No; it isn’t.
I may have missed an earlier post, but this NPR article points out that a President cannot create a branch of the armed forces, it must be done by Congress.
Loathe as I am to be in the position of defending one of Donald Trump’s weird-ass ideas, but…it’s literally just an idea at this point; we don’t know how it will play out. It could be a total debacle, but there’s a chance that it might work. We just don’t know. I’m not at the point of, like, wagering money on it or anything, but out of all the weird shit that Trump has suggested, this is one of the few things that seems like a semi-reasonable idea.
Yeah, they are Space personnel. They would get transferred. That’s sort of the point.
Yeah, the AF would get cut. Now, the AF controls the money and uses it for bombers and drone striking brown people in deserts. With a new Space Force, it wouldn’t have to depend on the goodwill of the AF. You know how the Navy doesn’t care what the AF does with its funding? That’s what the Space Force would do, unlike now.
In any event, it’s stupid and not going to happen anyway, so there’s that.
Excuse this non-researched post. My memory is that Jerry Pournelle (deceased SF writer, computer writer, advisor to Reagan on “Star Wars”) was very big on space armaments, because hey, you gotta be prepared for what the other guy might do. I believed in MAD (mutual assured destruction) and despised the idea of disrupting a functional detente – even though no one regards mutual destruction as the ideal answer.
My memory also has Isaac Asimov telling Jerry that while his ideas weren’t necessarily wrong, they were crazy.
“You’re not wrong Walter. You’re just an asshole.”
Except that the Air Force isn’t the final arbiter of its budget.
If space is roughly 8% of the Air Force budget, and a new Space Force is created and takes 8% of the Air Force’s budget with them out the door… then they are left with the same amount of money, but more bureaucracy to pay for.
To put it another way, if the Air Force, the Secretary of Defense, the President, and Congress think it is more important to buy bombers and drones than satellites, that judgment would presumably stand whether there is a Space Force or no Space Force. No such thing as a free lunch, creating a Space Force doesn’t create more money.
Which is why this dumb idea is right up Trump’s alley.
I think a space force, aside from requiring an act of congress that is never going to happen, is just asking to add a layer of bureaucracy in an era where the DoD is trying to combine agencies as often as possible in order to reduce bureaucracy.
That said, AF Space Command does have a struggle inside the larger USAF, in that it’s not a sexy mission. AF general officers, by and large, have a flying background, and flying ops have little to do with the space mission, so they’re competing for attention. I can see an argument being made the making a “separate but equal” branch would add a bunch of bureaucracy, but also allow AFSPC to self-govern in a way that they haven’t really been able to. Sort of like how the Marines are somewhat independent because the Navy at large is more focused on boats.
It’s still a dumb idea, but if all he’s talking about doing is breaking off AFSPC into it’s own branch, like USAAF was broken off in 1947, it’s not the end of the world.
It will not play out. It’s not a semi-reasonable idea.
“Not the end of the world” is a pretty low bar to judge things by. It is such a low bar that Scott Pruitt and Betsy DeVos can cross it; meaning that it’s still a long way from being a good idea.
Nobody is saying this will create more money. The Space guys want to be in control of their own money, and not relying on Big AF to provide it to them. That’s it.
Forgive me for idle partisan speculation here in GD, but I have a hard time not thinking that if Obama had made a thoughtful proposition for a USSF based on the importance of independence for such a critical US interest, and that such a move would be a blip in the overall DoD budget, then Fox News would be all up and arms about how Obama wants to waste money on a vanity project that the USAF isn’t even asking for, and the SDMB as a whole would be defending the move as forward thinking as the importance of the USA and USN are gradually diminished.
Or maybe I’m wrong, and there’d be 3 simultaneous threads about how ridiculous Obama’s proposal is. But I don’t think so.
A Space Force would be nearly totally dependent on the USAF anyway for logistics.
Does the USAF have a Space Command?
How so?
Now, compare what you just said to what Trump said in the link provided in the OP, and the way he presented it. Notice anything different?
All completely hypothetical, because it’s not something Obama would do.
But that opinion makes no sense. Money is provided by Congress to specific programs, not lump sums. If the Air Force space community has been hammered by Air Force leadership in specific ways over the years, I’m pretty sure I’d be aware of the specifics. Instead, Air Force space has really just shot itself in the foot over and over again:
- SBIRS is the most over-budget, late to delivery defense program in many decades
- GPS IIF was another tragedy
- GPS III was delayed by shitty PNT payloads
- GPS OCX was in stiff running to surpass SBIRS in terms of disasters, but thankfully that seems to be turning around
- FAB-T is a similar story
- New approaches to space launch were hamstrung for years by the risk-averse AF space community, and it took a beating in Congress over the Russian engine issue to get them to fully embrace SpaceX
- The follow on to SBIRS is one big hairy undefined mess
The only positive I can really think of is that Space Fence seems to be going pretty smoothly. So on the scope of “whats wrong with national security space,” it seems like a pretty fair criticism that “but-but-but the Air Force that we work for doesn’t let us pile more disasters on top of our sorry record!” is a laughable reason for reform.
Which part exactly do you take issue with?
Yes, hypothetical is hypothetical.
Hypothetical is “If Obama were a moronic shit like Trump then Democrats would still support him because there are no legitimate complaints about Trump and the only reason Democrats oppose him is irrational partisan hatred.”
We already have such an organization within the Department of Defense: United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), created in 2009 out of several separate NSA departments which were already staffed and directed to perform cyberintelligence and cyberdefense operations. As a top level Unified Combatant Command, it crosses individual branches within the Department of Defense just like USSOCOM, which is crucial because cyberattacks threaten not only the operational capability of each of the individual combat branches (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and in wartime, the Coast Guard and Merchant Marine) but also common assets such as space surveillance, satellite communications, and the GPS system, as well as attacks against domestic infrastructure. USCYBERCOM draws members from all branches as well as private contractors which minimizes interservice rivalry and encourages a sharing of strategy and procedures. A “Cyberspace Force” in the form of a conventional war fighting organization makes little as cyberspace “warfare” is a very different type of conflict more akin to physical terrorism and espionage than it is large scale direct action.
The United States already as a “Space Force” in the United States Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) which is a major command under the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM). There could be an argument made for moving AFSPC from under USSTRATCOM and into a UCC directly within the DOD, since it actually was until 2002 where it was downgraded to a majcom for reasons that have to do more with bureaucracy than practicality. AFSPC is responsible for the ULA rocket missions which orbit all national security payloads, most NOAA and many NASA satellites, and most NASA interplanetary missions as well as maintaining orbital space awareness and tracking space hazards such as debris, charged particle belts, and solar weather events. AFSPC is already doing a fine job of this to the point of being a resource for many other allied and neutral nations, and while there has long been discussion about creating a “Space Force”, mostly by people disappointed that the Air Force found a crewed space program to be of little practical value with advances in satellite surveillance technology and cancelled the Manned Orbiting Laboratory and the X-20 “Dyna-Soar”, and only very reluctantly and expensively participated in the Space Transportation System (“Shuttle”) before the Challenger failure made it clear that it required alternative access to space. Making a separate military service of it makes sense only in the anticipation of performing direct action operations from or in orbital space which is something we should actively avoid given the potential for making orbital space uninhabitable due to battle debris and destroying critical communication and surveillance infrastructure that can only operate in orbital space.
The non-sequitur use of the phrase “separate but equal” shows how little thought or context has gone into this idea or the public presentation of it. For those not aware, “seperate but equal” is strongly identified with the summation of the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case which justified racial segregation in state-sponsored education and other services. It is tempting to look at this as being some kind of an intentional “dog whistle” comment but in fact it likely just illustrates the horrifying lack of historical and cultural knowledge from all aspects of the Trump administration. And frankly, it doesn’t even make sense in this context; the other branches of the military are not “seperate but equal” in any measure, as they get different levels of funding, staffing, and support depending upon what their intended mission capabilities are.
What Trump really wants is to distract from the story of how we are separating families of undocumented immigrants and placing young children in indefinite detention and state care rather than finding a way to expedite their custody back to their parents or take any steps to effectively address either immigration or the causes of instability and violence which are causing people to flee Central and South American to come to the US despite a newly implemented “no tolerance” immigration policy justified only by blatant lies about how the minority-in-all-branches Democrats are responsible for and the Bible-thumping rhetoric of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a.k.a. Albino Racist Smurf.
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