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Donald Trump pledged on Monday to create a Space National Guard if he retakes the White House in November’s presidential election.
The issue has been hotly debated by the Pentagon, congressional legislators, and state governors, turning it into what has been dubbed a “political lightning rod.”
At a campaign stop in Detroit Monday, Trump told members of the National Guard Association that one of his “proudest achievements” in office was the creation of the Space Force.
“It’s a big deal,” the Republican presidential nominee told the attendees.
Trump, who is floundering as Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris surges in the polls, said the “time has come to create a Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the US Space Force.”
He told the crowd that Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who Trump denigrated during the 2016 primaries as “Little Marco,” was a big supporter of a Space National Guard, supposedly telling the 45th president: “I love this, I love it, I love it.”
“So, we’re going to do that,” Trump went on. “Space Force has been very important. Very, very important. When I did that, the, the people came in, they wanted to end it, and they were just hammered, because people realized how important we were getting, just, destroyed in space.”
The existing National Guard presently has space-centric units in seven states — Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, New York, and Ohio — and Guam.
The concept of a separate Space National Guard has been floating around since 2019, when Trump established the Space Force. National Guard leaders have come out in favor of such a plan. However, many experts have criticized any such initiative as one that would create unnecessary bureaucracy, complications, and costs.
“Creating a Space National Guard would effectively tie the service’s hands in managing its personnel and create wasteful overhead and duplication that drain funding and leadership attention away from higher priorities,” American Enterprise Institute defense analyst Todd Harrison wrote in May. “Congress should keep the Space Force lean and agile and give it the authority it is requesting to manage its personnel as one unified component.”
Last month, retiring National Guard Bureau boss Gen. Daniel Hokanson warned that transferring Air National Guard units into the Space Force could rob states of important resources and lead to unintended consequences if it were to come to pass.
Almost every governor is against the idea of transferring Air National Guard units to the Space Force, which has been proposed by the Biden administration instead of a fully separate Space National Guard. Others, like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who in May left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent, have come out in favor of an independent Space National Guard.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, it would cost at least $120 million to stand up a Space National Guard consisting of 1,500 “Guardians.”
