Scores of different HR systems, a new model for how to handle promotions, and protections against conflicts of interest are all challenges the Space Force will have to resolve as it tries to bring part-time Guardians into the fold instead of a traditional Reserve component.
And until the service has a complete construct for how to make all that happen, it can’t offer a definitive timeline for eager service members, personnel chief Katharine Kelley said Nov. 20.
The Space Force Personnel Management Act passed by Congress last December gave the service five years to implement its new hybrid part-time/full-time construct. USSF spent the first year of that timeline laying groundwork and setting up the process for Air Force Reservists with space missions to join the Space Force full time, Kelley said during an event hosted by AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
“We’re excited on how that’s gone. We’ve got a huge amount of interest, and maybe more interest than we have space at the moment, but we will get there,” said Kelley, who serves as Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Human Capital. “And I think these next four years of the execution window are going to be focused on, how do we create the ecosystem in the IT world to support the HR that is now fundamentally different than what the Air Force has in place today.”
Officials have noted in the past that they will need to think through how to do pay, benefits, retirement calculations, and more in a combined component. Another question is how Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) benefits would work for part-timers. Kelley highlighted the scale of the technical challenge.
“We think there’s easily over 300 systems in play today that somehow touch on the ecosystem of managing talent in DOD. And I’m emphasizing DOD here, and that’s not even discussing really where we go with external touch points that really matter for military,” Kelley said. “How your data flows to the VA matters. So think about all the external touch points as well as we go through this.”
These systems must either be adjusted to co-mingle part-time and full-time Guardians, or be replaced. That process is made all the more complicated by the fact that the Space Force relies on the Air Force for support functions, including much of its HR.
“The Space Force has to leverage the HR ecosystem that the Air Force has in place, by and large, and that ecosystem is pretty antiquated,” Kelley said. “The Air Force is doing unbelievable things right now to break free of some of the legacy models and really modernize the architectures. But all of those endeavors were preceding the Space Force Personnel Management Act. So a lot of what our limiting factors are to the execution side of our new legislation have to do with how we can manage and influence the system architectures to support these new talent models.”
Besides pay and benefits, the Space Force will also have to adjust how it assesses Guardians for promotions—always a sensitive topic—so that part-timers can be evaluated next to full-time troops.
“We envision one promotion ecosystem, whether you have served in a full- or part-time capacity,” Kelley said. “The idea is that we’re going to highly value credentialing, certifications, qualifications and training, and those can be garnered whether you’re in full- or part-time work roles. And so the idea that the team is fleshing out for us right now is, how do we build a promotion ecosystem that values both types of work roles simultaneously?”
On top of that, there are ethical concerns about part-time Guardians with jobs in the space industry. It’s an issue the Reserve and Guard already deal with today, and Kelley noted that they have measures in place the Space Force will likely copy. Yet given that the Space Force wants Guardians to be able to flex between part-time and full-time work more easily, the service may have to do more.
“We’re going to have to be a little more mindful of what that person is doing in their personal capacity, and what the work role is that they may be performing in the Space Force,” Kelley said. “So we’ve got more work to do to really define what that looks like.”
Officials have made some progress in defining the kinds of jobs part-time Guardians will have in the new construct—test and evaluation, training, teaching, or planning—and what they won’t do—employed-in-place operations, i.e., operational roles that don’t require deploying, such as flying satellites or defending cyber networks.
But much remains unsettled. And until the service has a clearer picture on how it will all work, Kelley was reluctant to offer a timeline, even as she acknowledged intense interest in the topic.
“It’s a construct that has to be fully fleshed out before we can actually say, this date and this is how,” Kelley said.
There is urgency to make progress, though, given the demand the Space Force is seeing from combatant commanders.
“The size of our service today, coupled with what’s at stake for national security, we need to take advantage of every force multiplication option we have, and this is one of them,” Kelley said.