Air Force moves to reorganize its space operations
Turf war! Claiming it is working to speed up acquisitions and the design-to-launch timeframe of future space missions, the Air Force today announced that it is reorganizing its space operations.
After a four-month review, SMC Commander Lt. Gen. J.T. Thompson will begin the restructuring of the massive organization that oversees a $6 billion space portfolio.
In a keynote speech Tuesday at the 34th Space Symposium, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson offered a preview of the upcoming reorganization. The central goal, she said, is to take down the walls that keep programs in stovepipes and create a more unified enterprise that looks at systems horizontally from design to production.
SMC will have a “chief architect” to guide and look across the entire space enterprise, Wilson said. Two new offices will be created. One will focus on innovation. The other will work to increase partnerships with foreign allies and commercial space companies. [emphasis mine]
This is rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. In fact, it is worse: It is buying more deck chairs for a sinking ship. Rather than cut the bureaucracy to simplify operations, they are creating more layers of bureaucracy on top of the old ones. The Air Force might be speeding up the design-to-launch of its satellites by switching to commercial products, but it appears that they aren’t saving the taxpayer any money as they do so.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Turf war! Claiming it is working to speed up acquisitions and the design-to-launch timeframe of future space missions, the Air Force today announced that it is reorganizing its space operations.
After a four-month review, SMC Commander Lt. Gen. J.T. Thompson will begin the restructuring of the massive organization that oversees a $6 billion space portfolio.
In a keynote speech Tuesday at the 34th Space Symposium, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson offered a preview of the upcoming reorganization. The central goal, she said, is to take down the walls that keep programs in stovepipes and create a more unified enterprise that looks at systems horizontally from design to production.
SMC will have a “chief architect” to guide and look across the entire space enterprise, Wilson said. Two new offices will be created. One will focus on innovation. The other will work to increase partnerships with foreign allies and commercial space companies. [emphasis mine]
This is rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. In fact, it is worse: It is buying more deck chairs for a sinking ship. Rather than cut the bureaucracy to simplify operations, they are creating more layers of bureaucracy on top of the old ones. The Air Force might be speeding up the design-to-launch of its satellites by switching to commercial products, but it appears that they aren’t saving the taxpayer any money as they do so.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
As an ex USAF member, I’d say one of the greatest threats to this country is a military with an infinite budget…..it never gets smaller until you have an economic catastrophe…
“As an ex USAF member, I’d say one of the greatest threats to this country is a military with an infinite budget…..”
This is quite true, since this would undercut the basis of an industrial economy, by putting all resource allocation in political hands that appropriate the military’s budget, contrary to the competent definition of the industrial revolution:
“When a society moves from allocating resources by custom and tradition (moderns read here, by politics) to allocating resources by markets, it may be said to have undergone an industrial revolution.”
“…it never gets smaller until you have an economic catastrophe…”
The word *Never* excludes many recent examples, even extreme ones. Look at Germany, and its defense budgets over the last 25 years, where a sub-rosa part of the reason Germany did not join the US, France, and Britain in marking a clearer red line for Assad’s gas brigades is that they cannot support their planes at that distance, or fly them much at all. About half their tanks are operational. About one of their subs was, until it left port, and had to be rescued. While the last 8 years have not been the brightest for Germany’s economy, they are *far* from an economic catastrophe. A strategic catastrophe, certainly, but not an economic one.
Which presumes that “we the public” know all there is to know about the Air Forces space operations. Then there is this,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
which clearly, Loudly and Clearly, speaks to the fact that “we the public” are probably clueless to actual operations and technology and systems deployments currently ongoing in the U.S. Air Force.
Andrew,
Changing the methods used from acquisition to launch has little to do with space operations. Space operations is not even mentioned as part of this redesign/restructure (depending upon which paragraph you are reading). We the public do not need to know anything about space operations in order to have an opinion on this effort, as it only modifies pre-launch ground operations.
Your choice of example demonstrates that, despite not knowing the actual purpose or operation of a project, we the public are well aware of some or many of the most secretive projects; including the super secretive Zuma satellite — so secretive that the agency that bought it is still not known; the purchasing agency is usually mentioned in launch announcements even for secretive projects.
From the article:
Robert is pessimistic and doubtful about the outcome of this effort, but it is an effort that people in the defense business have been publicly recommending (read: “demanding”) for decades. The SBIRS project is a classic case in point. It took about a decade and a half to get the first satellite aloft. That is too much time. I suspect that it took all that time (thus was an example) because, as the article said:
As U.S. Strategic Command’s Gen. John Hyten said in the article: “I need a flexible, resilient warfighting capability.”
I am more hopeful than Robert appears to be on this issue, but only time will tell whether the Air Force can streamline the procurement of space hardware, and maybe support services, so that it can obtain what it needs in a more timely manner.
Right now, the procurement of space hardware for the military looks more like a Depression era WPA (Works Progress Administration) jobs program than a national defense program. Clint Eastwood’s character in the movie “Heartbreak Ridge” described this kind of situation — literally this kind of situation — as a cluster[bleep]. From the movie (just after the “cluster” line): “Marines are fighting men, sir. They shouldn’t be sitting around on their sorry asses filling out request forms for equipment they should already have.“