Well, as dedicated and bright as General Jumper may be, his mission is to protect the careers of the "fighter pilots"!
Everything the AF does now in space is "how can it help the guy in the cockpit" do his mission. It is a perfectly valid approach for the AF, but there are a lot of space missions (manned and unmanned)which go well beyond the arena of the atmosphere and are of great strategic importance and "outside of the box" for fighter jocks!
Right now, the USAF is in the same situation as the US Army was in 1915, "What in the heck are we supposed to do with those flying machines?". Hopefully, the "spaceies" will get their own Billy Mitchell to produce a separate operating service in space.
I think that it's a matter of competing priorities. The current problem is conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq and space based systems aren't as cost efficient as jets and guided weapons. It takes a lot of money to put an object in space - thousands of dollars per pound. Each THOR projectile would weigh almost 2.5 Tons and could only be used once.
I think that you're correct about some people in the Air Force protecting the fighter pilots. I saw a lot of resistance to unmanned aerial vehicles when I was in. Some of it was justified, but a lot of it was fear of change.
I think that it would be very difficult to justify taking money from manned aircraft development and putting it into space-based systems without a clear objective for the space-based platform and a detailed cost-benefits analysis showing that it has some advantage over manned aircraft. Maybe a space-age Billy Mitchell is the answer.