Host you havent given a chance for our this is part of a program that is sponsored by the Science Technology and Innovation Program here at the Wilson Center that also sponsors other projects. General raymond is a native of virginia, but a prograduate of clemson university. He graduated in 1984 and was commissioned as an air force officer. His first assignment was grand force, north dakota, where he and his wife were recently both honored by the university of north dakota, where i was humbled to be a president earlier. His last assignment in the air force was the space, where i got to work with him when i was the president of the university of colorado. He became the first lead for the Space Command just three years ago. But soon after that, he was assigned to be the first chief of space operations. We are thrilled to have them with us here today and learn more about the great things space force is doing to secure our country. Lets begin, if we could, general, talking about, why was it important that we establish a space force . What are the threats out there that the president of the nation and the congress decided that we needed to have a new branch . Gen. Raymond first of all, thank you for the opportunity to be with you. It is always good to see you. I appreciate all the support you have given the Aerospace Forces over the years. It is a privilege to be here. Back in 2019, the United States decided to capitalize on an opportunity, an opportunity to elevate space to a level with its importance of National Security. Nothing we do as a nation or Coalition Force is not enabled by this. Over many decades, we have had many way been treating space as a given, that it is a benign, peaceful domain, and we can just operate there without any worries. Clearly, that is not the case today. We say that space has become more congested, more competitive, and more contested. The thought was, while we are still the best in the world in space, we elevate this to a service level, just like we have in all other domains. The United States army focused on the ground, the air force focused on the air domain, and the naval domain focused on the maritime domain. If you had a service that came to work everyday focused on this domain, we could elevate its importance and accelerate ahead of the strategic environment. Pres. Kennedy not everybody fully realizes how important space is to us. We get up in the morning and look at the weather, and we look at the time to commute. We dont realize how dependent we are on space. And in turn, how dependent all the other branches in the military are on space. How do you explain just how important space is to us as individuals, as well as to the broader effort for the department of defense . Gen. Raymond i think i will even broaden it beyond that to start with. It is really important for our nation. Space underpins every instrument in national power, whether it be diplomatic information, the military, or the economy. Again, as it underpins all of that, it is critical that just as you walk in a room and turn the lights on, the lights are always on, it is very important that space is always on as well. If you look at it from a National Security [no audio] pres. Kennedy we seem to have lost our signal from this line. 202 7488000 we will we hope to repair this issue and we will resume life coverage shortly. Live coverage shortly. Unfortunately, we are still having technical issues and we are not able to resolve this problem with our live feed from this event. We would love to have this for you in its entirety later in our program schedule. Host we will get to further comments from the president. We will hear some public response to the president s proposal and hear from you as well, as we open the morning with the president s proposal. It is called the america safer plan. He laid it out officially yesterday and it includes a 14 billion for hiring and training an additional 100,000 Police Officers over the next few years. One point 7 billion 1. 7 billion for hiring more agents and investigators. It would Push Congress to pass universal background checks. For all gun sales and advocate for banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines. The president s proposal laid out yesterday in pennsylvania. One of those policy speeches that often evolves into or changes into political stumping. Especially this time of year. Thats reflected in some of the headlines well see this morning. This one from the washington dimes this morning. Biden rips g. O. P. , antif. B. I. Talk and seeks Police Funding. President biden during a trip tuesday to the swing state of pennsylvania sought to blunt criticism hes soft on crime by calling for increases to Police Funding and depicting republicans as anticop for their antif. B. I. Rhetoric. The centerpiece of the proposal calls for 13 billion in spending over the next five years for local police to hire 14u7bd,000 new Police Officers. The times further writes the proposal has faced intense criticism from Racial Justice activists who say the proposal is just a repeat of his 1994 crime bill that he led as a senator which has been blamed for the mass incarceration of black people. Both the American Civil Liberties union and naacp have criticized the proposal to put more copses on the nations street. Called the safer america plan. Your thoughts and comments. 2027488001 for republicans. 2027488000 for democrats. For independents and others 2027488002. As we mentioned we welcome comments of current and former Law Enforcement officials. That line is 2027488003. This is the coverage of the washington post. Their piece, headline of their piece says, biden urges assault weapons ban. Hits g. O. P. Over january 6. In that piece that the post writes the spirited address was the first of bidens three visits in the next week to pennsylvania where democrats face crucial race force governor and u. S. Senate. Biden plans to deliver his prime time address in philadelphia on thursday and visit pittsburgh on monday to recognize labor day. Hear from michael sterling, virginia, independent line. Good morning. Caller hello. Im very concerned host you are on the air. Caller hello. Host you are on the air. Go ahead. Caller ok. Why dont we target the perpetrators of so many of these crimes of the stimulus cost from entertainment violence and we have to talk directly with the repeating history. Appreciate the time. Thank you. Host michael in virginia. The president yesterday praised Law Enforcement officials in his speech and repeated his call for 100,000 new cops over the next five years. He also criticized republicans for their voting against these measures previously. Heres what he said. President biden im old enough to remember when cops used to walk the beat in wilmington and scranton because they knew everybody. They knew the kid. They knew whose house to knock on the door and say mom your son just did. Im not being facetious. They knew the neighborhoods. As part of the American Rescue plan i signed into law last year which they voted for, we setaside 350 billion, with a b, billion dollars for state and local governments all across america. And urged them to do like your governor did to make communities safer. Here in pennsylvania Governor Wolf was using 250 million of that money to reduce crime and violence across this state. And mayor brown just described how its helping Fund Community policing here. Guess what . Every single republican member of congress, every single one in this state, every single one voted against the support for Law Enforcement. They talk about how much they love it. They voted against the funding. Flat out. Flat out. Every republican in the house. Every republican in the senate. Every single one. I know we expect so much more Law Enforcement officers, so we need to support them. Thats why my crime plan to help communities recruit, hire, and train nationwide more than 100,000 additional officers accountable officers for community policing. And i mean it. Folks, when it comes to fighting crime, we know it works. Officers on the street who know the neighborhood. Not a joke, who know the neighborhood. Who know the families they are protecting. Who get the training they need to be able to do their jobs well. Who work to earn the communitys trust. As we hire more Police Officers, there should be more training, more help, and more accountability. Without public trust, Law Enforcement cant do its job serving and protecting all the communities. Host President Biden yesterday in wilkesbarre, pennsylvania, on twitter. Senator ted cruz regarding the criticism of the president of f. B. I. Of g. O. P. Criticism of the f. B. I. Agents and the search of maralago. Heres what he said. Lefty twitter is going to lie. Its what they do. Every word i said is true. The f. B. I. Raid was horrific abuse of power, there needs to be a complete House Cleaning of f. B. I. Real oversight from congress. All absolutely true. Congressman eric swalwell, democrat from california, threats against Law Enforcement are at an all time high. As lawmakers we can can either support Law Enforcement and condemn the threats or what ted cruz just did double down about lies of Law Enforcement and ensure there will be more threats. This is what cruz wants. Headline this morning in terms of that story and a filing of, federal filing late yesterday in washington. Feds cite efforts to obstruct probe of documents at trump estate with pictures allegedly from the search at maralago. The Justice Department they write, associated press, said classified documents were likely concealed and removed from former president Donald Trumps maralago estate as part of an effort to obstruct investigation into the discovery of government records. They also seized 33 boxes containing more than 100 classified records during its august 8 search of maralago and found classified documents stashed in trumps office. According to a filing that lays out the most detailed chronology today of months of strained interactions between Justice Department officials and trump representatives over the discovery of government secrets. Our conversation with you this first hour is on sorry about the technical issues. We will take you back to the Wilson Center, with the chief of operations of space force life coverage here on cspan. Gen. Raymond both on the officer side go through the roof. We just had our first ever direct assessment from industry, where we brought a young officer, who is now an officer, into the space force and brought her in as a First Lieutenant based on experience she had. We have identified five others who will come in, all the way from First Lieutenant all the way up to lieutenant colonel. We will do more of that as we progress forward. Pres. Kennedy besides those great partnerships with our allies and commercial actors, to get that talent and make sure we are staying ahead on innovation, youve also done a great job of partnering with universities across the land. Gen. Raymond we have. That is something we are really proud of. We have strong University Partnership program that we have established. We have about 16 University Partners that have signed mlas this year. Everything from universities like the university of north dakota, which is our first one, to m. I. T. , stanford, and others. Theres a strong University Partnership program. That is allowing us to do two things. One, it is allowing us to develop talent in those schools that have really strong stemrelated attributes. Although we are not exclusively stem, a significant proportion of our force is. It is allowing us to develop talent. The other thing it is allowing us to do is partner for research. We now have a consortium of universities that can help us solve some of our problems that we are working on through Research Partnerships to be had as well. On both of those fronts, People Development and research, we think this partnership and network of universities that we have that spread across the country is going to be something that is going to deliver for our nation. Pres. Kennedy i am pleased that the university of colorado is also part of that grouping as well. Gen. Raymond so i my. Pres. Kennedy another thing you have done is set up spaceports in the beginning. You had a key force a key focus on making sure that it was flat and responsive in a digital service, but you also focused from the beginning on the talent piece and established your guardian ideal to center that on. Maybe talk a little bit more about how talent was sort of at your center of attention as you established space force. Pres. Kennedy 3 gen. Raymond we were given a significant opportunity to establish, to move at speed, to make sure we can compete and win in the space service, just like all other services do. One thing, if we didnt think bold enough, and number two, if we had trouble getting forward, and we have been successful on both fronts. What i have learned is that you bring one person into the space force or if you have one Million People in the space force, you have to have the machinery to be able to do that. You have to be able to recruit and assess and develop and promote and retire folks. All of that had to be built for this new service. At the same time, we didnt want to just do business the way we have always done business, we wanted to take an opportunity to build this service for today. The guardian ideal was our way of putting out a vision of a unique and fresh approach to talent management. One of the things we have an opportunity on is that we are a small service. Today, we are just coming up on 8000 guardians. By the end of this year, we will have 8400 active duty guardian spirit we have an equal number of civilians, a little less, but about an equal number. We have a force that has 16,000 folks in it, both active duty and civilians. You can apply a little more art than science when it comes to policies and professional development. Because you have the luxury that you are small enough and the machine doesnt have to take over to deal with it, to manage that talent pool, so we are looking for innovative ways to have a connection with each and every guardian, give them more choices, and attract talent that traditionally might not have been attracted to come into the military. I get that a lot. I hear a lot from folks that, i would never join the military, but i will join the space force. I remind them that we are the military. But we have a vision that allows us to apply that part and develop our posts in a way that we think is critical to the success of our service. We would like to give people opportunities to work in the commercial industry and combat, to work with other industries of space and come back. We want to offer up opportunities if they are in certain times of their life where they go parttime for a while, then come back to full time. We are laying all that out in this vision that we call the guardian ideal. We are in the process now of working through the implementation of that, each and every day, to provide all of those guardians, every one of the guardians that came into our service that volunteered. Whether you are a space operator, you are the air force, you had to volunteer to come in, if you are an acquisition professional or intelligence professional, or an engineer, you had choices of whether you are going to stay in the air force or come into the spaceports. Space force. We are now coming up on 700 or 800 transfers and they have a choice. They made the decision to transfer from the services they been part of into the space force. We want to make sure we live up to the expectations of those guardians that have volunteered to make a transition from what they are doing in space force, and give them the opportunity to be part of something new and built from the ground up. Pres. Kennedy as part of building that talent and moving it forward, you worked hard on the corgi . On decor . You are the youngest, starting out from the ground. It begins with the low row on the flag and the uniforms, but what have you started with you . Started with . Pres. Kennedy gen. Raymond i dont know how much we have done. Its not something you can order on amazon prime and get overnight. We know that there are some significant First Principles that we are trying to get after. Number one, we want to have an awardwinning culture. Number two, we want a culture that is old and innovative and can move at speed. Three, we want to have a culture that is connected. With this small force, there is a connection here and we can take care of our guardians because of our size. We looked at that and started bringing in people from other services. We want to get them on board as well not that the air force had a bad culture, but we want to take the best of each one of those services and bring them into mold this culture for us. One of the things were going to do here in an upcoming conference we have in october, i think now that we have the teams assembled and all the major muscle movements in place, and we know some of the First Principles that we want to get after, now we are going to look at how to engineer that culture. What types of steps can we take to make sure that we dont just of this on autopilot and arrive somewhere, that we purposely move . We figure out what is important and then figure out how to engineer. That is what we are going to do beginning this next month. Pres. Kennedy you mentioned that part of the culture is being a war fighting culture. It is sometimes hard for people to understand, what does war fighting mean in space . If i could ask you to address two questions. Relative to the allies, what have you done to work on establishing the norms of Good Behavior in space . And also, help us understand that war fighting. Perhaps its not something we can talk about in a public setting, but we do know that there have been antisatellite tests by both the chinese and the russians. There are many other electronic means where we could face conflict in space. If you could help us understand on both norms and the war fighting side, that would be great. Gen. Raymond first of all, i think it is clear that space is a war fighting plane, just like all other domains air, land, c. It is a war fighting domain. It is the newest of those, if you will. It has shifted from a benign domain to this war fighting domain. Things like other domains have, what is safe and professional behavior in space . What are rules of engagement . What would you consider a possible attempt . All of those things that have matured and developed over the years in other domains now have to be formulated as it requires new people, new capabilities, new tactics, techniques, and procedures pilloried procedures. All of that is the work of the space force, to provide capabilities that that if average american, nation, and our 20 Coalition Forces. Twin Coalition Forces. This is everything from reversible jamming of gps satellites and communication satellites, to directed energy threats, to very visible threats. For example, china and russia both launched missiles from the ground and have blown up a satellite into multiple pieces of debris. Theres a whole spectrum reference we are focusing on, to make sure the capabilities that fuel our nation are always there. Pres. Kennedy and that, with new technology, such as servicing satellites and extending their lives, and having extra people up in space, makes that job only more difficult. Gen. Raymond it does, but it also gives it a lot more opportunities as well. Historically, what used to be commercially viable in space were very large mutations satellites and commercial launch. As i mentioned earlier, today, various entry has been reduced and more objects are being launched into space. You now have multiple missions that are not commercially viable. I think that provides this great opportunity. That is why partnership with commercial industry is so important, that we can leverage them and leverage the Business Model that they have, to be able to make the transition from the exquisite capabilities we have today to a more hybrid architecture, proliferated to be more resilient in the face of the capabilities. I think it is a very complex domain, an exciting time. A couple of years ago, we were talking, and i would have told you we were tracking roughly 22,000 objects in space. Today, that number is nearing 50,000 objects. I wouldve told you a couple years ago that of those 22,000 objects come about 1500 were satellites. Today, that number is close to 5000 satellites. The projections are that that is going to increase. And we seem to have lost our signal from this live event. We hope to receive our to resume our live coverage shortly. Gen. Raymond well over 60 lunches out of Cape Canaveral. Those are going to continue to increase in the years ahead. Pres. Kennedy those numbers of objects were multiplied and added to by those antisatellite tests. We see lots of questions here at the Wilson Center and concern about space debris and the path forward to make sure we are managing that as best as possible. I know you see a role for congress and other areas outside of space force. [no audio] pres. Kennedy maybe give us your view on space debris and how we keep it from being too much of a problem going forward. Gen. Raymond i have said this many times in the past. One of the ways that you help resolve the space debris challenge is not to create the debris in the first place. The United States, back in april, committed to not conducting certain destructive antisatellite tests. This is to act in a responsible way and not create debris. We are not just space Traffic Control in the world, we track every object and do analytical work on every other object to make sure two things dont collide. If theyre going to collide, we provide warning and recommend that somebody maneuver those satellites from colliding. We had a collision back in 2008 that caused another 3000 pieces of debris. We act as space Traffic Control for the world. We have raised our standards, so that when you do launches, you do not litter the domain debris as the satellite comes off the rocket. We have set engineering standards so that they dont brick apart into multiple pieces of debris. All of those things we have put into place are all about making sure that we can help solve the debris problem by not creating it, and by ignoring the norms of behavior, there is another significant step that can be very helpful on managing this domain that has gone through an incredible transformation over the last couple of years. We are also exploring options on how might you do some debris removal from the domain. Space force is looking through that as well, one of the areas they are focusing on. All of that put together, space is a really big place. There are a lot of objects up there. There are a lot of objects too small for us to track. They are moving at a very fast pace and just stay in the domain. It is a challenge that we all are going to have to address. The way you do it is to keep from creating debris in the first place. Pres. Kennedy indeed. There is a bit of proliferation in lowearth orbit, medium earth orbit, in addition to upward. A lot of people are concerned that we may run out of space to launch those rockets out of canaveral or Kennedy Space center, or out at vandenberg. How concerned are you that with the proliferation of satellites, particularly lower orbit, that will lose that we will lose our opportunities to find lunch capabilities . Gen. Raymond im not very concerned on that. Space is a big place. There are opportunities to do launches. I told you that the launch rate here has gone up considerably. In fact, i highlighted just this past month that we did two launches out of Cape Canaveral in 13 hours. That is the first time we have done that since 1967. We launched a Space Force Missile warning satellite, then a commercial Company Launched a Communications Satellite that early evening. Two other places around the world, one in texas, a commercial Company Launched commercial astronauts into space and then another u. S. Launch was done out of new zealand. Four launches in one day. There are opportunities to launch. We have the means to understand what is up in the domain, to be able to track that. That is one of the functions we provide and one of the functions we also help support our allies and partners as well. Pres. Kennedy i should have said geo stationary. But speaking of launches, nasa has a big launch coming up. We have been talking about partners. Tell us about how nasa is a partner and the types of things they are doing our beneficial to the space force and vice versa. Gen. Raymond first of all, they have a really exciting launch coming up. It is the launch of artemis one, which is the first launch of the rocket that will take the u. S. And its partners back to the moon. They are going to do an attempt this saturday. The partnership, i think if you look at that launch, that is one area where the Partnership Comes alive. Nasa launches off of a u. S. Space force range, which will help conduct that in a safe manner. That is one area. That is probably an area where we have the closest relationships. The other is on the protection of the International Space station. We actually have nasa elements that sit sidebyside with us to do that in conjunction analysis, so we can protect that space station and the astronauts in orbit from any collision with debris they may encounter in space. We also provide military officers to nasa, to serve as a nasa astronaut. They transfer to nasa, they are part of that, and they serve as astronauts. We have two of those nasa astronauts [no audio] and we seem to have lost our signal from this live event. We will work to resolve this issue and hope to resume life coverage shortly. Live coverage shortly. Unfortunately, we are still having technical issues and we are not able to resolve the live feed. We will have this event for you in its entirety later in the program schedule. Was someone that was killed in their family and got their gun, which they could, no matter how secure they think they have their gun stored, how would they feel . They should be banned. They dont need to be here. Turn them over the collection of them to the military or whoever that really need them or should have them. They dont belong in the publics hands. No matter what. On immigration, i do would like to see a law passed that no ones allowed to become u. S. Citizens because of the changing of the times. And have their paperwork ready. Have it they are working on their own paperwork and their own country before they are even considered to be u. S. Citizens. There are limits to everything. And this one is very much needed. I think biden is doing the best he can because all these there are so many issues that they have congress has neglected for decades. Host shelby intown tfpblt more of your calls and comments in just a moment. Other news this morning, the headline here, the front page of the new york times, visionary, soviet leader who lifted the iron curtain, gorbachev, whose rise to power in the soviet union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of europe and ended the cold war that threatened the world with Nuclear Annihilation died in moscow. He was 91. Few leaders in 20th century, any century, have had such a profound effect on their time. In little more than six tumultuous years, he lifted the iron curtain decisively a ltering the Political Climate of the world. At home he promised aefr delivered greater openness as he set out to restructure his countrys society. It was not his intention to liquidate the soviet