Trump backed 'space force' after months of lobbying by officials with ties to aerospace industry

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http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-trump-space-20180817-story.html


President Trump speaks to Marines in March at Miramar Air Station in San Diego. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune)

When President Trump spoke to Marines at Air Station Miramar in San Diego on March 13, he threw out an idea that he suggested had just come to him.

"You know, I was saying it the other day, because we're doing a tremendous amount of work in space — I said maybe we need a new force. We'll call it the ‘space force,’" he told the crowd. "And I was not really serious. And then I said what a great idea — maybe we'll have to do that."

The origin of the space force wasn’t that simple.

The concept had been pushed unsuccessfully since 2016 by a small group of current and former government officials, some with deep financial ties to the aerospace industry, who see creation of the sixth military service as a surefire way to hike Pentagon spending on satellite and other space systems.

The idea of a space force “is not a new thing,” said Stuart O. Witt, an aerospace executive and a member of the White House’s National Space Council Users Advisory Group. “The president just acted upon it.”

But Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), one of the early supporters of a separate service, complained that Trump’s impromptu endorsement had “hijacked” the issue and could vastly inflate the budget process. “There are many vendors of all types who are excited at the prospect of an explosion of new spending, which was not our goal,” he said.

Still, when Trump abruptly embraced the idea at Miramar — and began promoting it to wild applause at other rallies — a moribund notion opposed by much of the Pentagon hierarchy and senior members of the Senate became a real possibility.