At a meeting of the National Space Council in Washington on Tuesday, October 23, at which the Vice-President of the United States, Mike Pence, chaired the meeting, the creation of the sixth type of armed forces, the Space Forces, was mainly discussed.
Following the meeting, recommendations were made to the Supreme Commander of the United States - current President Donald Trump, the implementation of which, in the opinion of those present, would give the necessary acceleration to the process of forming an entirely new structure of the Department of Defense responsible for conducting combat operations in outer space and ensuring the protection of the United States from attack space.
The head of the White House, Donald Trump, insistently demands that the military speed up the implementation of his instructions on the creation of space forces.
The main recommendations to the American leader are as follows:
- immediately begin to create a unified temporary space command, which will unite and subjugate heterogeneous, but decisive, similar tasks in the space sphere, units and subunits from the air force, naval forces and ground forces;
- to begin work on the preparation of legislation regulating the activities of the future US Department of Space Forces;
- to provide in the budget for 2020 the financing of the new structure;
- to improve the process of interaction between the Pentagon and the intelligence community solving similar problems in space.
This is how Patrick Shannon, the deputy head of the US military department responsible for the formation of the new structure, commented on the results of the meeting: "Creating the space forces is not an easy task, but we are confidently moving towards our intended goal."
As conceived by Donald Trump, the structure of the new type of armed forces should be similar to the existing ministries of the army, air force and naval forces. That is, the head should be the civilian minister of space forces, and the headquarters of the "four-star" general should be the highest rank in the American armed forces. It is expected that it will take about three years to form a new military control body.
I would like to note that only one circumstance can prevent the implementation of the White House’s plans to create space forces. American political analysts believe that if a democratic party gets a majority in the US Congress following the upcoming elections in early November, this initiative will be blocked.
