According to SpaceNews, Marc Berkowitz, President Donald Trump’s nominee for assistant secretary of defense for space policy, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on October 28 that the United States should consider streamlining management of national security space programs through tighter integration between the National Reconnaissance Office and the U.S. Space Force. Berkowitz, a veteran space policy strategist who previously served at Lockheed Martin, argued that closer NRO-Space Force integration could improve efficiency in acquisition and operations, noting that despite the 2019 creation of the Space Force, key defense space programs continue to be over budget and behind schedule. He also outlined priorities including sustaining U.S. space leadership, enabling the Golden Dome missile defense initiative, and countering China’s growing counterspace capabilities. This proposal represents the latest thinking in an ongoing debate about how to organize America’s space defense enterprise.
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The Long Road to Space Reorganization
The debate over integrating military and intelligence space operations isn’t new, but it’s gained urgency as threats evolve. The U.S. Space Force creation in 2019 was supposed to solve many of these organizational challenges, yet as Berkowitz correctly notes in his past writings, the fundamental acquisition problems persist. What’s particularly telling is his reference to historical arrangements where Air Force space leaders frequently served dual-hatted as NRO directors. This suggests we might be seeing a pendulum swing back toward consolidation after several years of creating new, separate organizations. The underlying tension between specialization and integration has characterized U.S. space policy for decades, with each approach offering different trade-offs in responsiveness versus efficiency.
Why Space Acquisition Remains Broken
Berkowitz’s critique of ongoing acquisition failures hits at a fundamental structural problem. The proliferation of acquisition organizations he mentions creates competing requirements, redundant capabilities, and bureaucratic friction that drives up costs and delays deployment. When the National Reconnaissance Office and Space Force develop parallel capabilities for similar missions, taxpayers effectively pay twice for overlapping systems. The synchronization problem between satellite, ground, and user equipment that Berkowitz identifies is particularly damaging—it means that even when individual components work, they may not function effectively as a system. This speaks to a deeper issue in defense contracting where requirements are often stovepiped by different organizations with limited coordination.
The China Factor and Missile Defense
The urgency behind these organizational reforms reflects the rapid advancement of Chinese and Russian counterspace capabilities. Berkowitz’s emphasis on China’s growing ability to “undermine our historic advantages in space” isn’t just rhetoric—it reflects genuine concern within the defense community about losing technological superiority. The Golden Dome missile defense initiative he mentions represents exactly the type of complex, multi-layered system that suffers most from organizational fragmentation. When sensor development, interceptor deployment, and battle management systems are managed by different entities with separate acquisition processes, the resulting system often lacks the seamless integration needed for effective missile defense. This becomes particularly critical for space-based interceptors, which require exquisite timing and coordination across domains.
The Pitfalls of Closer Integration
While Berkowitz’s integration proposal has merit, it carries significant risks that weren’t fully explored in the hearing. Combining military and intelligence functions could create conflicts between the NRO’s traditional focus on clandestine intelligence gathering and the Space Force’s warfighting mission. There’s also the danger of creating an overly centralized bureaucracy that becomes resistant to innovation—what defense experts sometimes call “single-point failure.” The intelligence community’s need for secrecy could potentially slow down the Space Force’s operational tempo, while military requirements might compromise the stealth and sensitivity of intelligence collection systems. These tensions require careful balancing that goes beyond simple organizational charts.
What Successful Reform Would Require
For any integration effort to succeed, it would need to address several key challenges simultaneously. First, Congress would need to reform the authorization and appropriations process that currently reinforces separation between intelligence and defense budgets. Second, any reorganization must preserve the unique cultures and specialized expertise of both communities while enabling better collaboration. Third, success would require developing common technical standards and interfaces that allow systems to work together without forcing complete uniformity. Finally, as Senator King noted, the focus must remain on eliminating genuine duplication rather than creating the appearance of efficiency through reorganization. True success would be measured by faster fielding of more capable systems at lower cost—the very metrics where national security space programs have historically struggled.
