Whose Idea Was This Anyway?
When established in December of 2019, the Space Force became the first new United States military service since the creation of the Air Force in 1947. On the occasion, then president Donald Trump held a press conference in which he stated, “I’m hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the Armed Forces.” He might as well, he could hardly do otherwise than direct Pentagon officials to obey the law. You’d never have known it from the proceedings, but while an American president may indeed be commander-in-chief of the nation’s Armed Forces, the job carries no authority to create a new service branch. That has to be done by Congress, and it was, when the 116th Congress added chapter 908 to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2020 under the heading “Space Force.” All Trump did was sign it.
In fact, The Trump administration had strongly rebuked the idea in 2016 when an Obama-era proposal to do the same thing was removed from that year’s defense authorization bill. Two years later, though, Trump had changed his position and put his full political weight behind it. Like him or loathe him, no one can argue he didn’t like to be perceived as a man of action and ideas. Indeed, on March 13, 2018, in comments at Miramar in San Diego, he told the assembled Marines, “I was saying it the other day—’cause we’re doing a tremendous amount of work in space—I said, ‘Maybe we need a new force. We’ll call it the Space Force . . . . . . . . . ’ And I was not really serious. And then I said, ‘What a great idea. Maybe we’ll have to do that.’”
A casual observer might be excused for thinking it was all his idea—at least if they didn’t know what Air Force Space Command had been up to for the last thirty-six years and that as he spoke that day, the Center For Strategic and International Studies was distributing copies of its “Space Threat Assessment 2018,” from which Trump had almost certainly been briefed on recent concerning actions by China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea among others. What they might not have told him, and what many Americans didn’t know either, was that a dedicated space force was anything but a new idea. In fact, debate over the proper organizational home for missile and space defense had been raging for decades, both in the United States and abroad.
Rockets have existed since ancient times, but only in the twentieth century did they become sophisticated aerial vehicles capable of carrying people, cargo, and bombs. By World War II, advancing technology had enabled the mass production of rocket artillery, which in various forms was used by all combatants in all theaters of the war. Artillery is traditionally the domain of an army, but by the war’s end, it was clear that rockets were going to play vital roles not only as artillery, but in defense against air attack, as a means of striking from vast distances, in new strategic deterrent roles, and maybe one day in reconnaissance and rapid logistical support roles, maybe even in space. Thus, every branch of the U.S. military scrambled to deploy rocket technology to keep itself relevant and effective in the new age.
* In 1945, the U.S. Army established In 1945, the U.S. Army established the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. It initially focused on developing and testing liquid-fueled rockets and played a key role in the development of the Redstone, Jupiter, and Pershing missile systems.
* In 1945, the U.S. Army established In 1949, the U.S. Navy established the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., responsible for the development of a wide range of missile systems including the Viking, Aerobee, and Talos missiles.
* In 1945, the U.S. Army established In 1952, the Army established the Ordnance Guided Missile Center, later renamed the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, which went on to develop the Redstone and Jupiter missiles and orbital launch vehicles.
* In 1945, the U.S. Army established n 1957, the Air Research Development Command’s Western Development Division, which had become the center of efforts to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles, was redesignated the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division.
* In 1960, the secretive National Reconnaissance Office was created to develop and operate intelligence-gathering satellites.
* In 1961, because of differences in applicable technologies and relative maturities between ballistic missile and space systems programs, the Air Force split these two responsibilities into separate commands under the newly organized Air Force Systems Command. In 1967, however, they were merged back together into the new Space and Missile Systems Organization. Collectively over the years, these organizations developed and operated a wide range of space systems, from communication and navigation to reconnaissance, missile warning, and weather observation. They oversaw the development of the Air Force Satellite Control Network and the Defense Satellite Communications System, a secure, jam-resistant global communications system for U.S. government agencies. They also operated the Air Force’s Atlas, Titan, and Delta space launch vehicles and developed and deployed the original GPS navigational satellite constellation.
* Air Force Space Command was created in 1982 to consolidate the Air Force’s space-related activities and responsibilities. Its mission was to provide resilient and affordable space and cyberspace capabilities for the joint force and the nation, and it managed most U.S. military space operations until 2002, when along with the older Space and Missile Systems Organization, it was reorganized into a new Air Force Space Command with a different reporting structure.
* In 1985, U.S. Space Command (not to be confused with U.S. Air Force Space Command) was created as a Unified Combatant Command to integrate space capabilities across the Air Force, Army, Navy, and the National Reconnaissance Office. Its mission included strategic warning and defense against potential threats from space and the conduct of military operations in space. In 2002, these responsibilities were transferred to the newly created U.S. Strategic Command, one of about a dozen Unified Combatant Commands under the Joint Chiefs of Staff but not in any service branch.
Meanwhile, an elevated vantage point has provided military advantage since antiquity, and there is no higher ground than space. While many today still protest the “militarization of space,” the reality is that bridge long ago burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp. From the moment a Soviet rocket put a battery-operated transmitter into orbit in October 1957, the high ground of space became a battleground, or in the PR-challenged parlance of modern military leaders, a “war-fighting domain.”
After Sputnik, Senator Barry Goldwater warned “the Soviets could drop nuclear bombs like rocks from a highway overpass.” Memories of Pearl Harbor were fresh and fears of Soviet aggression high. Western leaders knew the last war had been invited by perceived weakness and ultimately won on the strength of intelligence gathering. The next surprise attack might be the last, the end of the nation or even civilization itself.
And the surveillance overflights needed to prevent it were themselves a recipe for conflict. In order to reduce the risk, uncrewed Project Mogul balloons carried microphones over and around the Soviet Union to listen for nuclear tests. Project Genetrix and Project Moby Dick sent skyscraper-sized balloons over China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union to collect intelligence on nuclear and strategic military capabilities. The balloons worked, but they were logistically complex, risked crashing heavy equipment down on civilian populations, raised vociferous objections, and were simply too slow, requiring photographic film magazines to be recovered after a balloon reached international airspace.
Project Mogul’s NYU Flight 4 was an experimental test balloon launched on June 4, 1947, from Alamogordo Army Air Field (now Holloman Air Force Base) in New Mexico. Carrying a three-foot cylindrical metal sonobuoy, weather instrumentation, and a simple radar target, it was part of a series of experiments to test the feasibility of using high-altitude balloons to detect sound waves from nuclear explosions (the sonobuoy was just ballast, borrowed from the Navy till new acoustical sensors were ready).
Flight 4 was lost and never recovered by the research team, but ten days later, rancher W. W. Brazel found something weird northwest of Roswell, barely a hundred miles downwind. The rest, as they say, is history, but don’t go searching the desert for dilithium crystals just yet.
When interviewed for a congressionally mandated investigation in 19941, surviving Project Mogul researchers Dr. Athelstan F. Spilhaus, Charles B. Moore, and Colonel Albert C. Trakowski confirmed that photos and accounts from the time and later were all entirely consistent with Flight 4. This was supported by the recollections of Lieutenant Colonel Cavitt who in 1947 was dispatched by Roswell Army Air Field (now Walker Air Force Base) to investigate. Cavitt remembered a small area of debris which appeared “to resemble bamboo type square sticks one quarter to one half inch square, that were very light, as well as some sort of metallic reflecting material that was also very light.”
This matches Moore’s description of the radar target meant to help in tracking the balloon. Triangles of paper-backed aluminum foil were affixed to a complex balsa wood frame to form something resembling an inverted box kite—a set of retroreflectors to strongly return radar signals coming from all directions. Late in the war, production of these radar targets had been contracted out to toy companies who were not told what they were making. Various sorts of tape were used in their construction, and multiple contemporaneous sources mention “purplish tape printed with flowers and hearts”—the same tape recalled by a civilian witness of the crash site as well as numerous military men on the project who at the time wondered at the “unmilitary” construction.
This is clearly what Brigadier General Ramey is holding in photos taken of the debris at the time. And at his feet is a dark rumble of what is quite clearly the remains of a neoprene rubber weather balloon of the type used in clusters for the first seven Project Mogul tests, after which much larger polyethylene balloons were used instead.
Far from a massive cover-up of alien visitation, it’s clear what really happened: NYU Flight 4, carrying no sensitive or secret components, was lost as part of a top-secret program to detect Soviet nuclear tests. Tracking down the wreckage would have attracted attention without yielding additional data, so it was left to disintegrate in the blistering desert. And that would have been the end of it had not the locals come along and called the Army, who sent men knowing nothing about Project Mogul but who knew a weather balloon when they saw one and knew that enough Cold War secret squirrel action was going on just then that discretion was in order.
Cold War hysteria, post-war let-down, and human nature did the rest. The sonobuoy became “a flying disk,” goofy craft tape became “alien hieroglyphs,” and gentle downplay of a nonevent became the conspiracy of conspiracies. Honestly, if aliens really had stopped by, they’d have gone home shaking their heads at our credulity.
Left: Soldiers prepare radar target weather balloon at Ft. Bliss. Right: Brigadier General Ramey examining Roswell crash debris. courtesy, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.
1The Roswell Report: Fact Versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert: McAndrew, James: Headquarters, United States Air Force
Then, two years after Sputnik in August 1959, the first fully successful Corona satellite mission, Discoverer 14, orbited a large telescopic camera with a jettisonable film magazine. The recovery capsule, containing nearly 10 kilograms of film and suspended from a parachute, was snatched from midair by an Air Force C-119 aircraft. This first successful reconnaissance satellite alone returned more photos of the Soviet Union than all twenty-four U2 spy plane missions that had come before, and the images, although of poorer quality, covered areas of the Soviet Union never reached by any plane.
With the Soviet Union rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal and developing advanced delivery systems, there were those (generals MacArthur and LeMay among them) who advocated a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union before “it was too late.” But Corona showed that if we feared a nuclear Pearl Harbor, space-based reconnaissance was the way to prevent it. Far from a dystopian nightmare, the militarization of space was now the key to peace.
Indeed, in a 1962 interview with journalist Merle Miller, President Truman reportedly said he had been “damn glad” when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik because it had demonstrated the principle of free overflight and made it easier for the United States to launch its own reconnaissance satellites. Whether that’s really true, the legal principle has since been instrumental in making impending attack or military buildup increasingly difficult to conceal, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And of course, that’s not all. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S. military began to develop and deploy early-warning and surveillance satellites for use in missile defense. The Air Force also began to develop and test antisatellite (ASAT) weapons, which were designed to destroy enemy satellites in orbit.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. military continued to develop and deploy advanced surveillance and communication satellites, as well as space-based missile defense systems. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan proposed a bold initiative to use American technical know-how to “render nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” Never mind the trillion dollar price tag, the over-ambitious goals, the vulnerability of such technology to on-obit attack, the risk of disrupting the balance of power that for over thirty years had staved off the next world war or the fact that an adversary, deprived of intercontinental missiles, might be tempted to use sleeper agents with delivery trucks instead. Never mind all that, the nation had yet another space-defense-related component to staff, fund, and manage.
And observers started to see that as the real problem. By the end of World War II, air combat had developed in breadth and import to a point that made the need for a dedicated service branch obvious, but space technology and defense concerns emerged slowly. Control of missiles was given to the Army, because the Army used rockets as long-range artillery. Then it moved to the Air Force, which used missiles in place of strategic bombers, and the Navy, which used them in a whole new class of strategic weapon, the ballistic missile submarine.
Today’s U.S. space defense efforts descend from postwar and Cold War antiballistic missile defense and the Cold War use of space as a high ground from which to conduct surveillance. For decades, government space activity was strongly segregated into three parts, the civil space program run by NASA, intelligence gathering mostly by the Naval Reconnaissance Office and the CIA, and nuclear missile deterrence and defense, which itself was distributed across an ever-changing mosaic of military organizations.
By the 1990s, the Soviet Union was gone, and with it much of the Cold War threat of a widespread missile attack. But at the same time, technology had marched on, bringing new fears of terrorism, and rogue nuclear states, and making space increasingly central to the entire global economy. Threats, some said, were being missed and undervalued, important work was being lost in the bureaucratic cracks.
Simplifying a bit, the United States Armed Forces consists of six military service branches under three military departments, plus two executive departments and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At any given time, it also comprises multiple Unified Combatant Commands, each of which consists of units drawn from two or more service branches to fulfill some broad and continuing mission.
One such unified combatant command was the Air Force Space Command formed in 1982 to handle various aspects of procurement, launch, operation, and defense of space assets and access required by the various service branches. AFSPC comprised 26,000 personnel at facilities all over the world, launched satellites from both coasts, maintained a worldwide network of satellite tracking stations, and operated ground-based radars, optical tracking stations, and all manner of advanced sensors to protect the United States and its interests from ballistic missile attack, orbital space attack, and threats from deep space (asteroids).
Space Command itself was formed from space-related units scattered across the Armed Forces as rocketry matured from advanced artillery to strategic deterrent, and space from the province of science fiction to a vital theater of military and commercial interests. These units principally included Aerospace Defense Command (established in 1968 from units involved in Air Defense since World War II), Air Force Systems Command (established in 1951), and the Strategic Air Command (established in 1946 with the creation of the Air Force).
So much for the history, which convoluted and somewhat arcane though it may be, illustrates clearly the decades-long debate over how best to incorporate rapidly progressing space and rocketry capabilities into existing military organizations. And in this, the U.S. was not alone. Russian space defense has jumped from the old Soviet Air Force to a dedicated space defense and antisatellite force, back to a more general aerospace defense force, and more recently back to a dedicated “Space Force.” Similarly, Chinese space defense has at various times been combined with, or split from, its civilian space science programs and national cybersecurity efforts.
The first proposal for a U.S. military service branch for space defense was in 1957, when in the shadow of Sputnik, congressmen joined then secretary of the Air Force Donald Quarles in proposing the creation of a separate military service branch for space, known as the “Space Corps.” The proposal, in hindsight significantly ahead of its time, went nowhere, and instead the Air Force was given primary responsibility to develop and manage the military’s space capabilities.
Then, during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, calls were again made for a dedicated Space Corps. Chief among these came from Air Force General James Hartinger, then commander in chief of U.S. Space Command. He argued that given the increasing importance of space as a domain of military operations, the Air Force was not giving it the attention it needed and that a separate space corps would better address the problem.
Then in 1986, a report by the Defense Science Board Task Force on Space, headed by then secretary of the Air Force Edward “Pete” Aldridge, also called for creation of a space corps. The report argued that the Air Force had failed to develop a coherent space strategy and that a separate space corps would better address the problem. These proposals too, however, went nowhere.
The idea resurfaced in 2001 while George W. Bush was in the White House. Air Force Chief of Staff General John Jumper and other senior Air Force leaders again proposed creating a Space Corps as a way to better organize and manage military space operations. The idea, this time formally presented by the Rumsfeld Space Commission, was to create a separate service branch within the Department of the Air Force responsible for military space operations, similar to how the Marine Corps is a separate service branch within the Department of the Navy.
The proposal again failed to garner support, but in 2016, the final report from the congressionally mandated, Obama-era National Defense Panel made essentially the same recommendation yet again, and Republican Representative Mike Rogers added a provision to act on it into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2017. However, committee negotiations dropped the provision from the final bill. Instead, the NDAA tasked the secretary of defense with conducting yet another study on the establishment of a Space Corps within the Department of the Air Force. The study was to assess the potential benefits and drawbacks of creating a separate military branch focused on space, as well as the feasibility and costs associated with doing so.
The next year, Republican Representative Mike Rogers, on the House Armed Services Committee, again proposed an amendment to the NDAA for 2018 creating a Space Corps withing the Department of the Air Force. Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson did, too, but the new Trump administration, which had taken office in January 2017, wanted nothing to do with it. In fact the new secretary of defense, James Mattis, spoke out against it, and took the unusual step of intervening to request removal of the proposals, saying the sixty-one-year-old idea needed yet more study.
But by now, threats to America’s space assets were becoming less theoretical. The Chinese and Russian Federation had both created huge orbital debris clouds by testing direct-assent antisatellite weapons. China was known to be developing a wide range of military space technologies, including direct-ascent kinetic kill vehicles, co-orbital satellites, directed-energy weapons, jammers, and cyber capabilities. China had tested a satellite system believed capable of grappling another satellite, towing it to a new orbit, or cutting off its solar panels. A Russian satellite, Kosmos 2499, had approached a U.S. surveillance satellite close enough to force it to take evasive action.
Representative Jim Cooper (D-TN), then ranking member of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee on the House Armed Services Committee, had worked with Representative Rogers for years on legislation to establish a space service and on efforts to convince others in government, arguing that the U.S. military was not sufficiently focused on space and that the country was falling dangerously behind in space defense capabilities. In this environment of heightened concerns, the two lobbied other members of Congress and promoted their ideas to the public and the new president, negotiating the details of the new service with other legislators and together, agreeing to call it a “force” rather than a “corps.” This negotiated proposal made it into the final version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2020 that was passed by Congress and signed into law on December 20, 2019.
After that, Jim Cooper, who’d originally been skeptical of the idea, issued a statement congratulating the Air Force and Space Force on their successful collaboration in the creation of the new service branch which, he said “should make America stronger and more competitive in space.” Mike Rogers, who’d been a vocal proponent of the Space Force for years, praised the establishment of the new branch as “ensuring our strategic advantage in the final frontier.” Both Cooper and Rogers acknowledged the bipartisan nature of their efforts to establish a separate military branch focused on space, and expressed optimism for the future of U.S. space policy.
In the final analysis, however you feel about the man who signed the paperwork, the Space Force was created not by Mr. Trump but by Congress, and after literally decades of consideration and debate.