The large annual defense act steps into staffing issues within the Space Force, requiring roughly equal staffing between operational and acquisition positions.  The National Defense Authorization Act also requires the Secretary of the Air Force to examine the Space Force’s Integrated Mission D eltas leadership and assess whether an acquisitions officer should be required to lead or serve as the deputy commander of those units. Integrated Mission Deltas are units charged with specific tasks such as missile warning and tracking.  For Congress to step into a personnel issue in legislation is telling of some tension, said Kari Bingen, a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There are strong underlying concerns on the hill about the Space Force’s treatment of and management of its guardian acquisition workforce,” she said. A letter from the chairman and ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee sent to the Space Force last year voiced concerns about the service favoring operators, Breaking Defense reported.   “We fear a divide that elevates operators at the detriment to other core functions of the Space Force will have negative impacts, potentially not immediately, but as we look to 2030 and beyond,” according to the letter sent to Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations. Congress will typically send such letters before mandating certain steps in law, Bingen said. About half of the Space Force’s workforce is already in acquisitions, in part, because of the requirements of sending new satellites into space. Far more money must go into research and development of a satellite than its operation and maintenance, Bingen said. It’s a roughly 70-30 split favoring research and development in terms of investment, she said. So, it’s important to have a balance between those with expertise in acquisitions and operations personnel and training so that the technology the Space Force buys is informed by the operational needs, she said. The demands on the acquisition workforce are also ramping up as guardians shepherd multiple vendors through the research and development process, as opposed to picking a single vendor early on in the process, Bingen explained.  President and CEO of the Space Force Association Bill Woolf said that the military branch does not have a rift between aquirers and operators, rather the problem is not enough uniformed guardians overall. The NDAA increased the number of active duty personnel from 9,800 in 2025 to 10,400 in 2026, but the service is not growing fast enough to keep up with demands on it, Woolf said. Colorado is home to about half the Space Force making it an important employer and economic driver. In addition to addressing the mix of acquisitions officers, the act also weighed in on training. Instead of requiring equal training on operations, cyber security, intelligence and acquisitions, as required in an earlier version of the legislation, the military branch must provide “foundational instruction” in acquisitions.  The Space Force recently rolled out a yearlong training course for all officers and graduated the first class August that covered all the specialty areas needed in the military branch.    But the course had an operational bent, Defense One reported. Following the yearlong course, acquisitions officers can now attend a 10-week course on program management, engineering, contracting and testing that the service rolled out in September. In November, Saltzman said he would like to see acquisitions officers spend more time in positions to gain experience. “Cycling the jobs too quickly across an unnecessarily large pool of personnel in an attempt to give everyone experience, we give no one the necessary depth of experience,” Saltzman said. ...read more read less