Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert has praised the Biden administration's decision to keep the U.S. Space Command in her state of Colorado, putting her at odds with GOP senators in Alabama, where it was proposed the military headquarters move to.
The Republican representative for the Centennial State's third district had opposed the Trump administration's plan to move the headquarters to Alabama and had lobbied for it to stay, warning that 1,600 jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars were at risk.
U.S. Space Command (SPACECOM) was set up in 1985 at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs until it was deactivated in 2002 after merging into United States Strategic Command.
Space Command was reestablished in 2019 under former President Donald Trump with a focus on space as a warfighting domain and had been based in Colorado Springs. Trump called for moving the command to Huntsville, Alabama, the location of the Redstone Arsenal military complex.
Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said on Monday that Space Command would stay put in Colorado as it would enable the command to "most effectively plan, execute and integrate military space power into multi-domain global operations."
In a rare display of agreement with the Biden administration she usually lambastes, Boebert hailed the decision on Monday to keep Space Command in "its rightful home."
"When Russia and China are developing lasers to destroy U.S. satellites, we should not be wasting time considering moving Space Command's headquarters for political reasons," she said in a media statement to Newsweek.
Boebert said the decision came after she had worked in "a bipartisan and bicameral fashion...to set politics aside and put Colorado first."
But Alabama's two Republican U.S. Senators condemned the decision stating an assessment by the U.S. Air Force had ranked Huntsville first among possible headquarters sites.
Sen. Katie Britt said that Biden "has irresponsibly decided to yank a military decision out of the Air Force's hands in the name of partisan politics."
Sen. Tommy Tuberville said that the top three choices for Space Command headquarters in the Pentagon site selection process were in Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas—all red states—and that "Colorado didn't even come close."
"This decision to bypass the three most qualified sites looks like blatant patronage politics," he said in a statement. "It sets a dangerous precedent that military bases are now to be used as rewards for political supporters rather than for our security."
"This is absolutely not over," said Tuberville who is locked in a standoff with the Pentagon over its abortion policy. "I will continue to fight this as long as it takes."
While Alabama lawmakers had argued for the command's headquarters to move to their state, there had been concerns over whether it could reach full operational capability if it moved to Alabama. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said that the Missile Defense Agency had lost four-fifths of its workforce when it moved to the state in 2005.
Head of U.S. Space Command, Gen. James Dickinson said in March that while the uniformed troops who make up 38 percent of its workforce would move if so ordered, "there's really no way to know" if the 62 percent of civilian personnel or 80 percent of contractors would move as well.
"Lots of those folks are a great civilian workforce. They have made life choices and that's why they live, for example, in Colorado Springs," he said, according to Defense One. Newsweek has contacted the Pentagon for comment.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Brendan Cole is a Newsweek Senior News Reporter based in London, UK. His focus is Russia and Ukraine, in particular ... Read more
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