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Space to Nuclear transition could take years

The massive reorganization underway in the Air Force that will create a new Global Strike Command and reshape Air Force Space Command and Air Combat Command will take several years to complete and may not lead to a clean break between the commands, the service’s top space officer said Monday.

Gen. Bob Kehler, commander of Air Force Space Command, said the transition will be gradual and that AFSPC will have to rely on Global Strike Command to provide many of its young space officers.

“This will have to be a phased transition,” Kehler said. “You can’t move everyone at once even if you wanted to. This transition will take several years to complete.”

The Air Force announced Friday that ACC’s nuclear-capable B-52s and B-2s and AFSPC’s intercontinental ballistic missile forces will move to the new Global Strike Command, which will stand up by September 2009. Air Force Cyber Command will be renamed 24th Air Force and will move from ACC to AFSPC.

The shake-up, prompted by two nuclear incidents that embarrassed the Air Force and eventually cost former Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley and Secretary Michael W. Wynne their jobs, is the largest reorganization in the service since Strategic Air Command disbanded in the early 1990s.

But Kehler said the reorganization, like the merger of U.S. Space Command and U.S. Strategic Command in 2002, will take several years to fully implement.

“When the secretary of defense decided to stand down U.S. Space Command some years ago and restructure Strategic Command … that caused detachments of people to remain behind … as pieces started to move back and forth,” he said. “So we’ll have some [missile] people who remain [at AFSPC] in Colorado Springs regardless of where we put the new nuclear command.”

Kehler also said there will continue to be crossover between Global Strike Command and AFSPC in their officer corps. Missile units require a large number of lieutenants, he said, whereas space units require a proportionally larger number of captains and majors.

“We will have to take a number of people out of Global Strike Command who are lieutenants and brand-new captains and bring them to Space Command,” he said. “You need to pull them from somewhere. The logical marriage of ICBMs and space has been very helpful in that regard. That’s going to have to continue.”

But Kehler said the details of how such an arrangement might work will be up to the yet-to-be-named commander of Global Strike Command.