Our military services are steeped in tradition built out of real-life heroics of our predecessors: George Washington and his soldiers fearlessly crossing a frozen Delaware river; Marines raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima; the harrowing contests in the air over Europe by the Tuskegee Airmen and the 100th Bomb Group; James Lawrence’s final cry admonishing his men, “Don’t give up the ship!” Over time, each of the services has taken the real accomplishments of its servicemembers and mythologized them to great effect in setting a high standard to be aimed for by other servicemembers as well as an emblem to the general public of what it means to be a soldier, sailor, marine, or airman.
What then of the newest service, the United States Space Force? How does one create and build heritage in a way that motivates its members and creates an understanding and embrace of the mission in the popular imagination? The Space Force has a number of promising options available. First, leaders should highlight the decisive role of specific guardians in completing missions and protecting their fellow soldiers. They should also be more open in discussing the military’s role in space, while also promoting historic examples of officers who took professional risks to advance American security in space.
The Role of Heroes
Idealized images of heroes have existed for as long as history has been written down, or even carved into clay tablets. Fragments from the “Epic of Gilgamesh” have been found in clay tablets approximately 4,000 years old. Biblical stories such as David slaying Goliath, or Samson bringing down a temple atop himself and his enemies, have been depicted in artwork over and over through the generations.
Heroes exist both as a reflection of a culture’s values and as a target to give people something to emulate. Recognition of heroes inside an organization contributes to creating a strong sense of shared values and a common culture by illustrating and exemplifying the organization’s philosophy. Research has demonstrated that groups with a shared social identity have enhanced social collaboration and further allow leaders of such groups to exert more influence in shaping its direction and effectiveness. Building a shared repository of heroes and the ideals they represent is one way to create an identity and culture within the Space Force, which in turn can serve as a significant force multiplier by enhancing organizational motivation and cohesiveness.
In more practical terms, heritage may play a tangible role in creating a bond between the public and the institution, increasing support. The importance of this may best be summed up by an inversion of a quote from The Right Stuff. In that movie about the early space program, the prospective astronauts noted that they needed funding to get to space, hence “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” But it just as easily could be said in reverse, as the characters in the film and book acknowledge. Public relations and celebrity are needed to drive public opinion to generate pressure for more funding from Congress. No Buck Rogers, no bucks.
The Marine Corps faced the threat of being folded into the Army after World War II, but survived in part due to many congressional supporters citing its heroic deeds and, in the words of President Harry Truman, a skeptic of the Corps, “a propaganda machine almost the equal of Stalin’s.” The purpose of building a Space Force culture is not simply to lobby and influence public officials. But maintaining a link between the service’s mission and the general public that it serves is vital to maintaining support for that mission, both in dollars and cents, and in less tangible moral support. In any society, and especially in a democracy, support from the public for its governmental institutions is a vital component of success for those institutions. Educating, persuading, and winning the support of the public can have important tangible effects, from influencing potential recruits to join to encouraging more congressional support for programs to narrowing the military-civilian divide in communities with military bases. Using heritage and heroes is one powerful and simple method of making that connection.
Challenges
The Space Force suffers from several limitations in creating tradition. The first is time. Heritage, as the word denotes, signifies a legacy handed down from generations past. With a service that is less than five years old — barely long enough for a guardian to have completed one initial enlistment—all of the deeds of guardians past aren’t far enough in the rearview mirror to be given the veneer of legend that helps in creating and shaping a mythos and, with it, a culture.
Of course, the Space Force is not America’s first foray into military space activities. Air Force Space Command, which stood up in 1982, is the forerunner of the present Space Operations Command, a field command of the Space Force. Further, U.S. Space Command, the combatant command stood up in 2019 whose area of responsibility is outer space, existed in a previous iteration from 1985 to 2002. Just as the Air Force grew out of the Army Air Corps and had a legacy to draw on in its early days as a service in World War II, the Space Force can point to heroes from the past several decades, even if they weren’t part of the same organization. Space capabilities began to emerge during the Cold War, when the space race and nuclear capabilities became critical, proved vital in combat operations during the Gulf War, and then became an everyday necessity and fact of life in the “Global War on Terror.”
But the question remains, what heroes? This brings up the second limitation of developing space heritage. The stories that capture our imagination are feats of heroism in the face of danger. The Marine Corps underwent a defining battle when it faced relentless gunfire in the Battle of Belleau Wood, while the feats performed on shores of Tripoli are sung in the Marines’ Hymn to this day. Soldiers earned immortality by holding off surrounding German forces in subzero temperatures at Bastogne, with their commander famously refusing a suggestion of surrender with the short reply, “Nuts!” Sailors in tin can destroyers sailed directly toward far more powerful Japanese surface vessels to give their carriers time to escape at the Battle of Samar, many losing their lives but ultimately prevailing in what was called by author and historian James D. Hornfischer as the greatest upset in naval history. Airmen can point to the Berlin Airlift at the dawn of the Cold War, where relentless crews saved Berlin from starvation and capitulation by running round-the-clock operations that, at their height, had a plane landing every thirty seconds. In combat operations, they can point to the tense dogfights between F-86 Sabres and Soviet-built MiG-15s battling for control of the airspace over the Korean Peninsula or the risky Wild Weasel suppression of enemy air defense campaigns in Vietnam.
Death and danger go hand in hand with the military. But what do you do when you have a force that is primarily digital? Space operations consist of operating satellites, radar systems, and the ground stations and communications systems that allow them all to work and interact with the broader array of defense networks to provide militarily useful information and capabilities. Most of the personnel working on the space domain are not astronauts pushing the frontiers of human space travel, but technicians operating satellites, analysts reviewing data those satellites capture, scientists developing and testing new systems, or program managers working to bring new programs online. Plugging away at a keyboard from an operations center in Colorado Springs to send commands to a satellite — however important its mission — lacks the elements of a great story of bravery and panache. This is important work, but at a glance, it seems remote from Seal Team Six infiltrating Osama bin Laden’s compound.
Even if these stories were relatable, when could they be told? Space activities are heavily classified. Department of Defense leadership has taken steps to reduce the high level of classification given to many space programs. But one cannot expect to hear explicit, play-by-play details about any close encounters between blue and red space objects outside of a sensitive compartmented information facility any time soon.
Three Ways Forward
So how can the Space Force link its work to an idealized standard to strive for, and one that will resonate with the broader public? Three avenues are available. First, focus on the efforts of specific guardians and units in saving lives and accomplishing the mission. Second, be more open about talking about space military activities. And third, be willing to own and publicize risky decisions to solve problems.
First, the Space Force does not need to “create” heroes. It already has them. In response to the U.S. strike killing Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, Iran launched missiles at Erbil and al Asad airbases in Iraq. When Iran launched the missiles, the 2d Space Warning Squadron, part of Space Delta 4, Missile Warning, at Buckley Space Force Base, sprang into action. Utilizing the space-based infrared system, the warning officer and team determined that a launch had occurred, where it came from, and where it was going, and released warning messages in a very short window of time. Absent that quick action, “We would be talking about dead Americans,” observed then-Space Force Vice Commander Lt. Gen. David Thompson. Linking and highlighting the key role played by guardians in saving hundreds of American lives provides a model for other guardians to work toward.
The need to highlight these stories brings up the second issue: being more open about military activities in and concerning space. Publicity about these activities suffers from two critical limiting factors. First, as mentioned above, space activities tend to be highly classified. This is understandable and expected, but in some ways counterintuitive in that satellites — the primary vehicle for space activity — are observable, often to amateurs on the ground, and tend to travel in very predictable orbits. Indeed, there are numerous websites dedicated to the task of identifying space objects, their roles, and their orbits. Adversaries with reasonably advanced capabilities are aware of many activities in outer space, so attempting to obscure some of them may have limited strategic value, while serving to lower public awareness of the value provided by the Space Force. Second, the fact that space is often seen as a peaceful domain that war has not yet sullied has contributed to a reluctance to talk about space warfare, at least in some circles. The stand-up of the Space Force created concern among some that such militarization would create a “space arms race.”
While outright aggressive militancy should be avoided, it is beneficial to acknowledge the reality that space is militarized and always has been. As the then-USSPACEOM J3, now the Space Operations Command Commander, Lt. Gen. David Miller, said, “We’ve got to … stop debating if [space is] a warfighting domain, stop debating whether there are weapons, and get to the point of how do we responsibly, as part of the joint and combined force, deter conflict that nobody wants to see, but if we do see it, demonstrate our ability to win.” Similarly, the push by Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman to win the competition in space while avoiding — and countering — debris generation both acknowledges the reality of the situation in space while championing a position that promotes the U.S. role in maintaining a stable and safe environment. This openness to discussing the realities of competition and conflict in space should continue in order to make the public more comfortable with and more understanding of what guardians do and why their mission is so critical.
To that end, being more open about bringing stories of guardians and the space systems they operate to the forefront would serve many useful functions. It would normalize the role played by guardians among the general public. Additionally, more widespread discussion would make other members of the armed forces more familiar with the critical role played by the smallest force in enabling operations for everyone. This could have a unifying effect both across the armed forces — in bringing the services together in achieving a better understanding of what everyone does — and within the Space Force — by taking more opportunities to celebrate success in a shared enterprise. Shaking off our reluctance to talk about military activities in space and instead embracing the work that guardians do in protecting the American people is an important step in building culture and heritage.
Finally, examples of positive leadership can always serve as a common cultural touchstone. General Saltzman referenced the bold and sometimes defiant actions of the Space Force’s spiritual founder, Gen. Bernard Schriever, in promoting the importance of space in military operations. Schriever gave a speech on “space superiority” in which he focused on the need to build and achieve space superiority in order to maintain national security. For his efforts, he was reprimanded by the secretary of defense and told never to use the word “space” again. As this speech preceded the Soviet launch of Sputnik by eight months, it wound up being prophetic and visionary. Needless to say, the Department of Defense did an about-face and became very interested in Schriever’s ideas for the future.
It was no accident that Saltzman made the call back to Schriever’s comments. Rather, it was a deliberate move to connect the past — heritage — to the present and future. General Saltzman wanted guardians to see the actions taken by General Schriever and the positive impact they had on the development of America’s space capabilities to serve as an example of how guardians needed to “evolve … take risks … and solve problems.” He cast General Schriever in the same role as defiant aviation advocate Billy Mitchell, who is one of the spiritual fathers of the United States Air Force.
Because leadership occurs at all levels, from a general officer commanding an entire service to a noncommissioned officer or company-grade officer leading a small flight, detachment, or office, using examples of leadership like Schriever’s can serve as a common touchpoint for all guardians to rally around. When leaders choose to deliberately accept risk by, for example, opting to place more trust and authority in lower echelon units or members, making a strong public showing of such decisions can demonstrate both a courageous and independent leadership model and a junior corps that has more autonomy and responsibility. In turn, those decisions, repeated and publicized, can build an image of a service with its own traits and characteristics particular to its needs.
Space may be largely empty, but it is not a true vacuum. Likewise, the Space Force does not truly lack for heritage or examples of courageous leadership if one knows where to look and how to present them. By using these existing examples, the Space Force can build its own unique culture, tailored toward its mission needs, and motivate its guardians with idealized examples of leadership and performance under pressure.
Maj Nicholas Mahanic is a Judge Advocate in the United States Air Force, presently serving as Deputy Staff Judge Advocate, 88th Air Base Wing, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. He previously served as the Chief of Space and Operations Law at Space Operations Command, Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. He has an LLM in Air and Space Law from McGill University, a juris doctor from the University of Michigan Law School, and a B.A. in history and political science from the University of Michigan.
The views in this article are his personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect policy or the views of the Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force, or the Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
