Will the Space Force or Space Corps — whatever Congress decides to call it — legally count as a new armed service?
creating a new organization for space within the Department of the Air Force, analogous to how the Marine Corps exists within the Navy Department. Both, for example, would create a four-star billet to head the service who would, at least eventually, sit on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the House calls him the Space Corps commandant, continuing the Marine Corps analogy. Meanwhile the Senate calls him the Space Force commander, a title normally reserved for the heads of operational organizations like the current Air Force Space Command, not services, whose role is to “train, organize, and equip” forces for those operational commanders.
That was from “Space ‘Force’ Vs. ‘Corps’: One’s Not Actually A Service” over at Breaking Defense. Check out a nice chart that shows the evolution of the Space Corps from DOD proposal to Senate version of the NDAA to the House.
It seems that the Space Corps will be very much like the Marine Corps in the Navy department. One important point there is that neither the Space Corps nor the Marine Corps will be provided its own Service Acquisition Executive. Their acquisition decisions will be controlled by the Air Force and Navy, respectively, which means more layers of bureaucracy to get the OK on a decision. (Note that the Space Development Agency under USD(R&E) has its own Service Acquisition Executive.)
This makes it curious that the draft NDAA says that the “Secretary of the Air Force may establish a separate, alternative acquisition system for defense space acquisitions.” It isn’t clear what is so “separate” or “alternative” about it. The Space and Missile Systems Center would appear to operate much the same as before.
It appears that that the Space Corps is a reorganization entirely limited to Air Force space elements… for now. The House version says “Except as otherwise directed by the Secretary of Defense, all functions, assets, and obligations of the space elements of the Air Force… shall be transferred to the Space Corps.”
But earlier on, it says that “The Secretary of Defense shall, during the transition period, transfer all covered military personnel to the Space Corps.” It’s not clear which personnel are “covered,” and whether that is limited to the Air Force. For example, could the Secretary of Defense move space personnel from the Navy to the Space Corps? After all, the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) changed its name to Naval Intelligence and Cyber Warfare Command (NAVWAR), removing space from its title.
The House version only specifies that the Space Corps “may not include the personnel or assets of the National Reconnaissance Office or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.” Otherwise, if the Secretary of Defense chose, it would appear that all space development could be wrapped into the Space Corps (Army, Navy, even SDA?).
A final note is that Congress wants the Air Force to go full bore on the Space Corps immediately, reorganizing the department as soon as the legislation is passed. However, it concurrently asks for a slew of reports and plans on how that reorganization would actually work. In all, the draft NDAA identifies 29 points that require reports and plans to Congress.
Perhaps it is a political decision to rush into the Space Corps before plans have been hammered out. It seems that it would have made sense to require the reports and plans in the FY 2020 NDAA, then pending acceptable responses, put the reorganization into the FY 2021 NDAA.
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