Forget President Donald Trump’s Space Force. What the U.S. may need more is a Coast Guard for space.

Trump wants a stand-alone branch of the military — co-equal with the Army, Navy and Air Force — to ensure “dominance in space” and deter nations such as Russia and China from threatening America’s reliance on space technologies for defense and commerce.


But civilian and military strategists are also pondering the idea of a U.S. Space Guard to meet a variety of other needs in and beyond orbit. Those include enforcing laws and regulations to manage a burgeoning civilian space economy, ranging from asteroid mining to moon bases, private space stations and tourism — all functions that the military would be ill-suited to handle.

The Coast Guard, a military service within the Department of Homeland Security, serves a similar law enforcement and regulatory role in the maritime domain. And in a recent paper, one military officer argued that a Space Guard could “extend this role naturally to the next frontier.”

“It is internally debated quite hotly,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Peter Garretson, an instructor at the Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, where the issue has been the focus of a series of recent discussions and publications.

People inside the Trump administration are also debating the idea.

“There are a lot of us advocating for this and we are getting some traction,” said a former Trump adviser who asked not to be identified discussing conversations he is having with administration officials. The former adviser is pushing the idea of a Space Guard in part out of concern that military moves alone could bring international blowback.

“In an international environment, you don’t always want to put your angry face forward,” the former official said, referring to the Space Force proposal. “We need to find ways to work with China and Russia.”

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Even NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a vocal supporter of a Space Force, seemed intrigued by a companion Space Guard when asked about it at a recent POLITICO Live event.

“It’s an interesting concept,” Bridenstine said. “When you talk about all of the civilian things that are going to be happening in space, that’s why you would need that kind of capability.”

But the administration’s emphasis so far has been on establishing a militarized space department within the armed forces.

Trump, to the surprise of many of his top national security advisers, last month ordered the Pentagon to begin reorganizing its space mission — now residing primarily in the Air Force — into a separate Space Force.

“I am 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,” Trump said during a meeting of the National Space Council. “That’s a big statement. We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force. Separate but equal. It is going to be something. So important.”

The Pentagon was already studying how to elevate the space mission at the direction of Congress, including how to best reorganize the Air Force’s space personnel and bases into a separate department or corps.

A study directed by Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan is due next month, and another, recently undertaken at the Pentagon’s request by CNA Corp., a government-funded think tank, is set to be completed by the end of the year.

Ultimately, any major changes will require an act of Congress. The Space Force "is going to require legislation and a lot of detail planning that we have not yet begun,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis recently told reporters.

But calls are growing for the same emphasis being placed on military preparedness in space to be applied to the civilian side of the space renaissance, which Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross predicts could soon become a trillion-dollar industry.

“The concept of a Space Guard — roughly modeled on a Coast Guard — has a lot of attractive features in dealing with non-warfighting pieces of all this,” said George Nield, who retired in March as the associate administrator of the FAA responsible for commercial space.

He said that if the organizational changes under consideration focus too heavily on military questions, “there are a number of gaps in authorities and missed opportunities that are not being addressed.”

Whether as part of the Commerce or Transportation departments, a Space Guard “could focus on safety, could have an enforcement arm, do inspections — all things very different from warfighting, which is important but is not the whole picture,” added Nield, a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Michael Sinclair, a Coast Guard commander who has been studying space issues as a graduate student in national security at Georgetown University, contends that the Coast Guard model for a space constabulary force makes sense because of its hybrid nature: It's partly a military force, including in wartime, but primarily a regulatory and law enforcement arm of the government in peacetime.

That is not the case with the military, which is designed for one primary mission: war.

“The Coast Guard’s value to the nation is that it is a total domain management agency,” Sinclair said in an interview. “It’s more Swiss Army knife than Ka-Bar.”

The idea of such a force for space is also picking up steam in military circles, where leading strategists are debating how the government might best secure a so-called cislunar economy — between the Earth and the moon — as well as constellations of thousand of satellites planned by companies in the United States and overseas.

“People who believe in this future cislunar economy think that private industry would want similar sorts of services that people in the maritime domain receive,” said Garretson, the Air Force lieutenant colonel, in an interview. “And those include maintenance of navigational aids, ensuring freedom of navigation, things that are analogous to dredging the harbor, removing icebergs, things that are analogous to search and rescue, inspections of cruise ships.

“Those things are certainly imaginable in a future when we might have 20,000 satellites that require active space situational awareness and space traffic management,” he added. “At some point in time, if we have citizens in orbit, then they are going to expect somebody to provide some sort of constabulary function.”

Maj. Anna Gunn-Golkin, a member of the Executive Action Group advising the secretary and the chief of staff of the Air Force, recently outlined in a leading space journal what a U.S. Space Guard might do.

It could license space launches and inspect rockets and spacecraft for safety — much as the Coast Guard does for commercial ships. It could also have authority to “prevent legal infractions through its prevention program, and it will be ready to respond and enforce the laws when needed.”

“As part of this duty, the [Space Guard] will take on all aspects of commercial space management licensing,” she added.

She also argued that such an approach is a way for the United States to lead the way in peaceful space activities internationally.

“In being the first nation to establish a comprehensive government construct for safe and secure commercial space operations, America will set international space operating norms for spacecraft, debris and astronauts.”

James Vedda, a senior policy analyst at The Aerospace Corp., a government-funded think tank, also sees a major international component, given the number of nations that already cooperate with the United States in space.

“I would think it is most likely to be an international Space Coast Guard,” he says.

The White House National Space Council, which was re-established last year to review government space programs and regulations to help fuel the new commercial space industry, declined to say whether the topic of a Space Guard is on the agenda.

“We don’t have anything to share at this time,” said Thea McDonald, spokeswoman for the body headed by Vice President Mike Pence.

But Nield thinks the issue is only going to get more attention.

“I’ve been surprised at how much interest and traction it has received so far,” he said in an interview. “You can have a Space Guard as a component of a larger Space Force, or you could do it independently to address these non-warfighting issues.”