Senate, House on collision course over Space Corps

WASHINGTON - The Senate’s passage of a wide-ranging Defense Department authorization bill this week sets the stage for a potential battle in Congress over how to manage the Pentagon’s growing space portfolio and the emerging threats rival nations pose in Earth’s orbit.

The National Defense Authorization Act that the Senate overwhelmingly approved includes the creation of a new chief information warfare office with some authority over space and cyber issues. The version the House adopted in July would create a new branch of the military called the Space Corps — a step the Senate bill would expressly prohibit.

It’s one of many issues both chambers will have to iron out over the coming weeks as they settle on a final Department of Defense authorization measure. But it figures to be one of the most acrimonious differences, according to Todd Harrison, a space expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“This is probably going to be one of the most uncertain and contentious issues in the (Defense authorization bill),” Harrison said. “And (one of the) most consequential because this would be a major restructuring within the DOD.”

There’s general consensus among lawmakers that it’s time to grant special attention to military space issues — but not how it should be done.

The House has adopted Rep. Mike Rogers’ plan to create a Space Corps, which would be the first new military branch since the Air Force was broken out of the Army in 1947.

The Alabama Republican contends the Pentagon’s lack of focus on extra-terrestrial priorities has eroded the nation's dominance in space. Military satellites aren’t being deployed fast enough due to a bureaucracy that cares more about superiority in the air than space, said Rogers, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on Strategic Forces.

“We have allowed our primary adversaries, Russia and China, to gain peer status in just the last few years,” he said in a recent interview.

Rogers’ proposal, endorsed by his subcommittee's top Democrat Jim Cooper of Tennessee, would create a sixth branch of the military (joining the Air Force, Army, Marines, Coast Guard and the Navy). The Space Corps would be up and ready by 2019 and would still answer to the secretary of the Air Force, much like the Marines answer to the Navy secretary.

Its main purpose would be to oversee the acquisition, development and deployment of military satellites and the ground stations that control them. It would not include intelligence satellites or the National Reconnaissance Office, the government agency in charge of designing building, launching and maintaining intelligence satellites.

The Space Corps also would not have direct oversight of missile launches conducted by the military.

Trump administration officials are resisting the idea of a new branch.

“The Pentagon is complicated enough,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters in June. “We’re trying to simplify. So to make it more complex would add more boxes to the (organizational) chart and cost more money. And if I had more money, I would put it into lethality, not bureaucracy.”

In addition, some senators staunchly oppose the idea.

Sen. Bill Nelson, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee and one of Congress’ foremost champions of space, called the creation of a new branch “premature” and unnecessary.

“It ought to stay with the Air Force until there’s a compelling reason to change,” said the Florida Democrat, who co-sponsored the amendment in the Senate bill that bars the creation of a Space Corps. “There’s no sense to go out and create another re-organization and all the disruption that comes with that.”

Harrison thinks both sides will hammer out a compromise that falls short of a new Space Corps but recognizes the mutual desire for greater focus on the cosmos.

“That’s where they can find some agreement,” he said of House and Senate negotiators. “Space is incredibly important for the military (and) the military needs to do a better job of thinking about space as an operational war-fighting domain.”

Contact Ledyard King at lking@gannett.com; Twitter: @ledgeking