President Donald Trump directed the Department of Defense and the Pentagon to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the Armed Forces in a meeting with the National Space Council today.
“We are going to have the Air Force and we’re going to have the Space Force, separate but equal. It is going to be something so important,” President Trump said. “Separate but equal” is an appalling turn of phrase given that it’s derived from Plessy v. Ferguson, the now-overturned Supreme Court precedent for segregation.
The announcement came as a surprise in a meeting where the newly revived National Space Council was set to unveil the first comprehensive policy on space traffic management. “The whole point of today’s meeting was not about this at all, it was about the space traffic management policy decision,” says Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation — an NGO that focuses on space policy.
Still, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Trump’s hopes for a Space Force; he first proposed the idea of a Space Force in March 2018 — contradicting Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ opposition to creating a new military service. In a letter to the Committee on Armed Services, Mattis argued that it would just create more overhead and bureaucracy.
As it stands, the Air Force is largely in charge of controlling national security in space under the umbrella of the Air Force Space Command. Its responsibilities include supervising launches and controlling DoD satellites — including ones involved in missile early warnings, communication, and navigation.
“There’s a lot of complexity in making this change, since it involves creating a whole new Pentagon bureaucracy from scratch,” Weeden says. “Everything as mundane as new uniforms all the way through to new doctrine, and probably tens of thousands of new people … it would be a really big change, and it’s not something to be taken lightly.”
Nevertheless, Trump doubled down on his Space Force hopes today. He framed US space exploration as “not just a matter of national identity, but a matter of national security,” he said. “So important for our military, so important, and people don’t talk about it.”
What he didn’t talk about today were details about what exactly the Space Force would do and how it would be funded. In fact, the president can’t just unilaterally create a new branch of the military in an off-the-cuff announcement, experts say.