As Space Force celebrated its fifth birthday Friday, the youngest military branch is embarking on new training, a new way to manage part-time service members and facing growing threats.
With a little more than two-thirds of the Space Force stationed along the Front Range, many of the initiatives are happening locally, including new classes for officers meant to expose them to different specialties within the force, such as intelligence and cybersecurity.
Chief Master Sgt. Jacob Simmons, the senior enlisted leader with U.S. Space Command, highlighted the importance of growing young leaders Friday to mark the birthday of the youngest service branch. He also highlighted how space has become more contested with China investing heavily.
A report on China's military investment released last week highlighted how China is developing new intercontinental ballistic missiles to improve its nuclear-capable missile forces.
Simmons noted that young guardians will be the ones facing a growing threat, as China aims for a rejuvenated military by 2049.
"They are are going to be the ones in our place facing the adversary bent on turning the globe to look like China is in the middle," Simmons said. "... They are the ones that are going to keep us as the center of influence."
To help develop young Space Force officers, the branch recently started new training to help expose them to the core career paths in the Space Force, in the satellite operations, intelligence and cyber protection disciplines. The Space Force only has highly technical and specialized positions. The Air Force provides all of its support functions.
"We need to expose our officers at this point in the game to all disciplines so they are best prepared to lead these core teams with multiple disciplines," said Katharine Kelley, deputy chief of space operations for human capital during a Schriever Spacepower Series talk.
The Space Force is also working on more robust training pipeline for enlisted members and greater understanding among its civilians about the Space Force's role.
The young service branch is 50% military and 50% civilian, Kelley said, and the new training helps civilians understand the mission better.
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"We need to give everybody an awareness of what is at stake," she said.
The Space Force is also working on implementing a new model of managing its service members that will allow them to remain active-duty, but work part-time. It would be a model unique to the Space Force among military branches.
The new model could allow guardians to remain in the service if they spend more time away from work to have a family, care for a loved one, work in private industry, or go back to school, Kelley said. It's made possible, in part, because much of the Space Force's mission happens in place at U.S. bases.
Implementing the new model has been a challenge in part because the Air Force and all of the Department of Defense is reliant on aging human resources systems, she said.
Right now, airmen in the reserve are transferring over into the active-duty Space Force where they will take on full time roles for right now.
The Air Force announced earlier in December, 201 of 252 airmen selected for the Space Force are from the 310th Space Wing in Colorado Springs. Members of the wing work in missile warning at Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, space domain awareness at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and GPS at Schriever, The Gazette reported previously.
In some cases, reservists are needed to fill a certain percentage of seats during missions for several months as part of schedules forecast years in advance.
The Space Force has five years to implement its new model that incorporates part-time members.
Going forward, the Space Force needs to have more people in combatant commands, also called co-coms, that direct large military missions across all the service branches.
"We know putting presence into co-coms is a critical growth path for us," Kelley said.