Gen. Jay Raymond, Commander, Space Command and Air Force Space CommandWASHINGTON: Some 16,000 people — civilians and airmen — will be shifted from Air Force Space Command to the Space Force upon its stand-up sometime early next year.

“It’s a lot of people,” said Kaitlyn Johnson, who has been tracking the Space Force concept at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, although about the number DoD has been projecting. She noted that AFSPC currently numbers 26,000 personnel from military to administrative staff, although the Congressional Budget Office estimates there are 23,000 full time personnel in all of the Defense Department, excluding the intelligence agencies. But not all of those folks are actually well-versed in the space mission, given the Air Force’s practice of rapid rotation and its past emphasis on general, rather than specialized, training.

“One of the issues from the start has been how the Air Force can dig out the space people” who may or may not be working in AFSPC or a space-related job, she said. “Can people volunteer?”

Todd Harrison, who heads CSIS’s Aerospace Project, concurred that finding the right people will be a big headache for the service, and the fact that they have a hard number already means they must have been doing some serious pre-planning.

That said, Harrison stressed that the big question is actually the other 10,000 billets that are not being transferred to Space Force. “What happens to the other 10,000 billets, and what are they being withheld? You don’t want the Air Force to withhold support personnel, so the Space Force then has to go back and hire new people to do those functions — and you end up with bloat.”

Indeed, bureaucratic bloat is what both sides of Capitol Hill have been extremely worried about, and the reason that both the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) setting policy and the appropriations bill put solid bumpers around DoD’s freedom of action.

“For every single person that doesn’t get transferred, the Air Force has to be able to explain why not,” Harrison said.

The NDAA, expected to be signed by President Donald Trump tomorrow night, prevents Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett from creating any new Space Force billets. She’s not allowed to create any new ones either, stopping the service from getting around the restrictions. The spending bill chops the service’s budget request of $72.4 million for launching the headquarters to only $40 million, although in all fairness that could simply reflect a pro-rating for the short fiscal year given the lateness of the appropriation.

Johnson has a new analysis out that compares the 2020 NDAA to the president’s request, the Senate version, and the House version that tracks specific changes.

CSIS last November published a study of possible Space Force structures and the attendant costs of running each, with one of the options being a Space Corps similar to the structure Congress has approved, where the Space Force is a separate Title 10 military service but underneath the Department of the Air Force. In that study, Harrison calculated that such a structure would have an annual budget of about $11 billion.

So we have a baseline estimate to compare to whatever the Air Force comes up with, at least.

Meanwhile, we are hearing rumblings about a turf war between planning cells at Air Force headquarters here and at AFSPC in Colorado Springs.

Maj. Gen. Clint Crosier is in charge of Barrett’s “war room” here for planning process for the Space Force. He told me earlier this month at the West Coast Aerospace Forum in Santa Monica that his group of senior officers had put together pre-plans based on possible outcomes from the NDAA in order to move out “from day one.”

Meanwhile, however, Gen. Jay Raymond — whom the NDAA specifically allows to become the head of the Space Force for the first year — has his own planning task force that has been seeking to shape the new force. Raymond, as Breaking D readers know well, currently wears two hats: head of AFSPC and head of the new combatant command for space, Space Command, stood up in August.

Harrison noted that filling up billets in Space Command while simultaneously shifting people to the Space Force could be another problem for the Air Force, given the relatively small pool of space professionals. For example, there are also rumors that a number of Air Force personnel now on loan to the National Reconnaissance Office — which comprises both Air Force and CIA personnel –are being shifted over to Space Command.