing missions that can be better performed from space than from other domains. Like GMTI, the airborne warning and control mission has traditionally been conducted from the air, but advances in adversary air defenses make these aircraft increasingly vulnerable. Conducting this mission from space has the added advantage of covering all of an adversary’s territory, even during peacetime. Unlike in the air, land, and maritime domains, the right of free overflight in space is well established and is a defining characteristic of space operations.

Whether to move a mission to space or keep it in another domain is not always a binary decision. Sometimes the best choice may be to do both. Competition for missions among the services and with the intelligence community is not always a bad thing. Competition can stimulate innovation and incentivize the services to be more responsive to warfighter demands. It also creates an additional layer of resiliency, ensuring if one service’s capability is defeated or degraded, a competing capability from another part of the joint force may still be able to accomplish the mission. The Space Force should pursue and, where necessary, compete vigorously and unapologetically for new and expanded missions in several key areas, including tactical surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting (TacSRT); rapid transportation of cargo and personnel (i.e., spacelift); and offensive and defensive counterspace.

Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and Targeting. Other than missile warning, the US military has not traditionally conducted surveillance and reconnaissance of the Earth from space. Space-based surveillance and reconnaissance has been the National Reconnaissance Office’s (NRO’s) job, and its focus has been on providing national-level capabilities using highly capable satellites, often referred to as “national technical means.” While the NRO should be credited with fielding a new, more resilient proliferated architecture faster than the Space Force—having launched a new constellation of over 100 satellites between May and December 2024—the intelligence community should not be granted a monopoly on conducting surveillance from space.⁹ The Space Force has an important role in providing a more tactically responsive capability for the warfighter, but bureaucratic infighting with the intelligence community has hamstrung these efforts. As then–Space Force Acquisition Chief Frank Calvelli noted in public remarks, “I think if we drive tactical ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] in space to be more like national technical means, the country will lose, the warfighter will lose.”¹⁰

The Space Force announced its intention to begin developing a space-based radar system for GMTI in May 2021.¹¹ After years of wrangling over roles and authorities with the intelligence community, the program did not pass Milestone B—the official start of an acquisition program—until August 2024.¹² Taking over three years to start a program is not moving at the speed of innovation; it is moving at the speed of bureaucracy. 

The Space Force should part ways with the intelligence community on this program and make moving target indication (to include ground, maritime, and airborne targets) part of the Custody Layer of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) called for in one of President Trump’s executive orders.¹³ The custody layer is intended to provide commanders the ability to maintain “custody of time-sensitive targets to support engagement by advanced weapons.”¹⁴ The Space Development Agency (SDA) should build a tactically responsive system that allows users at lower echelons in all domains to directly task the system to scan the battle space and downlink processed (but not necessarily analyzed) data in real time directly to forces and weapons systems in any theater. In the interim, the Space Force should begin using commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems to experiment and provide an interim capability for the warfighter. Using commercially owned and operated systems will help refine requirements for a military owned and operated system and assess the trade-offs between cost and performance.

Spacelift. Another new mission area for the Space Force is cargo delivery to remote and inaccessible locations via space—sometimes referred to as spacelift. Just as airlift revolutionized military logistics and enabled new operational concepts for ground forces, spacelift may also prove revolutionary for the joint force. While at first it may be a niche capability due to the cost per pound delivered and the total payload capacity, spacelift can still be highly advantageous in certain situations. For example, it could rapidly deliver ammunition and supplies directly to forward operating forces or an embassy under attack when those areas are otherwise unreachable in a timely manner.

The Space Force’s paltry $4 million request in the FY2025 budget, however, is hardly a strong start.¹⁵ It needs the funding and authority to accelerate work with commercial launch providers and begin flying test missions as soon as possible. The aim should be to reach an initial operating capability for cargo transport to ships at sea and remote airfields within two years and crew transport by 2030.

Offensive and Defensive Counterspace. Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman has called space superiority “the reason the Space Force exists.”¹⁶ As he defines it, space superiority has two components: employing space capabilities to support US and allied military operations and preventing an adversary from using their space capabilities against US and allied forces. The second component—the ability to degrade or disrupt adversary space and counterspace capabilities—is often referred to as offensive and defensive counterspace. While some capabilities may be classified, the Space Force has not publicly revealed or demonstrated many of the basic capabilities needed for this mission area, such as bodyguard satellites capable of disrupting or disabling adversary space and counterspace assets.

In Saltzman’s theory of success, he calls on the Space Force to “be prepared to undertake responsible counterspace campaigning,” which he defines as “confronting malign activity in the domain through protracted, day-to-day competition.”¹⁷ Adversaries, particularly Russia in its war against Ukraine, routinely attack and interfere with the operation of US military space systems, including the widespread use of GPS jamming and spoofing.¹⁸ Yet the Space Force has not directly confronted these malign activities.

This lack of action suggests that the United States does not have either the will or the capability to respond. Either way, it undermines the Space Force’s credibility to achieve space superiority in a conflict. The new administration must ensure that the Space Force has the right suite of capabilities for offensive and defensive counterspace operations and that it uses these capabilities to confront bad actors by conducting responsible counterspace campaigning in peacetime.

Updated Roles and Missions. To facilitate the addition of new Space Force missions and a broader understanding within DOD of the Space Force’s role in the joint force, the new administration should update Department of Defense Directive (DODD) 5100.01, Functions of the Department of Defense and Its Major Components. The hasty update, made after the Space Force was created, lists five vague and overlapping functions for the service that are inconsistent with subsequent doctrine and terms of reference.¹⁹ For example, DODD 5100.01 does not mention key Space Force functions, including space superiority, PNT, missile warning, and satellite communications (SATCOM).

In contrast, it is much more specific about other services’ key functions. For example, one of the Air Force’s key functions is to “conduct offensive and defensive operations . . . to gain and maintain air superiority, and air supremacy as required,” and one of the Navy’s key functions is to “conduct offensive and defensive operations associated with the maritime domain including achieving and maintaining sea control.”²⁰ DODD 5100.01 is a foundational document for the US military, and it is critical to get this foundation right because it is the basis on which all Space Force missions are established and defended.

Personnel and Readiness Reform

A third factor that makes the Space Force exceptional is its people and the way it trains and maintains a ready force. While it may be easy to think of the Space Force as a microcosm of the overall military, this is an overly simplistic and misleading comparison. The Space Force’s composition and force posture are necessarily different from the other services. As a result, the personnel and readiness systems inherited from the Air Force and the practices and processes used by all of the other military services create serious challenges for the Space Force and its ability to attract, train, and retain the people it needs. The Space Force’s small size, however, also presents a unique opportunity. Unlike the other services, the Space Force can experiment with new policies and processes faster and with less political resistance. It must evolve its culture and internal processes to better fit the missions it supports and its role in the joint force—beginning with a concerted effort to rethink its rank structure and career paths, readiness model, and internal organization.

Rank Structure and Career Paths. Figure 1 shows that the rank distribution of personnel in the Space Force is distinct from the other services. The Space Force has a larger share of officers than the other services by far—48 percent of the Space Force’s active-duty personnel are officers compared to 19 percent in the Air Force, 17 percent in the Army, 16 percent in the Navy, and 11 percent in the Marine Corps (not including warrant officers). And within the officer and enlisted ranks, the Space Force is more heavily weighted toward the higher ranks.²¹ Guardians are also more educated than their peers in the other services: 20 percent of enlisted personnel in the Space Force have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 56 percent of officers have an advanced degree. In the other services, only 10 percent of enlisted personnel have a bachelor’s degree or higher and only 39 percent of officers have an advanced degree.²²

Figure 1. Rank Distribution Across the Military Services

This does not mean, however, that the Space Force is too top-heavy or educated. Rather, it reflects the divergent needs of the Space Force because the systems it acquires and the way it operates are fundamentally different from the other services. The Space Force is perhaps the polar opposite of the Marine Corps, which needs a large pipeline of young people to fill its battalions. Over 65 percent of marines are age 25 or younger, and a high turnover rate in the lower ranks is desirable to keep the Marine Corps young and physically strong.²³ In contrast, the Space Force needs people with a higher level of intellectual expertise in a narrow set of disciplines who are increasingly in high demand in the private sector. A high turnover rate may be desirable for the Marine Corps, but it is highly undesirable for the Space Force. Therefore, the personnel systems and policies that may work for the other services are not well suited for the Space Force. While the quantity of people may have a quality of its own for the other services, quality is the quantity that matters most for guardians.

The Space Force should work with Congress to rethink the Space Force’s rank structure, accession paths, and career tracks to better fit a space-centric workforce’s needs. Specifically, Congress and the Space Force should consider making the following changes:

• Eliminate the officer-enlisted divide by creating a single, continuous rank system. For example, it could adopt a unified rank system that spans from G-1 to G-10 for all guardians rather than E-1 to E-9 for enlisted and O-1 to O-10 for officers, and it could combine some ranks where the service has few billets. Table 1 provides a hypothetical example of how this could be accomplished as a starting point for debate.²⁴
• Make lateral entry the norm rather than the exception so that all guardians enter the service at a rank commensurate with their education and work experience. Using the example provided in Table 1, someone right out of high school would enter as a G-1, someone with a two-year associate degree would enter as a G-2, someone with a four-year bachelor’s degree would enter as a G-4, and someone with an advanced degree would enter as a G-5. All accessions would still go through a basic training course commensurate with their experience to familiarize them with the service and how it functions.
• Adopt a merit-based promotion system based on education, experience, performance, and service needs, and eliminate time in grade, peer groups, and up-or-out as factors in the promotion process.
• Make reentry simple and commonplace by allowing guardians that separate from the service to return at a rank commensurate with their education and work experience. Using Table 1 again as an example, a person that leaves as a G-5 with a four-year degree and five years of experience and returns after obtaining an advanced degree and two additional years of work experience would rejoin as a G-6.
• Create separate technical and leadership tracks, allowing personnel in technical tracks to remain in jobs longer and become more specialized in their respective disciplines. This will help reduce the number of unnecessary permanent change of station (PCS) moves, improving family stability, retention, and subject matter expertise.
• Eliminate the categorization of guardians by specialty codes (e.g., 13S Space Operator and 63A Acquisitions Manager). These designations exacerbate the divide between acquirers and operators (and other subcommunities in the workforce) and should be viewed more like special skills or certifications that each guardian can earn rather than separate career tracks.

Table 1. Notional Space Force Unified Rank Structure

Category	Grade	Rank	Education and Experience Guidelines	Equivalent Legacy Rank(s)
General Officer	G-10	General	Advanced Degree and over 26 years of experience	O-9/O-10
	G-9	Lieutenant General	Advanced Degree and over 22 years of experience	O-7/O-8
Field Grade Officer	G-8	Colonel	Advanced Degree and over 18 years of experience	O-6
	G-7	Lieutenant Colonel	Advanced degree and over 12 years of experience or four-year degree and over 16 years of experience	O-5
	G-6	Major	Advanced degree and over six years of experience or four-year degree and over 10 years of experience	O-4
Company Grade Officer	G-5	Captain	Advanced degree and no experience, four-year degree and over four years of experience, or two-year degree and over 12 years of experience	O-3
	G-4	Lieutenant	Four-year degree and no experience, two-year degree and over six years of experience, or high school or General Education Development (GED) degree and over eight years of experience	O-1/O-2
Noncommissioned Officer	G-3	Sergeant	Two-year degree and two years of experience or high school or GED degree and over four years of experience	E-5/E-6
Junior Enlisted	G-2	Specialist	Two-year degree and no experience or high school or GED degree and over two years of experience	E-3/E-4
	G-1	Specialist Basic	High school or GED degree and no experience	E-1/E-2

Changes to rank structure, accessions, promotions, lateral entry, and overall career management should not be made in isolation or without considering the many interdependent effects involved in each decision. Congress should create a commission to study changes to the personnel system and recommend an integrated package of reforms. It should be careful, however, to limit the number of retired general officers on the commission to ensure adequate representation of other points of view. General officers tend to strongly favor the status quo because by definition the current system worked well for them—a system the Space Force inherited that was designed and managed by the Air Force. Members of the commission should include former junior officers, junior enlisted personnel, and—since the private sector is where the Space Force must compete most vigorously for talent—individuals with private sector experience.

Major changes such as combining ranks and eliminating the officer-enlisted divide would likely evoke a strong response at first. One of the main arguments against a different rank structure for the Space Force is that personnel would not be easily aligned with their peers in the other services for the purposes of protocol and precedence in joint meetings and operations. This can be remedied in the same way the military currently translates between civilian and military ranks. DOD publishes equivalency tables where each civilian rank (GS-1 through SES) has a corresponding military rank, and DOD Instruction 1000.01 identifies Geneva Conventions categories and their equivalent military and civilian grades.²⁵ DOD could merely add a column to these tables including the equivalent guardian rank. While it would take time for people to learn the new system, it would soon become as natural and commonly understood as the fact that a Navy captain outranks an Air Force captain.

While the military itself can make some of the changes needed to the personnel system, other changes will require Congress to create exceptions, pilot programs, or entirely new authorities specific to the Space Force. Congress has already signaled that, with sufficient justification, it is open to making significant exceptions for the Space Force. The FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act, for example, included a section known as the Space Force Personnel Management Act, which allowed the Space Force to create a single component for active and reserve guardians.²⁶ The Space Force should build on this legislative success to enact broader reforms, and Congress should avoid taking actions that compel the Space Force to become more like the other services.

Readiness Model. The Space Force also requires a separate and distinct readiness model for training, operations, and sustainment. The service is already implementing what it calls the Space Force Generation (SPAFORGEN) model, which includes three phases: prepare, ready, and commit. This bears some similarities to the Air Force Force Generation (AFFORGEN) model, which uses four phases: prepare, ready, available to commit, and reset. One significant difference is that the AFFORGEN model spans 24 months per cycle (approximately six months per phase) while the SPAFORGEN model spans 24 weeks (three weeks for the prepare phase, six weeks for the ready phase, and 15 weeks for the commit phase).²⁷ This rotational schedule means that people will be non-deployed 37.5 percent of the time, requiring some increase in end strength.

Studies have shown that forces that are continuously employed in place, such as drone operators, can experience burnout and low retention. It can be difficult for these personnel to balance the demands of continuous operations (including night shifts) with the expectations of family life.²⁸ Continuous operations also limit time for professional and personal development. SPAFORGEN is intended to give guardians dedicated time and greater certainty in their schedule to plan for vacations, training, and professional military education. However, some guardians have expressed concerns about the rigid schedules the SPAFORGEN rotational model imposes and instead recommend a data-driven, “human-centric” approach that provides more flexibility for leaders and individuals to get the support they need.²⁹

With this new approach, the Space Force should avoid attempting to follow the other services’ readiness practices. It should not blindly assume personnel requirements scale linearly with the number of satellites it operates and use this as an excuse for personnel bloat. Some growth in end strength will be necessary to accommodate new mission areas and the fraction of the force allocated for the prepare and ready phases of the SPAFORGEN model, but this growth should not be used as a justification for increasing headquarters staff and overhead.

With the new SPAFORGEN model, the Space Force must also be clear-eyed about the trade-offs and interdependencies among operational readiness, modernization, and force size. For a given level of resources, improvements in one of these must necessarily come at the expense of one or both of the others.³⁰ The Space Force, however, needs to increase all three at once, and it can only accomplish this by increasing its overall budget. But if Congress does not provide sufficient funding, it will be forced to make trade-offs. Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, recently warned that the Space Force should not sacrifice modernization for the sake of operational readiness.³¹ Modernizing capabilities to keep pace with threats should remain the Space Force’s top priority.

Internal Organization. The Space Force has already taken steps to flatten its organization by reducing the number of echelons in its force structure. Soon after its formation, it changed from the Air Force’s wing, group, and squadron model to a delta structure.³² However, in some areas it continues to mirror its parent service in inefficient and ineffective ways. For example, the Space Force has maintained separate field commands for acquisition (Space Systems Command, or SSC) and operations (Space Operations Command, or SPOC) and is establishing a new organization known as Space Futures Command. Having separate commands for acquisition, operations, and future concept development is counterproductive to innovation. It separates personnel in different chains of command based on their function (e.g., acquisition, operations, etc.) rather than the mission they support (PNT, SATCOM, missile warning, etc.), and this limits their ability to interact and solve cross-functional problems within each mission area.

More than any other service, the Space Force competes with adversaries based on how quickly it innovates and brings new capabilities to the fight. The innovation cycle is accelerated when engineers, acquirers, intelligence analysts, and operators all work closely together within a mission area. This enables faster feedback and a deeper understanding of what operators need now and in the future. It also helps operators understand the opportunities new technologies present and the threats adversary developments pose. Proactive innovation happens when engineers, acquirers, and analysts find solutions to problems operators don’t yet know they need to solve.

The Space Force should immediately halt the establishment of Space Futures Command and combine SSC and SPOC into a new organizational structure aligned around mission areas. A notional concept for realignment around mission areas is shown in Figure 2 as a starting point for debate. Once units are transferred from SSC and SPOC, each mission commander should combine and reshape all deltas and program offices under their command to best suit their mission area’s unique needs. Mission commanders should be appointed for terms of at least five years and report directly to the chief of space operations, while the acquisition functions in each mission area would also report to the assistant secretary for space acquisition and integration. In each mission area, operators, analysts, acquirers, and engineers should be physically co-located to maximize opportunities for innovation and the development of deep subject matter expertise. Integration across mission areas would occur through the secondary alignment of personnel by functional certifications, allowing them to share best practices and explore opportunities for collaboration. Integration would also occur through the cross-mission area deltas under Space Training and Readiness Command.

Figure 2. Concept of a New Organizational Approach

The Department of the Air Force also needs a dedicated senior civilian position for space. The Trump administration’s original legislative proposal for the Space Force included an undersecretary of the Air Force for space, but in pursuing efficiency, Congress neglected to create this position.³³ Without it, the senior-most civilian position exclusively focused on space in the Department of the Air Force is the assistant secretary for space acquisition and integration, which only has purview over space acquisitions. A dedicated undersecretary position for space would ensure proper civilian oversight and authority for all aspects of the Space Force, including strategy, training, readiness, and force development. As in the past, such an under secretary position could also be dual-hatted as director of the National Reconnaissance Office to ensure better coordination and integration between military and intelligence space activities.³⁴

Specific Recommendations and Resources Required

Perhaps the Space Force’s most exceptional characteristic is how much capability it brings to the joint force relative to its budget. For only 3.5 percent of the DOD budget, the Space Force provides precision positioning, navigation and timing for the entire world, missile warning and tracking that protects the homeland and forward-deployed forces, satellite communications that support nuclear command and control and conventional forces, space domain awareness and collision avoidance for all space operators (civilian and military), and many other capabilities. The Space Force is a critical enabler for forces in all other domains and for the global economy—it is the foundation of the US military’s global power projection capabilities.

Given the increasingly pivotal role the Space Force plays in US national security, it must embrace change and reform itself to remain the world’s preeminent space power. This will require a partnership between the Space Force and Congress that engenders trust and cooperation. Congress needs to provide more funding and new authorities, but that must be matched by improved transparency, communication, and accountability from the Space Force and its senior leaders. Failures and mistakes along the way should be expected. What matters most for maintaining trust is how quickly they are disclosed and corrected. In this respect, the Space Force should aim to become the exceptional service in how closely it works with Congress.

One of the most important changes that trust between the Space Force and Congress could enable is the restructuring of appropriations accounts around mission areas, as Congress’s Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform recommended for all of DOD. The current system structures the budget around life cycle phases (i.e., development, procurement, operations, etc.), which is an industrial age approach that does not work well in the information age.³⁵ While a wholesale change in budget structure for all of DOD at once would be difficult to accomplish, the Space Force is an ideal test case, allowing appropriators to get more comfortable with the idea and see how well it works in practice. A mission-centric budget structure would align appropriations in the same way the Space Force should organize itself internally and, as a recent Aerospace Corporation report notes, would give Congress increased insight into how funding is being used by mission area.³⁶ Most importantly, it would align budget authority with operational responsibility so that Congress can hold the Space Force’s mission commanders accountable for their performance. It would also give the service more flexibility to respond to new threats and opportunities that arise within the budget cycle—a key to accelerating the pace of innovation.

The lists below give specific recommendations in rough priority order for what Congress, the new administration, and the Space Force should and should not do over the coming years. The net budget impact of these recommendations is estimated to be roughly $31 billion more over the next five years than planned in the FY2025 budget request—an average increase of approximately $6 billion above the currently planned annual funding level.³⁷ While many of these recommendations will incur additional costs, some do not have a meaningful budget impact, and others will save money by eliminating or preventing the creation of wasteful programs, organizations, and activities.

To-Do List

• Create a Commission on Reforming the Space Force Personnel System tasked to study the following:
  • Combining enlisted and officer ranks into a single guardian rank structure;
  • Normalizing lateral entry and reentry by making the rank for new and returning guardians a function of education and work experience;
  • Reforming the promotion process by eliminating up-or-out, time in grade, and other non-merit-based requirements;
  • Creating separate technical and leadership career tracks;
  • Reducing the number of unnecessary permanent change of station moves; and
  • Eliminating the categorization of guardians by specialty codes.
• Combine SSC and SPOC into a new organizational structure aligned around mission areas.
• Halt the establishment of Space Futures Command.
• Restructure the Space Force budget around mission areas rather than life cycle phases.
• Ensure operators, analysts, engineers, and acquirers are physically located together within mission areas.
• Update DOD 5100.01 to better articulate the Space Force’s roles and missions.
• Create an under secretary of the Air Force for space to serve as the senior civilian for the service.
• Stop worrying about competing with the intelligence community and the other services for missions.
• Develop a tactically responsive MTI system separate from the intelligence community as part of the PWSA custody layer.
• Fully fund the development of GPS M-Code Increment 2 receivers.
• Accelerate future tranches of the PWSA missile tracking and data transport layers.
• Prioritize the offensive and defensive counterspace mission area and begin using capabilities such as electronic warfare and bodyguard satellites, to confront malign activities in space.
• Create a separate budget line and five-year funding projection for commercial space intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and make the Space Force the central buyer of commercial space ISR for the combatant commands (as it already is for SATCOM).
• Increase funding and the five-year funding projection for commercial SATCOM.
• Stop buying new “legacy” satellites, such as Wideband Global SATCOM and Mobile User Objective System. 
• Make spacelift a new mission area for the Space Force and fully fund accelerated testing of cargo delivery via space.
• Accelerate protected SATCOM disaggregation by increasing funding for Evolved Strategic SATCOM and Protected Tactical SATCOM.
• Fund additional launch range modernization to support a higher volume of launches and improve existing facilities’ resiliency.
• Increase Space Force operations and maintenance funding and end strength to support the addition of new mission areas.
• Do not assume personnel requirements scale linearly with the overall number of satellites on orbit.
• Do not create a Space National Guard.³⁸

Conclusion

Due to its small size and the strategic priority of the domain in which it operates, the Space Force is—in many ways—the exception among the military services. It is exceptional in the critical enabling capabilities it provides for the other services, the way it conducts operations and employs forces across the spectrum of conflict, the skills and deep expertise of its people, and the unique role it plays in global commerce and the lives of every American. The Space Force is the foundation of US power projection—it provides the reach and strategic endurance the US military relies on across the spectrum of conflict.

The Space Force should not assume it is constrained by the old ways of doing business or the rules and regulations designed for the other services. Rather than trying to normalize itself and conform to the mold set by others, the Space Force should embrace its exceptionalism and be more aggressive and forward leaning in the missions, reforms, and policies it pursues. Recent history has shown that both Congress and the Trump administration are more open to disruptive ideas from the Space Force than from any other part of DOD. Congress and the White House recognize that the Space Force is different, and the public assumes it is different, but the Space Force itself has not fully accepted its uniqueness. The Space Force is the exceptional service, and Space Force Exceptionalism should be the heart of its culture, values, and vision.

About the Author

Todd Harrison is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on defense strategy and budgeting, the defense industrial base, and space policy and security.