Space Farce? All you need to know about America's newly proposed military wing
Space Force sounds like an exhausting sci-fi movie — possibly directed by Michael Bay — about the US sending a team of elite, arrogant, bad-boy air force pilots to fight either a giant meteor or aliens or save an American space station.
Sadly, Space Force is not that. Or at least, it doesn’t have meteors or asteroids and aliens (so far). And it isn’t a Michael Bay film.
It is, however, a real thing.
In a speech at the Pentagon on August 9, US Vice President Mike Pence announced details for the same. What it is is basically a proposed sixth branch of the US military that would focus on all matters off-world, from procuring military satellites to defending US spacecraft in orbit from attacks. In fact, according to Pence, it is supposedly going to be an “elite group of war fighters specialising in the domain of space” drawn from various branches of the military, in the style of existing special operations forces.
“Just as in the past, when we created the Air Force, establishing the Space Force is an idea whose time has come. The space environment has fundamentally changed in the last generation; what was once peaceful and uncontested is now crowded and adversarial,” said Pence.
Of course, this was not the first time such a plan was announced. In June, US President Donald Trump announced, “I’m here by directing the Department of Defence and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces.”
“That’s a big statement,” Trump reiterated, adding, “We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force — separate but equal."
And now, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has expressed his full support the Space Force. He added, however, that it will have a role separate from NASA.
Why is NASA — an agency responsible for civilian space programs — actively supporting a military expansion plan?
Well, it may have something to do with Bridenstine’s appointment, a member of the Republican Party, who was nominated for his present position by Trump in September 2017 — the appointment was heavily criticised because unlike previous NASA administrators, Bridenstine does not have any formal qualifications in science or engineering — and was confirmed by the Senate in April this year.
Another important question, of course, is from whom does America’s space assets need protection?
According to a report in The Guardian, the White House has pointed towards galactic threats from US adversaries like Russia and China, who can and may develop weapons to jam, blind or destroy satellites that are crucial to communications systems — two threats that have always been cited by the US government since the end of World War II. It may just all be hokum. After all, according to multiple reports over 2017 and 2018, Russia’s space industry “remains a few steps away from collapse” and has been in freefall since the downfall of the Soviet Union in the 90s. Thanks to low wages and a lack of transparency, the Russian Space Program lacks some serious brain-power.
At the same time, this Space Force also comes with quite the price tag. While VP Pence has asked the Congress to approve eight billion dollars over five years for space security systems, experts believe that a Space Force is likely to incur costs much higher than that.
In fact, according to a Washington Post report, this new charge is likely to be highly profitable for a number of private companies (all of whom are government defence contractors. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Harris Corporation, the report stated, may be particularly well-positioned to benefit from Trump’s Space Force).
All of this finally leads to the most disturbing question of them all.
Is the space going to turn into the Wild Wild West?
Perhaps not, but allocation of defence expenditure for space is a grand notion to begin with. Space is the final frontier and international law would limit what America could do in space, in terms of military action (in not expansion). After all, the major space powers, including the US, Russia, and China, have all signed the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 — a Cold War-era treaty — which states that nothing in space can be claimed as a single country's territory, and it bars countries from stationing nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction anywhere in outer space, including in orbit around Earth.
What is decidedly ominous, as is the case with most announcements Trump makes, is that on August 13, while signing a whopping $717 billion defence-authorisation act to fund the military over the next year, he proclaimed: "In order to maintain America's military supremacy, we must always be on the cutting edge. That is why we are also proudly reasserting America's legacy of leadership in space.”
Space Force, may of course, end up as nothing more than a farcical promise from the Trump regime; after all, the man does like to boast.