Avoiding Another Operation Eagle Claw: A Space Perspective

What would the next Operation Eagle Claw (OEC) look like if it occurred in the space domain? A destroyer crashing into an island off the cost of China? A North Korean missile that penetrates our defenses? A Special Forces team left blind and mute behind enemy lines? A U.S. hypersonic weapon missing its intended target and hitting an apartment building?

But what can the ill-fated Iranian hostage rescue mission from 1980 and subsequent lessons learned teach us about how to avoid another catastrophe on a much larger scale? OEC is perhaps the most studied joint military failure in history, ultimately leading to the most consequential shakeup of the DoD since 1947: the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. A similar transformation may be necessary for space, one much more consequential than the incremental advances that have recently occurred in managing militarization of the space domain.

At the same time, we are also dealing with increased competition from peer and near-peer adversaries. Both China and Russia’s publicly known and demonstrated space capabilities should give casual observers pause. The threats we face in space today offer direct parallel to the OEC disaster, which publicly demonstrated the U.S. Military’s inability to execute effective joint operations and maintain a credible deterrence posture in an existential Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. American space assets, both military and civilian, are such a critical part of the U.S. economy and defense posture that our peer adversaries are constantly searching and probing for vulnerabilities to exploit.

We cannot afford to delay implementation of properly managed authorities and funding responsibilities that maximize USSPACECOM’s ability to defend the Nation within the space domain. Anything less than reorganization now will not forestall a military disaster in space.

USSPACECOM is a unified combatant command (CCMD) with an area of responsibility that begins at an altitude greater than 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, above mean sea level, but is managed almost exclusively using functional authorities. In the past, this was with good reason. The effects created to and from space were strategic in nature, either a precursor to a larger, potentially nuclear attack or some other signal to the adversary that their economy would soon lay in ruin. But today, with the horizontal proliferation of space capabilities, we must adapt these old modes of thinking to 21^st and even 22^nd century needs. Fighting against a competitor, disruptor, or even threat will likely either start in or extend into space.

Despite language in the Unified Command Plan giving USSPACECOM an area of responsibility (AOR), it currently operates more like a hybrid approach of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and U.S. Cyber Command than the – now legacy –geographic CCMDs like U.S European Command or U.S. Central Command. In addition, USSPACECOM’s physical domain is one few have visited, making it “exotic” or “mystical,” but unlike the electromagnetic spectrum and the Internet, people can and actually do live there! As such, battlespace management, whether offensive or defensive, can be conducted from CONUS locations, but due to the physics of satellite actions and processes, may require a physical presence of people and equipment at remote terrestrial locations around the globe.

This dilemma begs the question: How best can USSPACECOM position, command, control, and resource personnel and equipment around world, split among the different Services, to achieve its objectives across the spectrum of conflict while not neglecting those of the individual Services? In learning from the many studies of OEC and the Goldwater-Nichols Act, one of the most effective ways to achieve success is through establishment of a CCMD-controlled budget authority that helps streamline decision-making and centralize control of resources to quickly de-conflict issues between CCMD and Service-level priorities. This cannot happen in a vacuum, of course, but with the advent of USSF, some across the government have begun to push other Services to divest of all space-related resourcing.

This highly questionable approach exacerbates the provincialism of the rapidly evolving space domain. But the fact    that the Services are already multi-domain: The Army, Navy, and Marines all have “air forces,” “sea forces,” and “ground forces,” despite their respective specialties with land maneuver or sea warfare.

As OEC tragically demonstrated, there are important lessons to be learned from the past regarding the risk of divesting discrete, cross-domain capabilities that must be readdressed generations later. Just as joint forces were out of position to rapidly deploy with little warning in OEC, so too will USSF be out of position to address space threats from land and sea. Many observers have attempted to draw parallels between the USAF emerging from the Army Air Corps, but this time is different. Jets were merely an evolution, and a quick one at that due to the abundance of pilots and warm industrial base in the years immediately following World War II. Space warfare, however, is a revolution—particularly in direct confrontation with peer threats—with a scarcity of USSF Guardians and only bespoke manufacturing capabilities for these incredibly complex technologies.

In today’s constrained and highly competitive resource environment, the Services are facing tough choices. Still, the 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) is clear, particularly for the Army: To modernize for the multi-domain fight, we must recapitalize our ground forces—most notably the brigade combat team (BCT). With more than 4,600 pieces of space-enabled equipment residing within an average Army BCT currently, divestment of all space capabilities to another Service runs counter to this directive.

Military Service parochialism, especially in the budget and program wars, is a well-known issue that can lead to resource issues for CCMD missions and objectives. Because the Services have executive agent funding responsibilities for different CCMD headquarters operations while also funding their own Service component commands, they must balance between current CCMD requirements and their own man, train, and equip responsibilities. When budgets are stretched thin, as they are today, emerging missions arising during the year of execution must come at the expense of something else.

Outside of USSF, space domain missions, despite their strategic importance, are rarely at the top of a Service or component to-do list. There is not a “must-fund” set of requirements related to space, and compared to other urgent priorities, it is difficult to quantify space-related impacts within the scope of a component command mission set. This can lead to non-USSF, high-impact space missions scraping by with minimal funding to the detriment of operational effectiveness. It is also worth noting that space, as an operational concept, has progressed more quickly than the institutional framework it supports. Thus, there is a dearth of space officers on Service staffs or at the decision-making and policy levels, such as Headquarters, Department of the Army’s G-3/5/7. The hope that the Services will eventually get around to building space generals and admirals within their respective ranks just delays urgently needed progress. Again—USSF is not a shelf to put “all things space.”

These factors drive Services not part of or named USSF to the situations they find themselves in today. While USSPACECOM issues more and more mission orders, and geographical Service component commands, looking at current threats, demand more forward stationed space capabilities, the ability of the Army, Navy, and Marines to fund these missions is limited. Additionally, development of new capabilities, from basic research to test and evaluation, are interspersed among up to 14 different centers within DoD. The Space Development Agency should be subordinate to USSF by this summer, while the Army’s legacy Technical Center is aligned under the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (USASMDC). But with no coordinating oversight at USSPACECOM, the potential for conflicting or duplicative work while failing to effectively collaborate is inevitable. This type of disconnect has fostered programs such as “warfighter involvement” in the past, but individual operators cannot be adequately supported by disconnected capability developers.

Today’s status quo funding approach for space operations is best described as a fund-sharing arrangement between different organizations within a Service based on internal policy. For the Army, this is a hybrid approach where USASMDC funds the majority of space operations, and theater Army Service component commands provide incremental dollars for requested missions. But even this resourcing is executed on an ad hoc basis. For research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) funding, USASMDC’s Technical Center, in conjunction with Army Futures Command, carries out its own programs, with support from customer funding for space and missile defense projects from numerous other DoD organizations. It also manages the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific.

Compounding this dynamic is the increasing convergence of missile defense and space capabilities, leading some to ask, is missile defense a subset of space operations or vice versa? From an operational standpoint, the enterprise has answered with a recommended Unified Command Plan change that makes USSPACECOM responsible for global missile defense operations support, in coordination with other combatant commands, the Services, and other US government agencies. Yet the capabilities that are developed and fielded for missile defense and—left unchecked—space, are federated away from the warfighter and just barely informed by operational need. This construct is untenable.

One strictly procedural and zero-growth option is to split funding across geographical CCMDs for space operations or have the Services allocate funding to their component commands based on NDS priority, carried out at the appropriation level. This model would see USSPACECOM’s component commands operating on a fee-for-service basis where anything outside man, train, and equip responsibilities would be borne by the requesting component command. For example, if USCENTCOM requests a specific Army-provided space capability in their AOR, they would either request and fund the mission directly via USASMDC, or through U.S. Army Central Command to USASMDC as the Service provider. However, the primary issue with this model is that it fails to provide a workable cost-sharing agreement if a mission benefits both the geographical CCMD, USSPACECOM, and potentially other Federal agencies that may also have a stake in certain missions.

Alternatively, and recommended: the CCMD-controlled model. There is historical precedence for this approach, which sees the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) providing special funding authorities directly to a CCMD to significantly reduce this risk, as happened with USSOCOM in the years immediately following OEC. Succinctly laid out in RAND’s 2013 book, The Other Quiet Professionals: Lessons for Future Cyber Forces from the Evolution of Special Forces, the process from passing the Nunn-Cohen Amendment of 1987, which supplemented Goldwater-Nichols and established Major Force Program-11 and its associated organization, leadership, and funding authorities, was an arduous and controversial process. However, the value of a CCMD controlling the funding for direct mission support while sharing responsibilities for man, train, and equip with the Services has been fully established.

This proven model must be duplicated for space. One possible application for the space domain would see the establishment of an office within OSD (Policy) to oversee all space requirements, while USSPACECOM directly receives resources, potentially across multiple DoD-wide appropriations, to more efficiently and effectively allocate funding to the many entities that carry out various aspects of space domain life cycle operations.

Space capabilities are a rapidly evolving area of technological advancement, but despite their relative ubiquity in military operations, they are still only fully understood by a relatively small, niche group of experts peppered throughout military, Government, and private organizations. While the number of global satellite and missile launches has grown exponentially over the last decade, the ability to harness their potential and defend against threats has not kept pace. Civilian and military capabilities can, and often do, complement each other, and dual-use technologies are more common than not. Expecting all the Services and other agencies to maintain groups of experts with the requisite knowledge to oversee and execute such a wide range of missions is unreasonable.

Yet, we should be equally wary of consolidating all space domain knowledge and expertise only within USSF. Frankly, we must grow in breadth and depth across the board. As previously noted, every major platform in the Services relies on space-based capabilities to some degree, and all military formations are vulnerable to space-based attacks. USSF is not manned, organized, or trained to provide this expertise by inserting a few Guardians into hundreds of military formations across multiple other Services, nor can they sufficiently wield offensive or defensive space capabilities from strategic support area cubicles to protect or enable Soldiers, Airmen, Sailors, and Marines.

With congressional support, a timely and accurate solution would have USSPACECOM gain command of all space-unique RDT&E funding and joint operational resources to allocate between the various DoD entities. Much like the U.S. Cyber Command commanding general is dual-hatted as director of the National Security Agency, the USSPACECOM commander should also be dual-hatted as director of the National Reconnaissance Office. Though this construct was considered but not implemented at USSPACECOM’s establishment, it would bolster unity of command and unity of effort at the national level and reduce the friction that has emerged over the past three years.

This model will require a significant increase in manpower at USSPACECOM to oversee additional aspects, but likely save personnel costs across the joint force through consolidated synergies of back-office headquarters personnel from other organizations. It will also have the effect of saving funding by establishing a single point of access for oversight of organizations carrying out projects or operations. From a Service perspective, this is a net positive. Rather than fighting for resources to fund USSPACECOM-directed missions and research, the Services can focus on leveraging technologies emerging from these organizations into their own Service-specific platforms. They also will have the benefit of not being forced to scrounge for resources to fund more strategically focused USSPACECOM-directed joint operations that are not in their current-year budgets.

The FY22 budget recently appropriated by Congress was a watershed moment in space-related funding. USSF alone received $7 billion more than the $17.7 billion it requested in the President’s Budget. Several other agencies, including the Missile Defense Agency, also saw additions to their budget requests for space capabilities. Though these funding increases are welcome and needed, without a single organization responsible for ensuring it is allocated and spent wisely, there is potential for duplicative work.

Unity of command and unity of effort will win in space. Increasing the individual budget of Special Operations Forces prior to 1980 would not have prevented OEC—but unity of both command and effort most likely would. USSPACECOM is still a new CCMD; it may need a few more months to fully mature its operational capacity. But this is the very reason it is an ideal time to codify this authority now, so it can be implemented as part of the command’s regular procedures.

As nation-state competitors and adversaries rapidly advance in technology, capacity, and strategy, the United States must respond with not only the proper level of funding, but also the required organizations and processes to maximize its usage. We cannot let the next OEC happen in space.

COL Michael Mai is the G-8, USASMDC, and has completed multiple strategic and operational tours during his 22-year career. 

Sam Fuller is the Deputy G-5, USASMDC, and has served on multiple interagency, joint, and operational staffs in both in his military and civilian careers. 

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and should not be construed as the official view of the DoD, Army, or USASMDC.