Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall warned today that the U.S. Space Force needs to be much, much bigger in personnel and capabilities to win the military space race against China.
During a Jan. 13 talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Kendall unveiled the Department of the Air Force 2050 report, a congressionally mandated report under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, emphasizing the urgent need for a dramatic expansion in the military’s space-based capabilities over the next 25 years.
By 2050, according to an excerpt of the report Kendall unveiled, “we will not be competitive unless we make substantial improvements in how [our] forces are equipped, trained and operated.”
“The ability of the entire joint force to project power depends upon our success in space,” Kendall said. “We’re going to need a much bigger, much more powerful Space Force.”
The sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces was established on Dec. 20, 2019, when Trump signed the FY2020 NDAA, which put on inactive status the Air Force Space Command and transferred space operations to the newly formed Space Force.
According to Kendall, the Space Force needs to “expand to several times its current end strength.” He emphasized that the military’s newest force “essentially [has to go from] a merchant marine to a navy.”
To date, the Space Force is comprised of approximately 10,000 personnel.
In addition to expanding in size, the Space Force needs to grow in mission capability, Kendall explained. He emphasized several fundamental missions such as missile warning and tracking systems; position, navigation, and timing; secure communications; space access; mobility; cybersecurity; battle management; and more.
Additionally, Kendall emphasized the need for the Space Force to grow substantially while investing heavily in “artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and modernized networks of space-based sensors.”
“An armed force, that’s the transformation that’s needed and already started,” Kendall said. “We’ve made some pretty good progress in just five years from when the Space Force was created…[but] we are going to have to do something to counter the militarization of space that China has embarked upon, largely to target our joint force and largely to deny us space capabilities.”
