National Guard’s Space Force Plan Defies Tradition

The Air Force is promoting a policy shift that effectively goes against more than a hundred years of precedent, and is facing significant opposition to it.

The crux of the policy change is that the relevant Air National Guard units would be folded into the U.S. Space Force, but governors are the heads of their state’s National Guard, and not one of them supports this plan. Instead, the service is attempting a legislative end around by seeking to get Congress to pass it despite gubernatorial opposition.

The governors, dozens of lawmakers, as well as current and former National Guard leaders in opposition to it have warned about the precedent it could set.

“The crux of the issue in dealing with [Legislative Proposal] 480 is just the terrible precedent it’s going to set,” retired Maj. Gen. Francis McGinn, president of the National Guard Association of the United States, told the Washington Examiner.

“The Army could say we’re going to take a project combat team out of the Army Guard and put it into the active component,” he added. “So for us, the crux is the very bad precedent. It goes against 120 years of history.”

The Air Force has said less than 600 Air National Guard members from six states would be affect. The National Guard Association includes a unit in New York and another in California, which the Air Force says don’t apply, and so they believe more than 1,000 guardsmen and women in 14 units across seven states — Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, New York, and Ohio — will be affected, according to Gen. Mike Bruno, chairman of the space task force at the National Guard Association of the United States.

Bruno, who is also the director of the Joint Staff of the Colorado National Guard, labeled the Air Force’s plan to “override gubernatorial authority” as an example of “federal overreach.”

Members of the Air and Army National Guard are part-time reserve service members who can be federalized in specific instances but are normally under gubernatorial control. Lawmakers and military leaders have discussed the possibility for years of creating a Space National Guard but that hasn’t happened to date. Specific units within the Air National Guard focus on space.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall called the situation “unique” during a hearing last month in front of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee. “There’s absolutely no intention to make any other changes, moving things out of the Guard.”

Gen. Joseph L. Lengyel, who served as chief of the National Guard Bureau from 2016-2020, told the Washington Examiner he was “a little surprised” the Air Force would seek to work around the governors’ authority.

“I think that was something that the Guard should rightly be concerned about, as a method of operations there for dealing with states and force structure and the National Guard to begin with all of it,” he argued. “I think that some in the Guard are fearful that DOD could use this authority, if granted, in the future to move pieces of force structure from the Guard back into an active component service.”

The governors of 48 states and five territories signed onto a letter earlier this month expressing their opposition to the proposal, while the governors of Florida and Texas, who did not sign that letter, have also publicly opposed the plan.

Gov. Spencer Cox (R-UT), who serves as the chairman of the National Governors Association, recently spoke with Kendall last week.

“I joined many other governors of both parties to share our extreme frustration about LP480 and pressed Air Force Secretary Kendall to withdraw support for the proposal,” he told the Washington Examiner in a statement. “While we’re disappointed in his refusal to do so, we stand willing to collaborate on a solution in good faith, but the administration first needs to comply with the law, which requires consultation and approval from governors before taking National Guard units.”

Eighty-five lawmakers from the House and Senate signed on to a letter earlier this month addressed to the leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee and they urged those congressional leaders to reject the inclusion of the proposal in the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act.

Technically, the proposal would waive Section 104 of Title 32 and Section 18238 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which states that “no change in the branch, organization or allotment of a unit located entirely within a state may be made without the approval of its governor” and that National Guard units cannot “be relocated or withdrawn under this chapter without the consent of the governor of the state.”

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Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL), the head of the House Armed Services Committe, released his chairman’s mark of the NDAA earlier this week, and it included language that would allow the Air Force to go ahead with their plan but with some compromise, according to Air and Space Forces Magazine. It would limit the number of personnel that could be transferred to 580, and it would require the Air Force to provide retraining and reassignment to any service member who prefers to stay in the Guard.

Rogers, who supports the Air Force proposal, told Politico, “Unless it becomes apparent to me that it’s not going anywhere, it will be in [the NDAA] and then somebody can just try to take it out” during the House Armed Services Committee markup process.