A few months back, I visited my eldest daughter at her home in far off Yuma, Arizona. It’s a lovely little town and it is home to a Marine Corps air station, from which my son-in-law flies his F-35 in defense of our great nation. In fact, when I visited, he was deployed on a Navy aircraft carrier flying missions against the bad guys. I’m immensely proud of both of them.

The Marine Corps is a remarkable service. While I spent my 25-plus year military career wearing Air Force blue, I never really got into the interservice rivalries, other than the occasional joke to a friend in another service. I really do believe that each of the services provides, well, a service that is vital to our national defense. 

The Marines, traditionally the smallest of the services, is home to roughly 180,000 active-duty folks and a big chunk of folks in the reserves. Created as the “land” force to help the Navy take and hold vital land locations, the Marines have proven again and again how important it is to have a “boots on the ground” component as part of overall naval operations. Yes, the Marine Corps may be small, but they fulfill a vital mission that their larger parent service, the Navy, cannot readily do.

Which of course, brings me to the silliness of the U.S. Space Force…

Let me make it clear right from the start that I am not in any way casting aspersions on the fine men and women who make up the Space Force. No, I am talking about the actions of a deeply flawed former president who, I’m quite sure, pushed through the creation of said Space Force as a political distraction, in hopes it would draw attention away from his other massive shortcomings (spoiler: it didn’t). And if you happen to visit a military clothing sales store (uniform store for you civilians out there) at one of the Colorado military installations, you will see lots of cool bumper stickers, badges, tee-shirts, and more with cool Space Force logos on them. Think Star Trek badges and you’ll have the basic idea. 

No, the folks actually in the Space Force are great people. And they were great people back when they were doing the same job as members of the – wait for it – United States Air Force. And that’s where they should return. It’s time to put Trump’s military stunt firmly on the “not so great an idea” list and merge the Space Force back with the Air Force.

Why am I on this particular soapbox, you may ask? Well, a recent Colorado Politics story noted that next week several military bases are about to get new names. Peterson Air Force Base will soon be Peterson Space Force Base, and Schriever Air Force Base will be, you guessed it, Schriever Space Force Base. The military organization inside Cheyenne Mountain will become Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station. It’s a good week to be in the sign repainting business.

No one doubts the military importance of space operations is both vital and growing. And I admit that I may well be biased, given my own years in the Air Force. But there are several signs that seem, at least to me, to suggest that this new entity is far different from the Marines, the other, and actually vital, “small” service.

First off, the Space Force numbers only about 13,000 troops, I mean guardians. Yup, that’s what they call their members. That makes the Space Force about 90% smaller than the Marines, already seen as a small force. Most of those guardians are here in Colorado Springs at one of the aforementioned and soon to be renamed, bases. 

A reasonable person might ask if, given that space is a vital area for military operations, why shouldn’t there be a new space force? Well, the answer is, it seems to me, that there already was a space force, called the U.S. Air Force. Yup, the AF was already operating in space, as is obvious when you realize that the new Space Force was simply taken from the body of the AF in the first place. Heck, my first AF job, as an ICBM launch officer, involved space operations, in that my missiles, if launched, spent much of their mission flying through space (they landed rather dramatically, I admit). Back then, in the 80s, there was actually an effort to rename my service as the “US Aerospace Force,” but happily, that idea didn’t get much support. But the concept is clear: the Air Force has space ops covered. We had AF folks flying the GPS satellites that make our lives so much easier, and the AF kept an eye on our adversaries through a variety of space assets. All good!

The issue is not the mission of space operations. That mission was, and will continue to be, vital. No, the question is shall we continue to spend a few billion here and there to create a new and tiny military service, just because a failed and shortsighted former president wanted to have something to brag about? 

It’s time for the Space Force to come home, and to be, well, pretty much what it already was, Space Command, as part of the Air Force. We need a Marine Corps, because ships do rather poorly on land. But we don’t need a separate space force. The Air Force had that mission covered and can continue to do so. It’s time for common sense to return to military policy decisions. 

Ok, I’ve got that off my chest, I feel better now…