Building the Space Force
September 23, 2025
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno, USSF (Ret.):
Well, good morning, everybody. Good morning. It’s great to be here at AFA. I’d like to thank AFA for inviting us on stage here to share stories about the establishment of the United States Space Force. And it’s wonderful that we’re following General Salzman’s keynote this morning. I have with me the leaders whose hard work, dedication, vision, determination, and leadership established the United States Space Force. And while I think they need no introduction, I’d like to quickly introduce General Raymond and General DT Thompson. General Raymond began his career out of Clemson. He attended Clemson and
Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, USSF (Ret.):
Harvard of the South.
Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno, USSF (Ret.):
And graduated from Clemson. He had an amazing career. One of the offices that he held, you might not be aware of, was the Air Force A3 office. He was the commander of Air Force Space Command. He was the commander of United States Space Command. In fact, was dual-hatted when he was also appointed as the CSO, Chief of Space Operations, for the first military service in 72 years. General DT Thompson went to the United States Air Force Academy. And was
Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, USSF (Ret.):
Couldn’t get into Clemson.
Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno, USSF (Ret.):
But he was the All-American heavyweight, not lightweight, heavyweight boxing champion. Not Clemson, United States Air Force Academy. General Thompson commanded the ADF, the Aerospace Data Facility in Colorado. He was the vice commander of Air Force Space Command. And he was in a little-known office, kind of an experiment that we were doing with the Air Force, A11, before he became the vice chief of the United States Space Force. So, with that introduction, and me, I know where all the skeletons are buried. All right, well, because I was the director of staff. And directors of staff know stuff. Okay, what I’d like to do is begin our conversation before the establishment of the Space Force. There was a strategic environment out there. So I’d like to start a few years beforehand and get some insight into what the environment was like at that time. General Raymond.
Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, USSF (Ret.):
Yeah, well, thank you, and thanks, Nina. Nina didn’t get introduced, but Nina is a longtime space professional. Probably the officer that has the most steeped experience in launch, having commanded both Vandenberg and Patrick. Said she was the director of staff, but she pretty much held every S position there was on the Space Force when we first stood it up. So it’s great to be here with you, and thanks for helping DT&I with this conversation. The strategic environment, I’ll start kind of back in 2014. Obviously, the broader strategic environment, very complex, like we see today. In the space business, China was beginning to move really, really fast, extremely fast. They were going from zero to 60 very quickly. And in the military, we were really pushing space as a warfighting domain narrative. That’s not something that we used to be able to say early on before that time. And if you all remember, there was a 60-minute show back in 2014 where we really started forcing and pushing that narrative to bring that to the light. I’ll then fast forward to 2016. And I’ll never forget this. I had just left as the Air Force A3, and I came out to Peterson Air Force Base to take command of Air Force Space Command. And I changed the command, went well, I walked off the stage, and the public affairs officer was sitting off to the side and said, “Sir, there’s some reporters outside. They’d like to do an interview with you. Will you do it?” I said, “Sure, but what do they want to talk about?” “Sir, this is easy. This is just, it’s great to be back in Colorado Springs. Great to be back at Air Force Space Command. This is a softball knocking it out of the park.” So, okay, I walked out into the parking lot, four cameras, TV cameras, and a newspaper reporter. And the very first question went to a gentleman named Tom Roeder, who was a Colorado Springs Gazette reporter. And he asked me the very first question, “General Raymond, should space be in the Air Force?” And it kind of took me aback, because I was just taking command of Air Force Space Command. I came there with, having been the A3, I knew what I wanted to do as the Air Force Space Command. I wanted to try to normalize space as a warfighting mission inside of the Department of Defense. I really had that mapped out of what I wanted to do. What I didn’t realize was from the time that question was asked, for the rest of my career, that became the focus of my career. Completely out of the blue. I’ll then fast forward. So that was October of ’16. In April of ’17, I was at a, the Space Foundation holds an annual space symposium in Colorado Springs. 15, it’s like this, 15,000 people descend into Colorado Springs of the Broadmoor and have conversations on all aspects of space, whether it’s national security space, civil space, commercial space. And there’s a breakfast in the morning. And Congressman Rogers, who I refer to as the congressional father of the Space Force, was there and he gave a speech. And I was there in uniform sitting at the head table. Then he gets up and it’s like body blow after body blow after body blow talking about the challenges that the space domain is having under the stewardship of the United States Air Force. He talked about space professionals weren’t being professionally developed. He talked about the budgets weren’t going up. He talked about 60 different offices inside the Pentagon that could say no and there was nobody that could say yes. He talked about the lack of joint integration across the department where we have satellites that are on orbit and we didn’t have handsets that could talk to those satellites. It was a very, very painful, painful breakfast. I mean, I literally came out of there just like I had been boxed by 15 rounds with Mike Tyson. And so from there until a few months later, we were really responding to that brief, to that speech. And going back and forth to the Pentagon, I mean, almost weekly, I was at the Pentagon, not in Colorado Springs. And what I realized was I needed a heavyweight boxer to help take this on and I needed somebody that’s living in Washington, D.C. to be able to do that. DT Thompson, a dear friend, great officer, incredible professional, somebody that can do math in public, just incredibly smart guy, was about to retire. In fact, the retirement ceremony was on the books for, I think, a month or two later. I remember asking Chief Goldfein, “Hey, is there any way I can get a three-star position and get DT to be promoted three stars and move him to Washington?” And they made that happen. I went to DT and said, “Will you do that?” Being the officer that he is, a selfless officer, he said, “I’ll do it.” They had just bought their house, their forever home. Mary, thank you. Came back and DT went to Washington. And with that, DT, over to you.
Gen. David “DT” Thompson, USSF (Ret.):
All right, sir, thanks. First, it’s a privilege to be here, especially on stage, with these two great air and space professionals. And I get to finish the introductions. And let’s just say this. Through this whole process of planning, designing, and standing up the Space Force, there were only two people in the Space Force who could yell at me and get away with it. And those two individuals are sitting here to the right of me on stage. And in fact, they did yell at me on quite a few occasions. But as General Raymond said, and actually through the fall of 2016 and into early 2017, General Raymond and General Goldfein, the chief at the time, Chief 21, were engaged in their own internal debate about how the Air Force should reorganize and look at how we should oversee and manage space capability, space operations inside the United States Air Force. And as General Raymond said, he sent me to Washington to work with the air staff and others to develop options and decide how we wanted to change our oversight, organizational, and management approach for space inside the Air Force. And in the spring, had ended up with a solution that was very similar to the solution that the Air Force had decided to implement in the 2007, 2008 time frame when they were challenged with oversight and management of nuclear operations. And they had created an air staff office called the A-10, the deputy chief of staff of the Air Force for nuclear matters. When I was there doing this development work, it was Lieutenant General Jack Weinstein, no small space professional in his own right. And we ended up with this concept. It was basically similar to that, which we called the A-11, because 11 comes after 10. And it was to create that deputy chief of staff for space operations inside the air staff. And it was going to be an office of about 125 folks. And it would do some of those air staff functions. It would oversee operations. It would oversee building the POM. And then it would work with the personnel folks and others on management of space professionals. And we actually had a plan for that space symposium in April of 2017. The space symposium began on a Monday. And on Thursday, the Air Force was going to have a big press conference. And we were going to roll out our new A-11 plan. Well, the breakfast that General Raymond talked about was Tuesday morning. And so let’s just say, as of Tuesday morning after that breakfast, we had already lost control of the narrative. And at the time, somebody had come up with a chart to describe the management of or the oversight of space inside the Department of Defense. And it was a chart with about 60 different boxes on it of offices responsible for various parts of space. And so after Chairman Rogers, after Congressman Rogers had given his speech, and the press was just going wild, the Air Force has our press conference. We announced this new thing called the A-11. And Congressman Rogers had a one-line response. And it was, oh, great, a 61st box. So it was an interesting environment. And despite that, the Air Force continued on with our plans to implement the A-11. Turns out I was the one who was nominated to become that officer. I went to Congress. And through the summer and into the fall of 2017, we prepared to stand up that office. And so as we walked down that path, we had plans to build it out. Some of you know Mr. Sean Barnes. He was installed as the deputy. I couldn’t officially act in that role until it was actually confirmed by Congress. But he was the official deputy. He was leading the office. He was starting to build out the A-11. And on November 1st of 2017, I was confirmed to become the first A-11 deputy chief of staff of space operations for the United States Air Force. And on November 8th, as part of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, the law specifically said that the A-11 would be as illegal and would be disbanded within 60 days of the passage of the act. And so Congress, on November 1st, confirmed me to be the A-11. And eight days later, they fired me by totally eliminating the office. That was the environment we were dealing with.
Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno, USSF (Ret.):
Talk about strategic environment. Who’s the real adversary here, right? Well, let’s talk about the 2019 NDAA that established the United States Space Force on December 20th of 2019. 2019 was a pivotal year. Establishment of U.S. Space Command with General Raymond at the helm. And later on in the year, establishment of the new service with General Raymond appointed as the only Guardian. We didn’t have the name quite then, but, sir, what was it like to be dual-hatted like that?
Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, USSF (Ret.):
I always say when you’re bald, you have to have a lot of hats, because you’ve got to keep the sun off your head. So that was really good. I’ll actually start back in 2018. 2018, in August of ’18, somebody whispered in my ear and said, “Hey, you’re going to have to stand up U.S. Space Command, and you’re going to have to have it up by December.” And so I was president of a promotion board down at Randolph, went down there, and I brought a team of about six people with me, and I put them in a side room as I was doing my board duties, and then on lunch breaks, and before and after school, if you will, I’d go meet with them. And we planned the establishment of U.S. Space Command for about 10 days. And at the end of those 10 days, we had a plan. And I’m convinced that if we were told to do so in December of that year, it might not have been pretty, but we would have been up and running. And what I’ve learned in the bureaucracy business is kind of like water skiing. It takes a real—it’s really, really, really hard to get up on the water, and once you’re on the water, you’re smooth sailing, if you will. It didn’t happen by December of ’18 because the previous NDAA said, “You’re going to stand up a subunified command.” And there was concern that we couldn’t stand up a unified command if the law said stand up a subunified command. So we had to wait another year. And so that gave us more time to plan, which was good. And so from really from August of ’18 to August of ’19, I was really head down focused on planning U.S. Space Command. There was really three big things we had to have before we could stand up that command. We had to have a UCP, a unified command plan that gives the commander the mission from the president of what a command needs to do. You had to have a confirmed commander, and then you had to have forces that are assigned to that combatant command. And so over that course of that year, we wrote the UCP, made U.S. Space Command a geographic combatant command rather than a functional combatant command, which is historic in itself. Wrote the UCP. I went through the confirmation process, got confirmed as the commander of U.S. Space Command. And then in August, late August of ’19, we stood up in a ceremony at the Rose Garden at the White House. We stood up U.S. Space Command as the 11th combatant commander. Three months later then, with the work being done on the planning of the Space Force, we stood up the United States Space Force. And I’ll let DT talk a little bit about the actions that occurred in the Washington side from that.
Gen. David “DT” Thompson, USSF (Ret.):
Thanks, sir. Yeah, so after having been fired by active Congress in late 2017, the Air Force recovered. General Raymond, General Goldfein, and the Secretary came up with a plan B while we figured out what we were going to do as a result. In the meantime, the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, had reestablished and reinvigorated the National Space Council, which was intended to be a whole of government council that was going to deal with all matter space. It would deal with civil space and NASA and military space and the IC and some of that, those sorts of things. And in June of 2018, at one of the early council meetings, the president was there to address the council. And at the end of his remarks, the chairman was there. It was General Dunford at the time, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. At the end of his remarks, he turned around. He pointed to the chairman. He said, General Dunford, go build me a plan for a Space Force. Of course, General Dunford tried to hide his shock and surprise, saluted smartly. And so obviously, a flurry of questions and calls and emails went back and forth. And we reached out to the executive director of the National Space Council, who was responsible for orchestrating all the activities, all the events, all the remarks. And a pretty tense conversation said, what are you guys doing to us? At least you could have given us a heads up. And the executive director at the time said, hey, we helped to prepare the remarks. We commorted any of the remarks. We reviewed the script of the remarks for the National Space Council. And nowhere in those remarks was there anything that said, build me a plan for the United States Space Force. So to this day, it’s still not sure whether somebody had inserted that in the last minute or the president just decided to go off script, not that President Trump does any of that sort of thing. But we still don’t know exactly whether somebody had put those in the remarks or he just decided on his own it was time for the Space Force. And so over the fall of 2018, an effort led by the head of space policy for the Pentagon at that time, Mr. Steve Kittay, we went through a process of developing options and evaluating what a Space Force should look like. Should it be its own full up military department with its own secretary? Should it be what we call the Marine Corps model, which was a separate service inside the Department of the Air Force? Should we give General Raymond’s combatant command acquisition authorities and other authorities like Special Operations Command had? Should we build a separate staff inside of the air staff? We looked at all of these and ultimately landed on the model that became written into law, which was a separate service inside the Department of the Air Force, just like the Department of the Navy has the Navy and the Marine Corps. And so that was what the rest of 2018 looked like. But then very early after that process, Secretary Wilson, who in my opinion never gets enough credit for what she did, saw what was coming and told us, you need a planning team. We need a planning team to figure out how that was going to work. And while we were waiting to see what was going to happen, we had actually had a conversation and I don’t know if you ever know this, Nina, but after a meeting with the Air Chief, Air Vice, Seve Wilson and I, we went into his office and talked about who should lead this planning team. And there were only two names that we talked about. First was Nina Armagno and the second was Clint Crozier. And my thought at the time was Nina was AQS. She was doing acquisition work for space and for Space Force and we couldn’t afford to lose her. So having known both of them and knowing she was doing work for space every day, my answer was, oh, we need Clint Crozier. Now, he was more than capable. He was a great planner. But one of the primary reasons we selected him was not just because of who he was and what he could do, was because we needed Nina to stay where she was doing space acquisition.
Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, USSF (Ret.):
So then it came to 20 December 2019, the National Defense Authorization Act was signed. In the days leading up to that, in fact, just a couple days leading up to that, it became clear that there was going to be a Space Force as part of this law. I was asked by the Secretary and the Chief if I was asked if I would serve, if the President wanted that to happen, and I said I would do that. We were trying to figure out if that was going to happen. Some language leaked out on the law, and the law said that the U.S. Space Command commander may serve dual-hatted as the CSO for up to one year. It said may, it didn’t say will. And we’re trying to figure out, no kidding, is this going to be real or not? Is it going to be me? We’re, the last couple days, you know, signing memos, establishing the CSO office. I said I’m not signing anything because I don’t know if I’m the person yet. I don’t want to sign something. We’ll sign them, we’ll lock them in a safe, it’ll all be good. We did all that, and then the night, went to Andrews Air Force Base at a hangar on 20 December in the evening. It wasn’t abnormal that a four-star was there. There was a lot of four-stars that were there. But when I got to the hangar, somebody from the White House came up to me and said, hey, when the President finishes giving his speech, he’s going to move over to a desk, he’s going to sign the law, and we’d like you to walk up and stand next to his daughter. And I’m thinking, that’s got to mean something. So I’m sitting there on the stage, the speech gets passed. It’s the first time when the President said that speech that I knew that I was going to be the CSO for sure. Walked up to the stage, the law was signed, establishing, it was the National Defense Authorization Act. In it, it said to establish a Space Force, and he signed a document that effectively kicked me out of the Air Force and made me their first Guardian, the first member of the Space Force. What the President didn’t say in his speech was that I was the only member of the Space Force. The old adage, the Soldier of one or the army of one, that was me. It was really easy. We’d take metrics. It was really easy. The Force was healthy, at least somewhat healthy. We never had a DUI. We were all good. It was really easy to measure all that for a while. But after that happened, jumped on an airplane, flew back to Peterson, at Peterson Air Force Base at the time, now Space Force Base. There was big parties going on at Air Force Base, man, watch parties, a lot of excitement about this new service. Got back, and on the plane back, we toasted, Chief Toberman, I don’t know if he’s here, he was here earlier. We toasted champagne on the plane. Flew back to Colorado Springs, and on the way back, I remember thinking, now what? How do you do this? Where’s the checklist? I’m an operator. Where’s the checklist that said what do you do? There wasn’t one. And so spent, over the holidays, spent a little bit of time talking to mentors, and then thinking through how we would go about doing this. One of my mentors, a guy named General Ed Eberhardt, former commander of US NORTHCOM, said to me, “Don’t climb Mount Everest when you’re still in training.” Meaning, focus on the main thing. Don’t try to tackle world hunger. And so with that in mind, what is the main thing? We thought through, what does a service have to do? And the service has to develop its people. Service has to have its own budget. Has to do doctrine. Has to design its force. Has to ready that force. And then has to present those forces to combatant commands. And so as that as a framework, we started going to work. And as the rest of this discussion goes, I say a few words, and then I turn it over to DT, because DT was in Washington. I was in Colorado Springs as US Space Command Commander. And DT and team, many are on the front row and here on stage, got to work. And I will tell you, the only way this happened was because we had a team of space professionals that grew up with each other, knew each other, trusted each other. And as we said, if we can’t get this done, nobody can get this done. So DT, over to you.
Gen. David “DT” Thompson, USSF (Ret.):
Thanks, sir. Yeah, so one of the unknown stories and unsung heroes of December of 2019 was, it turns out everybody knew and the plan was to have General Raymond in place as the first chief of space operations at the same time that the law was signed. The challenge was 18 hours before that ceremony, he had still not been, you know, he basically had still not been appointed into that position. And so Colonel Troy Endicott, crusty, and I don’t know if he’s in the audience here, was on the National Security Council staff and he and a couple of folks in the National Space Council went on a hunting expedition in the West Wing of the White House because somewhere in somebody’s inbox was the paperwork that was supposed to be signed by the President so that General Raymond could be appointed, could serve as the chief of space operations the day it was law was signed. So he and these other folks were walking through the West Wing into offices and eventually at the bottom of somebody’s inbox found the paperwork, grabbed it, took it into the President’s office, said if you really want this to work the way it’s supposed to, he needs to sign this, you know, in conjunction with the act. And so that was sort of one of the diving saves that was made by crusty and folks in the last couple of hours before that ceremony. But one of the surprises that we had as part of the law, as I talked about earlier, Clint Crozer in the spring of 2019 put together a planning team and created a fabulous team and built a plan that showed how we were going to create the Space Force. One of the key assumptions of that plan was one year, we would have one year to plan and prepare to establish the Space Force and on the one year anniversary of the signing of the law we would stand up the Space Force. Well, early in the year we had decided, you know, General Raymond said, hey, we need somebody over in Congress who’s going to help us write the law and settled on a retired Air Force Colonel, space guy named J.R. Reardon, many of you probably know J.R., and he worked that year writing the law for us, buy him a beer someday and ask him to tell you his stories. But one of the things he did in that law was he put in the condition that the Space Force would be established on the day the law was signed, not one year later. And at the time I just thought I wanted to choke JR out because that was just going to be horrible, but it turns out it was probably one of the best things that ever happened. But it meant on day one everybody in the Pentagon did two things. First, they added us to all their meeting invitations and second, they added us to all of our task lists. So we immediately were flooded with requirements to come to meetings and answer taskers that had nothing at all to do with space or the Space Force. But the good news is there were 35 of us, well 36 because the second thing I did was say, Nina, you’re no longer AQS, you’re now part of the Space Staff. But we immediately started working on and getting inundated not just with what to do to stand up the Space Force, but all of the Space Force bureaucracy. But I will say, I think it was Eisenhower who said, “Plans are nothing, planning is everything.” And without that plan that Clint Crozier and his team had built, we just would have been flat on our backs. But it was the blueprint we used from there.
Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno, USSF (Ret.):
Yeah, he did a fantastic job and one of the things he did was shake out the other services for people. So that initial team of 35 people, we had Army, we had Navy, we had Air Force, of course, we even had a Marine. And some of these people didn’t even know how to spell space, but they knew the importance of what we were doing. They knew the historic significance, they knew the importance to national defense and our nation. And they rolled up their sleeves every day and it didn’t matter who was responsible for what because we were still trying to figure that out. They did whatever it took every single day. And oh, by the way, what weeks into our work, COVID struck and we just kept pressing. I think we tried to do remote for a couple weeks, but that didn’t work out so well. So everyone just masked up and came to work. And I mean, I’m just in awe of these people. And some of them who couldn’t spell space, have now commanded. We’re talking about Stephanie Flowers who commanded the 13th. We’re talking about Michael Koebick who’s now at the 11th. Both of them from the Army. And I mean, we really had an amazing team of voluntolds, but they were spectacular. So General Raymond, the Space Force is now established and I know we don’t have a ton of time to talk about this, but one of your early focus areas was culture. Would you like to share some culture stories?
Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, USSF (Ret.):
Sure. I’ll talk a minute on culture and then switch to people as well, because that was critical. The service had to grow from one person to thousands. Culture, we did a lot of things, symbolism of the Space Force. We did flags and seals and songs and all of that. We took grief on every single one of them and Twitter, but we did all that. But on the culture piece, I always got asked, “When are you going to get your culture done?” And I always said, “Culture is not something you can order on Amazon Prime. It doesn’t come overnight. It’s going to take some time.” Probably though, we should have been a little bit more purposeful about building that culture ahead of time or as we built this. And hindsight might have done some things to help accelerate that. I will tell you, I learned in establishing the Space Force that culture is absolutely critical. It can’t be an afterthought. It has to be something that you think about upfront. And I’m very proud of the culture that was built. I think one of the key things of culture was core values. And I’ll tell you, I was wrong on this one. They came to me early on and said, “We need our own core values.” I said, “Nope, we got core values. We got the Air Force core values. We’re good.” I’d been in the Air Force before core values. I was in the Air Force after core values. Like our core values, we’re good. And they said, “Sir, those core values are not our service’s core values. We need our core values.” And we built our core values. And no kidding, I think that’s been one of the main things that has made the success of the Guardians that have come in, is they now have their own culture and their own core values that are aligned to that culture. I’ll tell you a funny story about some of the, the one thing I’ll talk on the uniforms and things. I needed a uniform. And I was kicked out of the Air Force. I’m wearing Air Force OCPs. And so I go into the White House and I’m sitting, and no kidding, the President’s at the desk. I’m in a chair in front of the desk. I have a, I’m in my service dress. I have an OCP shirt on a hanger, and it has Raymond and Space Force, and it has Raymond and Space Force in brown, which is what I wore, I would say in the Air Force, brown thread. I had Raymond and Space Force in black thread, which is what the Army wears. And then I had Raymond and Space Force in blue and silver. I said, “Mr. President, you kicked me out of the Air Force. I need a uniform. Here’s what I wear in the Air Force. Here’s what the Army wears. I need a new color. What do you think, blue or silver?” He said, “Blue.” I said, “I like blue.” And that’s how we got the OCP blue name tapes. The funny thing was that night I went back to the, I had shirts made up in both colors. So whatever he picked, I was ready to go the next day. I was staying at the Embassy Suites in Colorado Springs, got on the elevator, I’m sorry, in Crystal City, got on the elevator at the 11th floor. Elevator stops on the ninth floor. A lady gets in. We’re going down to the lobby, and she is looking at me and looking at me. And we get down to the lobby, and she goes, “Sir, I’m sorry, I got to ask you.” I said, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody in the Space Force before, and I know I haven’t seen a Space Force uniform.” I said, “Well, ma’am, I’m the only one, and this is the first day that has been worn. So you’re not dreaming.” On the people side, though, it was really critical. We needed to grow. And so the first hire that we made was Miss Pat Mulcahy. She was a personal expert, got from OSD. She came up, and basically her charge was build the force and think differently on how you do it. Again, December, one Guardian. In April, I think the third of April or the fourth of April, we hired Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force, Chief Master Sergeant Towberman. He became number two. And at the end of April, towards the end of April, I think the third week in April, Air Force Academy class graduated. We had 86 Academy cadets graduate from that class. We gave each of them a number. So whoever had the A name as the last name was number three and number four, all the way up to number 88. Are there any Air Force Academy cadets that were in that class that got a number? Are you here? Usually everywhere I go, somebody comes up and says, “I was number eight,” or, “I was number 10.” So we started building that force. I will tell you, and I think General Saltzman would agree, he talked about it in his speech, the importance of people to the mission. My personal opinion is the best benefit that we’ve got from establishing the Space Force is the quality of the people that we’re attracting. It’s an incredible force made up of incredible young men and women, the most selective service and most highly qualified service in the Department of War.
Gen. David “DT” Thompson, USSF (Ret.):
Yeah, those early days, incredibly small staff. And General Raymond was wearing two hats. He had two full-time jobs as Space Command Commander and CSO. I had one full-time job as Vice Commander. General Saltzman had just come back from overseas. He had been the Deputy CFAC out at AFSCEN. He was going to be our OPSTEP. But in the meantime, so that we didn’t get cross-eyed with Congress, he was the Acting Director of Staff. Pat Mulcahy was the S1 in charge of people. And then, so we all kind of had one, General Raymond had two full-time jobs. We all kind of had one full-time job. But everything else on the staff, we gave to Nina. So, you know, she was the S2, she was the S3, she was the S4. We ended up calling her the S54 because when you had S2 through 10, it added up to 54. So we had one or two full-time jobs. Nina had about seven full-time jobs. And I’m hoping she’s finally forgiven us all. But what was it like to be the S54?
Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno, USSF (Ret.):
Oh my gosh. I felt, I mean, at the end of a few months, because it was a few months, I honestly just felt like an idiot running from meeting to meeting to meeting. Because I mean, I had to cover those meetings with my three-star equivalents. I was a two-star. And at first, actually, they were fantastic. I mean, the Air Force opened their arms and their doors and, you know, everything. They invited us to every meeting. I started every day at the Ops Intel meeting with the A3. I mean, but I soon figured out that the budget was taking the lion’s share of my attention. And you might remember later, sir, we divided further so that I could spend more time on budget. But it was crazy. But what was good about it was I learned who all the players were in the other services as well. And those first few weeks of establishing the Space Force were very collaborative. There was lots of partnership and lots of support until they finally realized that we needed their money, we needed their people, and we needed places to sit in the Pentagon too. So then it became the typical knife fight of Pentagon services against each other. That’s just the way it is.
Gen. David “DT” Thompson, USSF (Ret.):
Yeah, if I can. So I was very, I’m still very proud of the Air Force and the way they responded. One of the early things we did was Lieutenant General Abu Nahum and I, he was the aide at the time, we went to talk to the Department of the Navy about how this two services in one department worked. And so he and I went down, we scheduled the meeting, we showed up in the conference room first, we’re sitting at the table. The Marines all walk in first, and they all sit on the wall, on the chairs on the wall, including two and three stars. And then the Navy walks in and all the Navy folks sit at the table. And so we’re having this conversation about, you know, how’s it work? How do you do various things? And the Navy folks at the table basically said, well, it’s taken us about 225 years, but we think we now have it right, as they’re describing how this works. Thanks. Great. Awesome. The meeting closes, we walk out of the meeting, and the head Marine in the meeting goes, General Thompson, come here. So he hands me his card, he says, it’s still not working, come see me and we’ll talk about it.
Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, USSF (Ret.):
We only have a couple minutes, so maybe I’ll hijack the last two minutes and try to put a bow on this. I give General Goldfein a lot of credit. He was my co-chief, if you will, or partner as a chief. We met one Saturday and talked about how we’re going to do this. And he set a great, great example of collaboration and said, we’re going to give you everything you need, we’re going to be your best friend, we’re going to do this better than the way we did it when the Air Force separated from the Army, we’re going to be a model so that when my grandkids, he had two grandkids at the time, grow up, one will go to the Air Force Academy and become an Airman and one will go to the Air Force Academy and be a Guardian, we’re going to make this right. So I give him a lot of credit for setting that tone. We also wanted to do more than just establish, we wanted to make a difference. So if you heard General Saltzman’s speech earlier, he talked about the proliferated warfighter architecture and force design, that was all planned in that first year, first couple years of the Space Force. It allowed us to flex our muscles inside the department, allowed Congress to pass a law saying General Saltzman now is responsible for force design, so you don’t have those 60 offices, you have one. And I will tell you, we had the opportunity, all three of us yesterday had an opportunity to spend the afternoon with the current leadership team of the Space Force to get an update. And I will tell you, we all left very, very proud. This team that we have in place is doing incredible work. A lot of the things that we had initial good ideas of, they now have put meat on the bone, if you will, and have implemented and executed it, and they’ve come up with a lot of their own things as well. We’re really, really proud of the work that they’ve done. General Saltzman, thank you for your leadership. Thank you to your team and appreciate all that service continues to do. Again, only six years old and recognized as a very critical part of our national security apparatus. Nina, thanks for hosting this with us. And DT, it’s a privilege, sir, to be with you.
Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno, USSF (Ret.):
Thank you, General Raymond. Thank you, General Thompson. It has been an honor to be on stage with you, and thank you for sharing the insights for establishing the United States Space Force. Semper Supra. Have a great day, everybody.