General Officers, Career Field Sustainability, Training Pipelines, and the Civilian Workforce of the U.S. Space Force Considered Options to Enhance Structure and Configuration

With the U.S. Space Force rapidly standing up as a separate military service within the Department of the Air Force, as established by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year (FY) 2020, it was imperative to determine the appropriate workforce alignment and training for the space cadre. This report documents several sets of analyses conducted in support of the Space Force. These analyses assess the number of general officers (GOs) that the Space Force could internally generate compared with the Space Force-proposed GO structure and associated selectivity (or promotion) ratios; career field sustainability for officers in the five primary career fields within the Space Force (Space Operations, Intelligence, Cyberspace Operations, Developmental Engineering, and Acquisition Management); the training pipelines of both officers and enlisted personnel in these five career fields; and key considerations regarding the civilian workforce transitioning to the Space Force. Based on a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the analyses yielded several major findings. In this report, the authors discuss the implications of these findings, provide recommendations specific to each career field and the transitioning civilian workforce to address identified challenges and gaps, and conclude with a synthesized list of 20 recommendations. The options considered in this report to enhance the Space Force’s structure and configuration are designed to support an entirely new type of warfighting and national security organization, the U.S. Space Force.