This post has very little to do with the Space Force as an entity. I’m mainly interested in describing my experience reading the legislation that formed the Space Force. It was quite the trip, causing me to think about how legislation is written, who reads it, and who checks whether it’s accurately and precisely formed. For reference, this is all pulled from the National Defense Authorization Act (PDF warning).
The first thing to note about this piece of legislation (which is the official PDF from the House of Representatives) is that it is over 3000 pages long, and the table of contents is not updated. Every section is labeled with page number 0000, which is extremely unhelpful when you are someone wanting to find their way to a specific part of the document.
Luckily, whoever is in charge of putting these documents online is not just scanning pieces of paper, they are proper PDF documents that can be searched. This was the only way I could find where the Space Force section is.
The start of the section informs the reader that the purpose of the legislation is not to create standalone documentation related to the Space Force, but that the section is a matter of record, declaring a certain chapter will be amended in, and another will be added to, a different set of documentation. (In particular, Title 10 of the United States code is having sections of Chapter 907 re-indexed, and Chapter 908 is being added. This latter bit is the key hunk of legislation.)
Sifting through the legislation reveals some intriguing, readable information which was covered in Part 2. Surrounding these nuggets are administrative fluff and humorously detailed notes of very small changes to other documents. For a broad idea of how this went, consider section 9081 of the Act. There are seven directives, from (a) to (g). Only three of them pertain directly to providing new information about the Space Force. The remaining four are either minimal (one word) edits, or a renaming of a chapter, section, or subsection in another document.
There are two excellent quotes that encompass the type of edits I am referring to.
Section 9016… is further amended in subsection (a), by striking “four” and inserting “five”…
National Defense Authorization Act
Title 10, United States Code, is amended as follows:
(1) In section 101(a)(9)(C), by inserting ‘and the Space Force’ before the semicolon.
National Defense Authorization Act
These both struck me as immensely funny for two reasons: First, somebody had to write both of those sentences, with their hands, consciously thinking about the importance of these changes. Second, I am in the minority of people who will ever read these sentences and others like them. They mean nothing to me, and to most Americans, yet it is little phrases like these that somehow make the country go. I’m sure there are other pieces of legislation that are written in a more straightforward manner, and many that are even more opaque than this one. Yet, the phrases remain, formulated by some unknown group of people, written and reviewed by others we will never see, then filed away for an occasional viewing.