WASHINGTON: Top Pentagon officials are hammering out a legislative proposal to Congress to bring personnel from the Army, Navy and Marines into the newly inaugurated Space Force.

DoD and military sources say Air Force Maj. Gen. Clint Crosier, charged by Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett with planning how to flesh out the nascent Space Force, is crafting the plan, that will ultimately be sent to Defense Secretary Mark Esper. The Army and the Navy Department maintain significant space capabilities and forces that so far are barred from Space Force integration under the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed by President Donald Trump Dec. 20.

If approved, these sources say, the proposal then would be sent to Congress — with a particular eye to convincing the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), which has been skeptical about the whole idea of a Space Force. Breaking D readers know that it was SASC language in the 2020 NDAA that limits DoD to transferring only Air Force billets to Space Force, and bans the creation of any new ones. Republican SASC Chair Jim Inhofe’s goal is to have the 2021 NDAA approved by Memorial Day, his spokesperson confirmed today.

Barrett owes Congress a report on plans for Space Force organization the first of next month, Air Force Maj. Gen. John Shaw told the Mitchell Institute at a breakfast this morning. Shaw is now head of the Space Force Space Operations Command, formerly the 14th Air Force under Air Force Space Command, at Vandenberg AFB.

“Congress has asked for additional legislation with regard to Space Force ideas as part of the whole work that we’re going to be doing this year. And I suspect that that will be a topic that will come up,” he said. “How do we need to look at laws and see how they might change to make us get to that?”

Shaw stressed that the Space Force is looking to establish an independent identity, that builds not just on the Air Force’s legacy but also brings in lessons learned from other services. In particular, he said, the new service needs to focus on “22nd century warfare” when speed of decision-making and reaction is paramount.

“We have the opportunity to create a new service, from scratch, that can be a warfighting service — and I’ve been telling the team, ‘Don’t even think about a warfighting service for the next decade or even this century; create a warfighting service for the 22nd century’,” he said. “What is warfighting look like at the end of this century, and into the next. We’ve started with that.”

“I’m sure we didn’t get it 100 percent right,” he added. “We didn’t have the ‘Time Infinity Stone’ that we could kinda just jump into the future and come back. But the general feeling is that it’s going to happen fast. … It’s going to happen across the planet and beyond the planet very quickly.” (For those who aren’t sci-fi aficionados, the Infinity Stones are key to the plot of the hit Marvel Comics “Avengers” movie and comic book series.)

He noted that a key to future warfighting will be incredibly rapid shift in technology, “maybe even by the second,” as automated software development and artificial intelligence capabilities kick in. Warfighting will become “highly technology dependent and not human capital dependent.”

Those issues are all on the table as DoD and military leaders ponder Space Force organization, he said, including during a two-hour teleconference yesterday in Colorado Springs. Space Operations Command’s Combat Development Division is eying “how do we best leverage technology and wield it at the speed of war?” That division is looking first at what technological capabilities are currently available and figuring out how to “plug them in” to space warfighting operational capability as quickly as possible.

In order to underpin the Space Force’s independence of thought, given the uniqueness of the space environment, Shaw said it is being given a number of billets dedicated to the development of space doctrine and there will be a conference on space doctrine in Colorado Springs next month. The idea will be to pull doctrine and concepts of operations from not just the Air Force, but also other services.

“There are things we can learn from the Navy, we can learn from the Army,” Shaw said. “I think the domain that’s closest to space is the undersea one. … Attribution is really hard, awareness is hard; you don’t see it, you have to kind of visualize it.”

Breaking D readers will remember that crafting new space doctrine –– currently embedded in both Air Force doctrine such as Counterspace Operations Doctrine and Joint Doctrine 3-14 on Space Operations — is also on the mind of Gen. Jay Raymond, wearing both his Space Force and Space Command hats.

Cooperation and coordination with allies is another major thrust in figuring out what Space Force will look like, said Shaw, who also serves as the head of Space Command’s Combined Space Force Component Command (CSFCC), that includes allies and coalition partners.

“We have a lot of ground that we can still cover in integrating with our allies, and getting together as an alliance from a space domain perspective. We have made a lot of progress, don’t get me wrong,” he said.

For example, there is a now a weekly meeting between all the Space Operations Centers of the so-called Five Eyes — an intelligence-sharing alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. New Zealand was the latest of the Five Eyes to join CFSCC in December, Shaw said.

Next steps in 2020 will include a number of cooperative efforts with Japan, including launch of a US space domain awareness payload on Japan’s Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) position, navigation and timing payload. Washington and Tokyo have been working on that effort for about two years, Shaw explained, by he now expects a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) to be signed and the hardware to be delivered this year.

The US and Japanese militaries are also collaborating on Japan’s development of a deep space radar, that DoD hopes will provide space domain awareness data that can be integrated with its own database. In addition, a US-Japan bilateral space conference will be held next month, Shaw said.