Bipartisan group launches criticism of 'political' decision over Space Command

By Micaela Burrow
Daily Caller News Foundation

Republicans and Democrats on Thursday blasted the Biden administration’s last-minute decision to keep Space Command (SPACECOM) headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which they said is motivated by politics rather than actual concerns over the readiness of forces assigned to the command.

The Air Force’s basing process determined Huntsville, Alabama — a red state — was the best place to relocate SPACECOM, which is responsible for all operations in space, from its provisional headquarters in Colorado Springs. Both Republican and Democrat lawmakers questioned President Joe Biden’s intervention in the decision, despite military leaders’ assessments that moving SPACECOM would not interrupt readiness at a hearing Thursday.

Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama called the evidence for Huntsville’s superiority over Colorado Springs “overwhelming and undeniable.”

Get the hottest, most important news stories on the Internet – delivered FREE to your inbox as soon as they break! Take just 30 seconds and sign up for WND's Email News Alerts!

“We’ve made a political decision over a competency decision. I know this administration strives for equity, strives to be fair, and this is simply unfair,” she said.

Biden’s reasoning for picking Colorado Springs came from Gen. James Dickinson, SPACECOM commander, who argued the moving process would hamper operations. He told Congress he was worried the trained civilian personnel supporting SPACECOM would refuse to relocate to Huntsville.

Is Space Command getting political?

But Space Force, the military branch responsible for training and organizing forces that provide the vast majority of those assigned to SPACECOM, is not moving, Republican Alabama Rep. Mike Rogers, who chairs the committee, emphasized.

“The Biden Administration has chosen to play politics with our national security,” Rogers said in his opening statement.

Moving SPACECOM to a permanent location in Huntsville “will not affect the readiness of U.S. space forces,” Rogers asked Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, involving “very little operational risk.”

“Yes sir, those are my statements” Saltzman responded.

Rogers directed his frustration mainly at Dickinson. According to Rogers and Sewell, Dickinson told a delegation of Alabama lawmakers he would not recommend Colorado Springs as SPACECOM’s permanent location, which Rogers asked Dickinson to confirm.

Dickinson said physical construction of the headquarters, expected to take five years, would not have harmed readiness until the force, itself, transitioned to Huntsville, he said.

“You just skipped past my question. That is not a reason,” Rogers said.

“I had a misunderstanding with what was asked of me,” Dickinson said.

“That was a very clear question, and you know exactly what your answer was,” Rogers retorted.

Democratic Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking member, disagreed that politics played a decisive role in the decision. He accused the Department of Defense and Biden administration of displaying “a spectacular level of unacceptable indecision,” dragging out the process of choosing a SPACECOM headquarters for years.

“One of the main reasons that we are here today is that the Department, for reasons I still don’t fully comprehend, appears to have departed from the norms of the Air Force strategic basing process,” Smith said. “We have had an unnecessary, tortured, and opaque process that has resulted in confusion, anger, and doubt about both the process and the result.”

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said he was informed that Biden would overrule his recommendation shortly before it was made, acknowledging the president doesn’t typically intervene in a basing decision.

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].

IMPORTANT NOTE TO WND READERS: Believe it or not, today's high priests of climate-change apocalypse are correct in predicting that in just a few short years, the earth will become miserable, wretched and almost uninhabitable by human beings. But the grim future they envision won't come about because of "catastrophic climate change," but rather, because of the implementation of their completely insane and truly catastrophic agenda.

As Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore recently admitted, "If they actually achieve Net Zero, at least 50% of the population would die of hunger and disease." Likewise, writes energy expert and author Alex Epstein: "Today's proposed policies to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use would, if fully implemented, have truly apocalyptic consequences – making the world an impoverished, dangerous, and miserable place for most people."

Question: When the scientific case for global warming apocalypse consists primarily of a 1-degree Celsius rise in temperature over more than 130 years, what explains the obsession with an imminent, climate-caused end of the world?

Although many groups have been drawn into the Climate Change Cult – from the news media (which has warned of climate catastrophe, either global warming or a "new ice age," for over a century!), to innocent school kids indoctrinated by hysterical leftist teachers, to liberal Democrats who claim "climate change" will destroy the earth in a few years – the REAL villains are the national and global elites who KNOW the apocalyptic global warming religion is just a cruel hoax, but promote and exploit it as a means of accomplishing their ultimate goal: Transforming and ruling the world.

The heart and soul of today's bizarre, pagan climate-change religion, and the global elites' strategies for using it to rule all of mankind, is powerfully exposed and illuminated in the September issue of WND's critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, an issue titled "CULT OF THE CLIMATE APOCALYPSE: The elites' breathtaking strategy for ruling the world." WHISTLEBLOWER is available in both the popular print edition and a state-of-the-art digital version, either single issues or discounted annual subscriptions.

SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!