President Trump has signed Space Force into law. It will start with only about 200 people, but the military sees it as an affirmation of the need to more effectively organize to defend U.S. interests in space.
— including the Pentagon’s budget — that provides a steady stream of financing for Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border fence and reverses unpopular and unworkable automatic spending cuts to defense and domestic programs.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters Friday, “Our reliance on space-based capabilities has grown dramatically, and today outer space has evolved into a warfighting domain of its own.” Maintaining dominance in space, he said, will now be Space Force’s mission. When he publicly directed the Pentagon in June 2018 to begin working toward a Space Force, Trump spoke of the military space mission as part of a broader vision of achieving American dominance in space.
Space Force is the first new military service since the Air Force was spun off from the Army in 1947. Space Force will be the provider of forces to U.S. Space Command, a separate organization established earlier this year as the overseer of the military’s space operations. Kaitlyn Johnson, a space policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, sees the creation of Space Force as an important move but doubts it will prove as momentous as Trump administration officials suggest. Vice President Mike Pence has touted Space Force as “the next great chapter in the history of our armed forces.” And Esper earlier this week called this an “epic moment” in recent American military history.
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