“I believe we need the Space Force, in fact, in my opinion, a domain-specific service to organize, train, and equip space forces is overdue,” Air Force Secretary nominee Barbara Barrett said.

“If it’s a hurricane, [at the Defense Department], they’ve got the mission assignments. They know, ‘OK, we’ve got to send people to fill sandbags,'” DHS’s Jeanette Manfra explained. For cyber responses, she said, “that part is not mature enough.”

Senate Republicans and Democrats remain far apart on using DoD money for the border wall — so far that the government might not gets its 2020 budget on time,

“We’ve been kicking around this idea that there needs to be a milestone past D; a milestone E where the program is proving elderly and we’re having to do Herculean tasks to keep airplanes flying that should have been retired long ago,” says Air Force acquisition czar Will Roper.

“We have been been given a lawful order by the president to respond to this crisis on the border and we’re doing that,” a Pentagon official said.

When new entities fail, it’s most often due to the fact they don’t do what they do better than their competition (differentiated value proposition is the business term) and they lack investment in talent and technology. But there are other challenges.

Money for the Trump Administration’s border wall is going to come from DoD construction projects overseas, followed by domestic accounts. Some lawmakers are not happy.

The Trump administration is finding Taiwan to be a more than willing partner as it continues to look for ways to counter China

If the new Acting Secretary of the Air Force, Matt Donovan, is looking for someone who can “unleash the power of space’ he should look to the bold leadership of Steve Kwast and recommend his nomination to be the first Space Force Commander.

As Mark Lewis, an expert on hypersonics at the Institute for Defense Analyses, said here at the NDIA conference: “You can’t walk more than 10 feet in the Pentagon without hearing the word hypersonics.”