SPACE FARCE.

• Author: Boehm, Eric
• Position: POLICY

THE LAST SUCCESSFUL cavalry charge in military history took place in Poland on March 1, 1945--more than a decade before the first man-made object would exit Earth's atmosphere. So it might come as a surprise to learn that the U.S. Space Force--the sixth and newest branch of the military, created by President Donald Trump in 2019--has a stable of decidedly earthbound "military working horses" at the Vandenberg Space Force Base on California's Pacific Coast.

That makes about as much sense as anything else connected to the Space Force, which will cost taxpayers a little more than $18 billion this year. For that kind of cash, the horses should at least get to wear jetpacks.

The Space Force has always been something of a joke. Unfortunately, it is now a very expensive one. If there is any lesson to be learned from the first few years of the branch's existence, it is that Congress cannot resist dumping money on the Pentagon-even when the Pentagon doesn't want it.

Top Defense Department officials opposed the new service, which they viewed as too expensive to be practical. "At a time when we are trying to integrate the [Defense] Department's joint warfighting functions," then-Defense Secretary James Mattis wrote in a 2017 letter to Congress, "I do not wish to add a separate service that would likely present a narrower and even parochial approach to space operations." Those operations, Mattis noted, were already under the Air Force's purview.

In a country run by sane leaders, that would have been that: If the military says it does not need a Space Force, there is no reason to create one. But that's not how the federal budget works. Vice President Mike Pence was trotted out in August 2018 to give a speech confirming that, yes, this was happening. "It's not enough to have an American presence in space," he said. "We must have American dominance in space."

As Americans learned during the first two decades of this century, a dominating U.S. presence in faraway places does not come cheap. A September 2018 memo from the Pentagon confirmed the bill for a new Space Force: $13 billion during the first five years.

Once again, hope flared that the Space Force might not make it off the launchpad. "Too costly and beyond what is needed" was how then-Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson described the idea to the Washington Examiner shortly after the memo was released.

Politics also threatened to crash the Space Force. "I am concerned" that a new branch of the...