What Is a Space Force, and How Would It Work?

In a speech at the Pentagon on Thursday,
U.S. Vice President Mike
Pence announced more details for a Space Force^[1]: a proposed sixth branch
of the U.S. military that would focus on all matters off-world,
from procuring military satellites to defending U.S. spacecraft in
orbit from attacks.

“Just as in the past, when we created the
Air Force, establishing the Space Force is an idea whose time has
come,” Pence said. “The space environment has fundamentally changed
in the last generation; what was once peaceful and uncontested is
now crowded and adversarial.”

Pence’s speech rekindles a news cycle
that, at first glance, resembles the prologue of a sci-fi film. In
June, U.S. President Donald Trump made international headlines by
voicing
support for a Space Force^[2]
in remarks to the National Space Council.

“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.
That’s a big statement,” Trump said. “We are going to have the Air
Force and we are going to have the Space Force—separate
but equal^[3].”

In the wake of Pence’s speech and Trump’s
directive, you may have some questions. Does the U.S. now have
starship troopers? What are the pros and cons to a Space Force? And
is such a military branch even legal under international treaties?
We’ve got you covered.

Not yet. Only an act of Congress can
create a new military branch, but the Trump Administration is
sketching out how one would work. If Congress assents, the branch
would be the first added to the U.S. military since 1947, when the
Air Force was founded.

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“The Pentagon is complicated enough,” Air Force Secretary
Heather Wilson told
reporters in June 2017^[4]. “This will make it more
complex, add more boxes to the organization chart, and cost more
money. If I had more money, I would put it into lethality, not
bureaucracy.”

“Space is a place where there is now tens of billions of
dollars” in infrastructure, says Mark Albrecht, the executive
secretary of the National Space Council from 1989 to 1992.
“Everything from financial transactions to the GPS that guides your
car is controlled from space, or at least facilitated by
space.”

Military activity in space, he argues, is therefore “not
materially different from the U.S. Navy, which goes around the
Pacific and the Atlantic and the Mediterranean not to create
trouble or to cause wars, but to make sure that all the things we
enjoy are protected.”

The U.S. military depends heavily on space for communications,
reconnaissance, and detecting incoming missiles. Russia and China
have been building surface-to-air missiles powerful enough to take
out a satellite, Albrecht notes, a move that has U.S. officials
increasingly concerned. In 2007, China even shot
down one of its own aging weather satellites^[5]
in a test of the technology that the U.S. protested.

“Before Congress does anything, I think they’re going to want to
see that report and see what the Department of Defense says about
that,” says Michael Dodge^[6], a space law expert at
the University of North Dakota’s Department of Space Studies.

From Eisenhower to
Obama^[7], the U.S. has seen space
as a zone for self-defense and non-aggressive military activities.
But by advocating for a Space Force, observers say that Trump is
taking an unusually brazen tack.

“It sends a message to other countries around the world that the
U.S. is looking aggressively at our future in space with respect to
national defense,” says Dodge. “What I mean by ‘aggressively’ is
the signaling that the U.S. is looking at space as a potential
war-fighting domain—which is nothing new, but probably isn’t
helpful to discourse.”

In all likelihood, a Space Force would be stitched together from
existing U.S. programs. At its center would be the Air Force Space
Command^[8], which has led the
U.S.’s military space operations since 1982.

If you’re picturing a rehash of Starship Troopers or
The Expanse, brace yourself for disappointment. Day to day,
the Space Force would probably monitor Earth’s satellites and take
the lead on launching and maintaining military satellites, the
command’s current beat.

At its most elaborate, a Space Force would be on equal footing
with the Army and Navy, replete with Pentagon offices and a service
academy like West Point. However, its exact structure would depend
on the enacting laws, which aren’t passing any time soon.

Albrecht estimates that at the absolute fastest, it’d take at
least a year to make the Space Force a legal entity. In his August
9 speech, Vice President Pence said that officials are optimistic a
Space Force could blast off as soon as 2020.

Costs for the branch would vary, depending on how it was
organized. In an
interview with the Washington Post^[9], National Space Council
executive secretary Scott Pace said that the Trump Administration’s
proposed reorganization “should be budget neutral.” The Post
also noted that the White House has asked Congress for an extra $8
billion over the next five years to bolster funding for national
security systems in space.

In a word, yes. But if a U.S. Space Force ever came online,
legal experts say that international law would limit what it could
do.

All major space powers, including the U.S., Russia, and China,
have signed the
Outer Space Treaty of 1967^[10]. The pact says that
nothing in space can be claimed^[11] as a single country’s
territory, and it bars countries from stationing nuclear weapons or
weapons of mass destruction anywhere in outer space, including in
orbit around Earth.

The treaty gets stricter when it comes to “celestial bodies”
such as the moon and Mars. Parties can’t build military bases,
conduct military maneuvers, or test weapons of any kind—even
conventional weapons—on another world.

But the Outer Space Treaty does give countries some wiggle room.
Dodge says that the Cold War-era treaty doesn’t explicitly forbid
intercontinental ballistic missiles, which enter and exit space on
their way toward their targets. The treaty also doesn’t specify
whether conventional weapons can be used in open space or on space
stations. And they have, at least once: In January 1975, the Soviet
Union secretly test-fired a modified
cannon^[12] on its Almaz space
station.

“I don’t think that necessarily would have violated the treaty,
even if it’s contrary to the spirit of the document itself,” says
Dodge.

“Space is like the high seas, it’s like Antarctica—it’s a global
commons. And that means it’s governed by international law,” says
Joanne
Gabrynowicz^[13], a space law expert and
professor emerita at the University of Mississippi. “In addition to
the Outer Space Treaty, the whole body of international law applies
to space, and that includes humanitarian law^[14] [such as the Geneva
Conventions] and the law of armed
conflict^[15].”

Gabrynowicz adds that even the proposed branch’s name could
raise legal questions.

“There’s a term of art in law called the ‘use of force,’” she
says, “[and] that phrase has a huge body of law just on what that
means.”