You probably should have gone with “Clittoral Combat Ships”
Wait…so maybe I really DID do it wrong. You don’t even get my pun? I haz the sadz 
I got it. I littorally laughed out loud.
I agree with you from an acquisitions/funding perspective, but I think the USSF makes the most sense looking at it from the personnel side. It comes down to why we need a uniformed service in the first place, which I put into two basic categories – we need people who can’t just up and quit if they get an unpleasant and/or dangerous assignment (e.g., we need grunts to go fight in Afghanistan), and we need people with command authority to engage in lawful warfare (e.g., we have commissioned officers flying armed drones for legal reasons). I’m not sure which category matters more for spacecom but the DoD sees fit to keep it as a military (and not a civilian) function, and yet AFSPC is where careers go to die. It’s the red-headed stepchild of the Air Force, because it’s not planes and it’s not even a support function that people see on a day-to-day basis. If breaking AFSPC off into a new branch helps prevent some of the brain drain in that domain, it would be a good thing IMHO.
Whether or not that’s worth the added overhead, I can’t say. I just know that the space people I’ve talked to seem to thing this is a good idea. Of course, they would say that, but I think their gripes about the lack of opportunities are reasonable.
The worst thing about Space Force is that you just know that Space Force’s new sergeant major just PCSd from Germany and he wants his base to have nice green grass just like he had there so some poor schmuck privates are going to get stuck trying to make the grass look nice on the moon.
I recall a probably apocryphal story of a general, pissed off that his plane had to wait to have the waste tanks emptied at Thule airbase, ripping on the poor guy who came to empty it. After he said he would make the guy’s life unbearable, the airman replied, “It is 30 degrees below zero, and I am pumping shit out of an airplane. What could you possibly do to me?”
I don’t know how many missileers the Air Force has, but I don’t think of that as a career with particular upward mobility. Speaking of mobility, how many mobility pilots have moved to top positions in the Air Force? I can only think of Norty Schwartz, and while I’m sure they are others, it doesn’t seem like a long list.
And while AFSPC has been around for lo these many two and a half decades, the current Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is a space guy and a former commander of Space Command.
Lastly, if the idea is to create more General Officer billets for space professionals, well, my point is proven: more generals is by definition more bureaucracy. We ought to be cutting GO slots overall across the services and spending that money on combat capability, not making more billets so people can feel proud of themselves or make more money in retirement.
And really lastly, I’m starting to think of Air Force officers as generally being whiners. I’m pretty sure that Space Force officers are just going to ramp up the whining to National Guard Bureau levels when their dreams of limitless money for new stuff starts getting crushed by reality.
Get out. NOW.
It was a shallow effort at best.
More piledriving: Did this POTUS watch CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT when he was youngish?
I’ve followed the suggestions that USAF will devour USSF or vice-versa; that the US Army has more boats than the USN and more aircraft than the USAF; that all services should be joined under one command - and let’s not be shy, but return to the old name: US Dept of War.
What do I expect? Yet more commands and commissions, for Army, Air and Space, Navy and Marines, Coast Guard, Cyberspace, Public Health - and that latter could include biological warfare. These balkanized realms will grow yet vaster bureaucracies and acquisition programs, all competing for funds and power. I do not expect improved audits or accountability. Let the Pentagon fund itself with the last trillion unaccounted for? Sure thing!
Then there are proprietary limits. Without right to repair, the military can’t fix its own battlefield equipment.
Got a problem in orbit? Ship that broken part back to the factory, right? How long can you breathe vacuum?
Perhaps you can explain how a comm troop is supposed to repair a burned out chip in a mission critical router?
A critical device should be designed with field repair in mind. Swap chips or modules. BTW did you follow the link?
Sorry, I don’t read informative news from sites called boingboing.net.
Could you perhaps explain how a 55" flat screen monitor can be designed with field repair in mind? I can’t imagine how one could be designed for normal consumer-level repair, let alone battlefield conditions. Perhaps I’m just not that imaginative.
Firstly, I’m not sure what any of this has to do with the topic of the thread, and RioRico bringing up problems with “right to repair” issues feels like a hijack.
Secondly, the boing boing article was written by Cory Doctorow, who’s not unheard of, and has a link at the bottom to a NYT article covering the same issue.
Thirdly, to help your imagination, imagine a router that upon entering a failure condition – say an internal (and easily replaceable) power supply with a slight voltage issue – refuses to reveal the error code to the end user. It just says “err state,” and a proprietary code reader must be used to effectively diagnose the issue. If the router manufacturer doesn’t make these proprietary code readers available to end users, then in order to diagnose the problem it must be shipped to a manufacturer-approved repair facility.
But wait, there’s more! In the interest of “ensuring the best possible routing experience,” the router manufacturer has placed a trusted computing module in the router, which only allows it to turn on if it validates that the power supply is a Genuine Manufacturer Part ™ that has been paired to that specific router using a public/private key pair that only the manufacturer has access to. Thus meaning that even if a plucky field tech recognizes the telltale signs of a dying power supply, and she has all the tools and parts available to replace it, the router must, nevertheless, still be shipped to an approved repair facility.
“Right to repair” is an ongoing issue for all kinds of consumer products, the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act of 1972 made it illegal for manufacturers to place restrictions on when the manufacturer could void a warranty (e.g., Ford can’t say your warranty is voided if your local shop does the oil changes under this law), but in 1975 nobody foresaw manufacturers effecting the same sorts of limitations with technology. That is, what if you couldn’t remove the oil drain bolt without entering a proprietary password only available at authorized Ford service centers.
Apparently, based on the link posted above, this problem is affecting the military as well as normal consumers, but the extent of the problem, or what this has to do with a thread on the space force, is beyond me. Carry on.
Space Force ain’t gonna repair jack shit in orbit. This hijack is as relevant as the color of my grandma’s socks.
I would think that in a military situation there would be back up pre-configured routers or switches on hand that could be swapped out.
Modern equipment is designed to be replaced rather than repaired. I recall the circuitry in an ancient mass spectrometer where transistors and their attendant resistors and capacitors were mounted on an octal plug. Repair consisted of removing the damaged circuit and plugging in a new one. Of course, plugs and sockets cost money. Sockets for ICs cost money, increasing the cost of the product. HP would rather sell me a new printer, or a new PC rather than have me repair a damaged one. There are military grade components, but building a military grade device with sockets requires a different design and assembly line from which less product will be produced, so there is a problem with the cost of military, field repairable equipment.
Sure, – and again, this is all irrelevant to the topic of the thread – but we’re not talking about a piece of equipment that’s unrepairable due to design, but rather a piece of equipment that IS repairable, but only by the manufacturer. To your example, it would be like the octal plug in a mass spectrometer that is easily replaceable, but has a TPM chip inside of it so that you yourself can’t do it solely because the manufacturer has added extra technology with the sole purpose of preventing you from doing so. And where this issue has made the news is with John Deere industrial farm equipment, so I imagine we’re talking about things like APCs and F-35s rather than consumer-grade routers.
I’m fairly certain that the link at the bottom is to an opinion piece.
Most of my time in the military, things were shipped to a repair facility because my unit purchased the warranty, or the “3 years same day service option” or similar. We didn’t have to ship them to replace a hard drive, or swap bad memory, or add expansion cards, or replace connectors.
I agree, sorry for continuing the hijack.
Of course it is! There are going to be Space Force techs in orbital space station maintenance yards fixing Space Force equipment. I mean, why have a Space Force if we are not actually going to have Forces in Space?
To spend a lot of public money that could be much better allocated elsewhere on things nobody on the planet needs but will make some contractor/personal friends/kickback buddies VERY happy ?
Oh wait, that was one of those rhetorical question, wasn’t it ? Nevermind then.