Space Force Troops Get a Name: ‘Guardians’

VP Pence revealed the moniker for Trump’s oft-teased newest military service branch to stand alongside soldiers, airmen, sailors, and Marines.

Two days before the U.S. Space Force’s first birthday, its troops received their collective name: Guardians.

The new name for military’s space professionals, announced on Friday by Vice President Mike Pence, may appear to be a play on the Marvel superhero film “Guardians of the Galaxy.” But Space Force officials said it was a callback to a 1983 motto.

Since its standup on Dec. 20, 2019, the Space Force has grown to about 2,400 active-duty personnel, mostly Air Force personnel who were responsible for the military’s space mission before the new service was created. In 2021, the Space Force is expected to grow to about 6,400 active-duty Guardians, as Army and Navy personnel start transfering into the new service, Gen. Jay Raymond, the chief of space operations, said on a call with reporters earlier this week.

Raymond on Sunday will officially become a member of the Joint Chiefs.

The Space Force’s first year has been a “full-on sprint,” said Justin Johnson, a top defense official who is performing the duties of the assistant defense secretary for space policy.

In addition to the Space Force, there’s a handful of new space organizations around the Defense Department. There’s the U.S. Space Command, a combatant command that provides space support to military commanders around the world. There’s the Space Development Agency, a satellite buying organization that pre-dates the new service. It has ambitious goals to buy one satellite per week. And there’s Johnson’s job, a new top-level Pentagon position established by the same law that created the Space Force.

“A lot of them are still growing and maturing, but now it's just about delivering results,” he said. “And there's ton of work to do.”

Johnson played a key role in the reorganization of the Pentagon’s space enterprise. He was a top aide to former Deputy Defense Secretary (and acting Defense Secretary) Patrick Shanahan, who was put in charge of looking at ways to reorganize the management structure of the military’s space activities.

Despite bipartisan support in Congress for creating a space-focused branch of the military there was plenty of resistance, largely within the Pentagon. Most officials believed the military’s space mission was important, particularly as since China and Russia were building spacecraft and weapons that could disrupt American satellites, but how to organize these space professionals was hotly debated. 

“The hardest part in standing up the Space Force, honestly, was internal Pentagon bureaucracy and...traditional resistance to change,” Johnson said. “But we fought through that. We got support in Congress [and] we got support from the president obviously.”

President Trump first called for a Space Force in 2018. One year earlier, top Pentagon officials fought Congress over plans to create a Space Corps within the Air Force. Ultimately that’s what ended up happening as the Space Force today is part of the Department of the Air Force, just as the Marine Corps is part of the Department of the Navy.