The U.S. Air Force on Sunday carried out what is expected to be the final test of the hypersonic AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon.

The service did not say whether the test was successful.

In a statement to Defense News, an Air Force spokesperson said a B-52H Stratofortress carried out the test of the fully operational ARRW prototype, referred to as an all-up round test, after taking off from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. The test was carried out at the Reagan Test Site, an Army facility in the Marshall Islands.

The Air Force declined to identify the test’s objectives, but said it “gained valuable insights into the capabilities” of the Lockheed Martin-made hypersonic weapon.

“This test acquired valuable, unique data and was intended to further a range of hypersonic programs,” the spokesperson said. “We also validated and improved our test and evaluation capabilities for continued development of advanced hypersonic systems.”

In a follow-up statement, Lockheed Martin said it is ready to deliver ARRW technology or other hypersonic capabilities to the Air Force.

“Following the recent end-to-end flight test, Lockheed Martin has completed the test program with full confidence in ARRW’s revolutionary capabilities, and we stand ready to deliver this fully-qualified, hypersonic solution to the U.S. Air Force,” the company said. “Building on ARRW’s industry-leading technology and testing success, Lockheed Martin can quickly deliver additional hypersonic-strike assets that can be rapidly deployed to the U.S. military.”

ARRW is one of the Air Force’s two main programs to develop an air-launched hypersonic weapon that could fly faster than Mach 5 and be highly maneuverable. China and Russia have invested heavily in their own hypersonic weapons, and the Pentagon is under pressure from Congress to show more progress toward fielding the United States’ own capabilities.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall last year told lawmakers the ARRW program had “struggled” in testing, shortly after a March 2023 test failed.

Air Force officials said earlier this month that ARRW’s upcoming test would be its last, and the service plans to wrap up its rapid prototyping program this year. The service requested no funding to procure ARRW, nor conduct any research and development, in 2025.

Kendall has sounded a more optimistic tone about the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile program, and the fiscal 2025 budget request proposes $517 million to keep developing that program. The HACM weapon, developed by Northrop Grumman and RTX subsidiary Raytheon, is an air-breathing missile that the Air Force said would be smaller than ARRW and able to fly along “vastly different trajectories” than the boost-glide ARRW.

The Air Force assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics told reporters earlier this month that the service will study the results of the final ARRW test to help it decide what hypersonic capabilities it will need.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in remarks carried by Russian news agencies that Moscow has halted all information exchanges with Washington after previously suspending its participation in the last remaining nuclear arms pact with the U.S.

Along with the data about the current state of the countries’ nuclear forces routinely released every six months in compliance with the treaty, the parties also have exchanged advance warnings about test launches. Such notices have been an essential element of strategic stability for decades, allowing Russia and the United States to correctly interpret each other’s moves and make sure that neither country mistakes a test launch for a missile attack.

The termination of missile test warnings marks yet another attempt by Moscow to discourage the West from ramping up its support for Ukraine by pointing to Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal. In recent days, President Vladimir Putin announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to the territory of Moscow’s ally Belarus.

Last month, Putin suspended the New START treaty, saying Russia can’t accept U.S. inspections of its nuclear sites under the agreement at a time when Washington and its NATO allies have openly declared Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine as their goal. Moscow emphasized that it wasn’t withdrawing from the pact altogether and would continue to respect the caps on nuclear weapons the treaty set.

The Foreign Ministry initially said Moscow would keep notifying the U.S. about planned test launches of its ballistic missiles, but Ryabkov’s statement reflected an abrupt change of course.

“There will be no notifications at all,” he said in remarks reported by Russian news agencies when asked if Moscow would also stop issuing notices about planned missile tests. “All notifications, all kinds of notifications, all activities under the treaty. will be suspended and will not be conducted regardless of what position the U.S. may take.”

Ryabkov’s announcement followed U.S. officials’ statement that Moscow and Washington have stopped sharing biannual nuclear weapons data that were envisioned by the New START treaty. Officials at the White House, Pentagon and State Department said the U.S. had offered to continue providing this information to Russia even after Putin suspended its participation in the treaty, but Moscow told Washington it would not be sharing its own data.

The New START, signed in 2010 by then-Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers. The agreement envisages sweeping on-site inspections to verify compliance.

The inspections have been put on hold since 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Discussions on resuming them were supposed to have taken place in November 2022, but Russia abruptly called them off, citing U.S. support for Ukraine.

As part of the Russian drills that began Wednesday, Yars mobile missile launchers will maneuver across three regions of Siberia, Russia’s Defense Ministry said. The movements will involve measures to conceal the deployment from foreign satellites and other intelligence assets, the ministry said.

The Defense Ministry didn’t say how long the drills would last or mention plans for any practice launches. The Yars is a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of about 11,000 kilometers (over 6,800 miles). It forms the backbone of Russia’s strategic missile forces.

A Defense Ministry video shows trucks carrying the missiles driving from a base to go on patrol. The maneuvers involve about 300 vehicles and 3,000 troops in eastern Siberia, according to the ministry.

The exercise took place days after Putin announced a plan to deploy the tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, Russia’s neighbor and ally. Such weapons are intended for use on the battlefield and have a relatively short range and a much lower yield compared with the long-range strategic missiles fitted with nuclear warheads that are capable of obliterating whole cities.

Putin’s decision on the tactical weapons followed his repeated warnings that Moscow was ready to use “all available means” — a reference to its nuclear arsenal — to fend off attacks on Russian territory.

Ryabkov said Wednesday that Putin’s move followed the failure by Kyiv’s allies to heed previous “serious signals” from Moscow because of what he described as the “fundamental irresponsibility of Western elites before their people and international security.”

“Now they will have to deal with changing realities,” he said, adding: “We hope that NATO officials will adequately assess the seriousness of the situation.”

Russian officials have issued a barrage of hawkish statements since their troops entered Ukraine, warning that the continuing Western support for Kyiv raised the threat of a nuclear conflict.

In remarks published Tuesday, Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, which Putin chairs, sternly warned the U.S. and its allies against harboring hopes for Russia’s defeat in Ukraine.

Patrushev alleged that some American politicians believe the U.S. could launch a preventative missile strike on Russia to which Moscow would be unable to respond, a purported belief that he described as “short-sighted stupidity, which is very dangerous.”

“Russia is patient and isn’t trying to scare anyone with its military superiority, but it has unique modern weapons capable of destroying any adversary, including the United States, in case of a threat to its existence,” Patrushev said.

Iyer joins ServiceNow in the newly created position weeks after leaving the Army, where he sat atop the service’s IT sprawl and oversaw a $16 billion budget, which included hundreds of millions of dollars for cloud in fiscal 2023. The company announced the hire March 13.

“Raj is the best of the best,” ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said in a statement. “He’s the perfect leader to accelerate the mission critical nature of the work we do with governments around the world, to transform experiences for employees, service members, and citizens.”

Iyer in January said he would depart his military role after two and a half years, and return to industry. He previously worked at Deloitte, an international consulting firm.

In his new gig, Iyer will focus on digital transformation — a buzzy phrase often used to describe the embrace of new tech and the ditching of dated practices — across international markets, including in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S.

“We have a huge opportunity to truly transform the public sector through cloud-based digital technologies,” Iyer said in a statement. “ServiceNow has the biggest vision for digital transformation at the scale of government, and I’m thrilled to join a company that is equally as passionate and excited about the potential for change as ServiceNow.”

Iyer’s jump to industry precedes departures by two other Department of Defense IT czars.

The Navy’s Aaron Weis will leave his CIO post this month, and the Air Force’s Lauren Knausenberger will do the same in June. The timing of the respective exits, Knausenberger said at an event earlier this month, was not planned.

The two have not said where they are headed next.

Thanks to one officer, the service is working to make that a reality.

The light-bulb moment of inspiration came to Lt. Cmdr. Jonathan Calhoun, a reservist assigned to U.S. Fleet Forces Command’s Maritime Operations Center in Norfolk, Virginia, as he completed a mobilization exercise earlier this year and was inundated with the required paperwork.

Calhoun said his new idea to this old problem involves sailors completing documents and requirements through an app that pre-populates information through their mobile phones so that they aren’t spending time filling out repetitive information like name, rank, and address by hand.

Pre-populating that information also reduces the likelihood of errors, Calhoun noted.

“It would save a significant amount of time, and what could take up to a full week to get done could be completed within just a few hours,” Calhoun told Navy Times.

“As soon as they show up to their Navy Reserve Center for mobilization, all of the information is already completed, verified and validated, as opposed to having to complete multiple different forms from scratch,” he added.

Calhoun’s idea, called “Leveraging Mobile Technology to Streamline Mobilization,” won the i3 Waypoints program last month, a new competition that Chief of Navy Reserve Vice Adm. John Mustin established so sailors could share ideas with top Navy leaders.

“We are already moving out on the design for Lt. Cdr. Calhoun’s mobile application,” Mustin said in a Navy news release last week. “His idea to add mobile technology to our distributed activation process helps us achieve our goal of mobilizing the entire Selected Reserve force of 50,000 in 30 days, if required.”

The i3 Waypoints program —a name based on innovating something new, improving an existing program, or integrating several concepts — received a total of 107 submissions over the course of a five-week period, and the competition will proceed as an annual event.

“With such an enthusiastic response from the force, and so many great ideas to modernize the way we do business, we saw enough in this inaugural event to commit to making i3 Waypoints an annual program,” Mustin said. “Very little is more important to us than keeping the direct pipeline open for creative ideas to flow to top leadership without filter or disruption.”

Calhoun, who served five years active-duty and eight years in the Reserves, said he would encourage others who’ve thought of concepts to improve the Navy to make their voices heard because leadership was receptive to the presentations exhibited at the i3 Waypoints competition.

“I think coming out of this process, I’ll definitely encourage others — if you have an idea, speak up, because leadership is willing and eager to listen,” Calhoun said.

During a July 6 seminar led by President Yoon Suk Yeol, the ministry discussed key defense policies meant to counter the threat of North Korean nuclear missiles, including the Kill Chain strategy and well as more efficient efforts to develop defense capabilities.

The ministry said the strategic command, which would fall under the purview of the country’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, is to integrate and efficiently operate all South Korean armed forces’ strategic weapons systems, currently controlled by each military branch individually. The command would also give the orders to subordinate military assets to strike enemy targets or intercept hostile missiles as part of the Kill Chain strategy and the Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation plan.

Kill Chain is a preemptive strike strategy that the South Korean military would implement against key North Korean military facilities, such as missile silos, when intelligence organizations confirm an imminent attack. KMPR involves the use of ballistic missiles and highly explosive weapons against an offensive nuclear attack. Its purpose is essentially the total destruction of North Korea’s capital Pyongyang.

The units and capabilities that would fall under the forthcoming strategic include:

• The Army’s Missile and Strategic Command, which operates Hyunmoo ballistic missiles.
• The Air Force’s Missile Defense Command, which operates PAC-3 anti-air missiles, F-35A fighter jets and Global Hawk surveillance aircraft.
• The Navy’s 3000-ton submarines that feature sub-launched ballistic missiles.
• Military surveillance satellites.
• Cyberwarfare- and space-focused forces.

The military is also expected to adjust the duties of the Army’s Missile and Strategic Command and the Air Force’s Missile Defense Command.

“The key assets of Kill Chain and KMPR are individually managed by the Army, Navy and Air Force. I can assure that the STRATCOM [strategic command] would be highly efficient if those divided strategic assets of each military branch are combined as one single unit,” Uk Yang, the associate research fellow of Asan Institute for policy studies, told Defense News.

The former commander of the Air Force’s Air Defense Command, Myung-guk Kwon, agreed. “This means that one commander at a combined command center could execute offensive and defensive operations based on analyses of coherent information. I believe this will be an efficient command system.”

For the chain of command, a three-star general or admiral is expected to take the lead of the planned command, with the military branches taking turns to lead.

The Defense Ministry also said it plans to strengthen intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities; preemptive strike capabilities; and the country’s missile defense architecture.

For example, the rise of hybrid and multi-cloud architectures present data integration, access and management challenges for many as agencies seek to leverage data assets that span across both on-premise and hosted solutions.

This may be why the GSA Data Center and Cloud Optimization Initiative Program Management Office recently released a Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Guide to help agencies make better decisions about cloud architecture. Further complicating matters is that the DoD is facing a groundbreaking December award of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability procurement.

Pentagon Chief Information Officer John Sherman describes the JWCC as a “multi-cloud effort that will provide enterprise cloud capabilities for the Defense Department at all three security classifications: unclassified, secret, and top secret all the way from the continental United States out to the tactical edge.” At the conclusion of this possible five-year procurement, the DOD plans to launch a full and open competition for a future multi-cloud acquisitions. Until then, DoD data scientists may be forced to work in silos because connecting to live data may not always be possible.

How Technology Can Help

Many government agencies are overcoming these challenges using technologies such as data virtualization to implement a logical data fabric approach capable of ensuring trusted data access and sharing. Data virtualization is a modern data integration technique that integrates data in real-time without having to physically replicate it.

Data virtualization can seamlessly combine views of data from different sources and feed AI/ML engines with data from a common data services layer. Using data virtualization, AI teams can work more efficiently and collaborate more effectively, because the technology provides views of data rather than replicating it.

This not only saves access and storage costs because it provides a unified data-access layer, it also enables stakeholders to implement governance controls from a single point across the department. Creating this “single source of truth” is one of the most valuable characteristics of unifying enterprise data through use the of data virtualization.

This combination of enterprise AI, multi-cloud architecture, and data virtualization is being leveraged by many government organizations to leverage data more effectively and take advantage of the cost savings of the cloud. Together, these technologies underscore the fact that digital transformation is not just about technology, but about using technology in the most intelligent way and providing enhanced value to data science teams and internal and external data consumers.

Also, with the competition for market share between the major Cloud Service Providers (CSP) promising both better value for government and access to a vast array of AL/ML tools to drive better, mission-specific results, there may be conflicting narratives on which CSP — and which AI/ML technology — is best for a given mission.

In this environment, a logical data fabric is rapidly emerging as the technologically elegant solution to the chaos of multi-cloud computing as it simultaneously makes the best features of each CSP available to users.

Defined by Gartner as a design concept that serves as an integrated layer (fabric) of data and connecting processes, a data fabric utilizes continuous analytics over existing, discoverable and inferenced metadata assets to support the design, deployment and utilization of integrated and reusable data across all environments, including hybrid and multi-cloud platforms. This pure play data fabric enables the best of all commercial CSP offerings without vendor lock-in and, in many instances, is proving to be the government’s best answer to overcome these challenges.

Addressing the DoD’s pervasive siloed data, standardizing and improving its quality and access, should be a precondition to having the data necessary to train algorithms for many defense uses. A logical data fabric approach that incorporates data virtualization promises to be a means for quickly collecting, processing, and using information from the DoD’s disparate data sources. It also ensures that a developed AI/ML model in a silo is still relevant to live data and can accelerate better data flow and data access across the entire AI operationalization cycle.

The more data AI/ML models receive, the more they learn creating better and more accurate predictions the DoD requires for mission critical decision-making. However, extracting data from multiple sources and then replicating it to a central repository is an old and inefficient way of getting data access. The process is still prevalent across the federal government and often results in the majority of the project time being spent on data acquisition and preparation tasks.

With the DoD touting their growing capabilities in artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, integrating data to nourish disparate AI/ML models with their expanding data science teams is still a significant undertaking. Enterprise AI, leveraging a logical data fabric layer, overcomes these challenges. It can act as a central hub for data science teams between different AI/ML systems, reducing the need for data duplication enabling highly sophisticated AI/ML initiatives with enhanced operationalization and accelerated timetables for quicker time-to-production.

Bill Sullivan is Vice President and General Manager, US Federal at data integration and management company Denodo.

Have an opinion?

This article is an Op-Ed and as such, the opinions expressed are those of the authors. If you would like to respond, or have an editorial of your own you would like to submit, please email C4ISRNET Senior Managing Editor Cary O’Reilly.

Want more perspectives like this sent straight to you? Subscribe to get our Commentary & Opinion newsletter once a week.

Their target – critical Ukrainian government data.

As the multi-pronged invasion commenced, cruise missiles struck a Ukrainian governmental facility housing servers full of important data. At the same time, Russian cyber operatives conducted “wiper attacks” on computer networks – attempting to delete all the stored information.

Despite the sophisticated and holistic nature of the Russian attack, the Ukrainian data survived the onslaught. For a week earlier, it had been virtually smuggled out of the country. The data which had once singularly been stored on physical servers, had been uploaded to the cloud.

“The key to a country’s digital resilience in wartime is the ability quickly to move data outside the country while still connecting to and relying on it for a government’s digital operations,” according to a report from Microsoft on the cyber lessons of the Ukrainian war. “One reason these kinetic and cyberattacks have had limited operational impact is because digital operations and data have been disbursed into the public cloud,” it said.

Microsoft, which competes with Amazon, IBM, Salesforce and other software and computer networking companies in providing cloud services to governments, published the report, “Defending Ukraine: Early Lessons from the Cyber War,” on June 22.

Prior to the Russia-Ukraine war, a data protection law prohibited the Ukrainian government from utilizing the cloud to store and process data, forcing all the data to be centralized and vulnerable, according to the report. The law was amended just days before the invasion to permit the very same information to be housed on the cloud.

The cloud is a system of decentralized, networked computer servers spread out all over the world. Stored data, often encrypted and secure, is housed in duplicate across multiple servers and can be accessed via the internet from any location. The redundancy means that even if one server is destroyed, the data is not lost because it is copied elsewhere.

Governments around the world have been exploring the idea of adopting the cloud for official use. The Pentagon awarded Microsoft a contract for just that reason in 2019 before rescinding it less than a year later. New DoD contracts for cloud computing are expected to be awarded this year.

“It’s also important to think about the longer-lasting lessons that come from these efforts,” the Microsoft report said. “The last few months in Ukraine illustrate the very different defense needs that prevail during a war.”

The announcement immediately reverberated through social media, with celebrities and mainstream news outlets mocking what seemed to be yet another instance of the Trump administration pilfering pop culture for a military organization that — at least to some — has always seemed more like a joke than a serious policy endeavor.

“Can we sue this dork?” tweeted James Gunn, who directed the two “Guardians of the Galaxy” films, which are part of the blockbuster Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Mark Hamill, the actor best known for starring as Luke Skywalker in the “Star Wars” films, fired back a response to Gunn.

“So they grab the ‘Guardians’ from your movies, they use the ‘Force’ from our movies… then they have the gall to just steal their logo from ‘Star Trek’? Let’s file a 3-way joint lawsuit & really nail these larcenous bastards!”

New York Magazine ran a story that began: “Mr. Biden, I beg you: Abolish the Space Force.”

For opponents of the Space Force, however, that may be easier said than done.

President-elect Joe Biden, for his part, has given no indication that he will seek to overturn the creation of the Space Force, said Todd Harrison, an aerospace and budget expert with the Center for International and Strategic Studies.

“It’s fair to say that if the Space Force did not exist right now, the Biden administration probably wouldn’t create it,” he said. “But now that it does exist, I think that they’re going to work with it and try to continue the implementation of it.”

That leaves the new administration with a problem: For much of the public, the Space Force is seen as a vanity project of Trump’s instead of a long-debated military organization necessary to ensure that the Defense Department can counter Russian and Chinese threats.

Trump has bolstered that perception in his own public statements, telling troops during a teleconference last Thanksgiving that “nobody even thought about the Space Force” before him.

“I looked at it, and I said — I said: ‘We’re going to have to come up — we’re going to have to do something,’ ” Trump said Nov. 26. “Because I looked at what China was doing and Russia was doing and others are thinking about doing.”

So how does “Trump’s Space Force” become “America’s Space Force?”

Do or do not — there is no try

The Space Force, as it exists now, is fundamentally a rebranding of the Air Force’s legacy space organizations — specifically the now-defunct Air Force Space Command. The service currently controls about $15 billion in annual spending, commands dozens of military satellites and tracks more than 24,000 objects in space.

Though Trump has often sought to take credit for establishing the Space Force, debate about a separate service branch for space originated in 2017 and was led by a bipartisan duo of lawmakers: Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., who led the House Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee.

The lawmakers criticized the Air Force for overlooking the importance of space, and they proposed the concept of a “Space Corps.”

Its main opponents were Republican lawmakers — mostly in the Senate — who backed the Air Force’s position that removing space operations from the service could erode performance in current missions, such as running the nation’s GPS constellation and detecting the launch of ballistic missiles.

But when Trump ordered the creation of a Space Force in June 2018, both Air Force officials and Republican lawmakers fell in line. In December 2019, Congress established the Space Force through the annual National Defense Authorization Act.

It would take another act of Congress to abolish the Space Force from U.S. law, as well as a massive bureaucratic effort to revert military space organizations back to how they were set up before the Space Force was established, said Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation and a former space operations officer for the Air Force.

All of that would require political capital that the Biden administration is going to need to spend elsewhere, said Weeden, who initially opposed creating a space service. “It’s just not worth it,” he said. “At this point we have spent thousands and thousands of hours and years of effort to create this new bureaucracy in the hope that it will address these challenges. At this point, we have no choice but to see that through. To now go back and spend even more time undoing all this stuff would be even worse.”

Trump has touted the Space Force as a signature achievement of his presidency. But his involvement in standing up of the service has been controversial.

“President Trump’s rhetoric has created a false perception in the public,” Weeden said. “You have people imagining that we’re going to have Marines on Mars and fighters in space and all kinds of crazy stuff. That is not the case.”

Some of those misperceptions have been self-inflicted by the Space Force itself, such as a July advertisement featuring a female guardian wearing a spacesuit and narrating about space exploration.

However, the president has also set out to connect the Space Force with the Trump brand — even going so far as to sell unofficial Space Force hats on his reelection website.

A July article in Time magazine described how the president was given the authority to choose the Space Force’s seal. Days later, he tweeted the seal with no notice to the Defense Department, which reportedly led to a conference call between defense officials and executives from Paramount Pictures concerned about the seal’s similarity to the “Star Trek” logo.

Trump also suggested to military officials that his wife, first lady Melania Trump, could help design uniforms for the new service, Time reported. That plot point was later parodied on the 2020 Netflix comedy series “Space Force,” in which Steve Carrell portrays a bumbling Air Force general who is tapped to lead the new space service.

“One of the biggest things we have to overcome is that there’s a Netflix series making fun of the Space Force,” said Mandy Smithberger, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project for Government Oversight. “If the public has been thinking about it all, the reputation of the Space Force — in public imagination — is one of incompetence.”

Harrison, of the Center for International and Strategic Studies, said Biden could take a more hands-off approach with the Space Force, allowing it to normalize itself with time and giving service officials the opportunity to lead the conversation.

“Just by not making a big show of interfering with it, that may help depoliticize it,” he said.

“But I personally think that might not be enough,” he added. “The way the Space Force was presented to the general public has not been healthy. It has not helped educate people about what the military does in space. It has caused more people to become confused about what the Space Force does versus what NASA does.”

To boldly go …

If the Space Force is going to win over the broader public, it needs to make some changes, experts agreed.

First, the Space Force should clarify exactly what the service is going to do and not do in space. “For example, the Space Force isn’t going to have people on the moon. The Space Force is talking about satellites in Earth orbit or cislunar space that can get better awareness of activities in cislunar space,” Weeden said.

Beyond that, the Space Force must lead a broader public discussion about how far the U.S. military should be willing to go to deter attacks against its space-based assets, he added.

Service officials have been clear about the threat posed to the United States as adversaries focus on testing technologies meant to disrupt or destroy U.S. satellites. Most recently, in December, Russia conducted its second direct-ascent anti-satellite missile test of 2020.

However, the amount of money the Space Force plans to invest in its offensive counterspace capabilities is less clear, given the classification of those programs.

“Overclassification is a huge problem. We can’t communicate what we have. We can’t communicate the problem,” Weeden said. “We can’t deter if we can’t talk about this stuff. Yet despite multiple [four-star generals] saying [declassification] is a top priority, I haven’t seen anything change.”

Harrison and Weeden agreed the service needs to reestablish the firewall between civil and military space, as the line between NASA and the Space Force has been blurred by Trump and some of his top politicians.

“If you carefully read the actual policy documents, it makes that [distinction] clear. It’s just that nobody ever reads those except for wonks like me. Most people only really see what Trump says,” Weeden said. “Substantively, most of what’s going on is good. The change mostly needs to be in the public rhetoric and discussion about what we’re doing.”

Harrison pointed to the December announcement of NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins transferring to the Space Force while in orbit at the International Space Station. While many military personnel have worked as astronauts, they do so in a civilian capacity.

“That really confuses the message” Harrison said.

Officials such as Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, the chief of space operations, are trying to set the record straight on the Space Force’s purpose and the importance of the military’s operations in space, Weeden said.

“I think there’s a realization amongst nations that access to space is no longer a given,” Raymond said in a Nov. 25 Defense Department news story. “We’ve got to make sure that we stay ahead of this growing threat.”

Still, “no one can contradict Trump. So when they do make clarifications it’s sotto voce or through channels that are less apparent than Trump’s original comments,” Weeden said.

To give Space Force a communications strategy that prioritizes its own needs, Harrison said the service should stand up its own public affairs and legislative liaison offices instead of conducting those activities through the Air Force, as it currently does.

“They’ve got to learn from the Marine Corps there, that they are part of the Department of the Air Force but they are not run by the Air Force,” Harrison said. “They’ve got to have the ability to develop their own independent messages as a military service. That would help a lot with their public image.”

Never give up. Never surrender.

The transition of personnel, equipment and funding to the Space Force is still a work in progress, but several major changes are planned for this year.

Chief Master Sgt. Roger Towberman, the service’s top enlisted adviser, told Military.com the service is working to solidify much-anticipated cultural touchstones, such as the Space Force song, dress uniform and rank structure.

“It’s about listening to everyone,” he said in an interview. “We feel we can craft a service narrative that both honors military traditions and speaks to the things that we want them to speak to: the essence of our service, the future of our service.”

By the end of 2021, the size of the Space Force will have tripled from about 2,400 active-duty members to about 6,400 people, Raymond said in December. Some of those personnel, he said, could be the first space operators transferring into the Space Force from the Army or Navy.

The Space Force also intends to stand up a new space acquisitions organization, called Space Systems Command, in 2021. SSC will be home to Space and Missile Systems Center, the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, and the Space Development Agency — as well as, potentially, other space procurement organizations from the Army and Navy.

That’s something Harrison said he’ll be keeping an eye on this year.

“They need to make sure they don’t leave any organizations or any programs in those other services that are clearly without a doubt building space systems,” he said. The Space Force should also “continue to transfer all of the budget accounts, including the [military personnel] accounts, from the Air Force. Because if you don’t control your own budget, then you’re not a real service.”

To keep the development of several new space systems on track — such as the Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared constellation of missile warning satellites — Harrison said the Space Force budget will likely continue to grow, although perhaps not as rapidly as under the Trump administration.

However, the Biden administration should also keep pressure on the Space Force to minimize bureaucratic overhead and prevent duplication with other services, said Smithberger, of the Project for Government Oversight.

“The amount of money going to the Space Force should be low and slow as they prove they can be responsible stewards,” she said. “I think if we send a lot of money to that service, we would be increasing program risk unnecessarily.”

In mid-June, the Space and Missile Systems Center announced that it would award ride-share contracts to six firms by using funding meant to bolster companies made financially vulnerable by the coronavirus pandemic.

However, the government in early July reversed course, recalling the $116 million designated for small launch providers because of “additional small business needs that were generated,” such as other government loan programs, said Will Roper, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics.

“My hope is that whenever there’s new [Defense Production Act] Title 3 funding or when resource frees up due to other efforts not executing as planned, that those [contracts] are the first to go back into the hopper,” Roper told reporters Tuesday.

“If I were asked today to put in one new Title 3 initiative, it’s small launch because I think it’s going to be an amazing industry base for this country, and if properly influenced, my military mission can be highly disruptive in future war fighting, especially if satellites can be put up in a very responsive way that changes the calculus for holding space assets at risk.”

In the June announcement, SMC stated that Aevum, Astra, X-BOW, Rocket Lab USA, Space Vector and VOX Space would each receive sole-source contracts for two ride-share missions to be conducted over the next 24 months. But it may no longer be possible for the companies to get all $116 million originally set aside for those contracts, Roper acknowledged.

“I don’t know if that much will free up,” he said. “We have had quite a few come in lower than initially estimated. So it’s possible that a resource will be freed, and whatever it is, we can scale some effort in small launch.”

With venture capital drying up due to worldwide economic instability caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Pentagon leaders have been vocal about the impact on the emerging small launch industry, which they see as a critical capability that could allow the Space Force to launch small satellites more cheaply and rapidly.

In April, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord labeled it — along with shipbuilding and aviation — as one of the three sectors the Defense Department was most concerned could be permanently impacted.

“Much of the industry have limited flight capability or are in the critical transition from development to flight, and this funding restriction may prevent or delay these systems,” Col. Rob Bongiovi, director of SMC Launch Enterprise Systems Directorate, told C4ISRNET in April. “The Space and Missile Systems Center is evaluating the impacts to the small launch industrial base to consider actions to enable a robust U.S. launch industrial base.”

Nathan Strout in Washington contributed to this report.