The aliens from this old thread of mine have been moved to share their faster-than-light drive and related tech with the United States: not out of any particular niceness, but because it turns out there’s a big honking deposit of unobtanium in Death Valley and Galactic Federation laws prevent them from just taking it by force. With this technological advantage, the good old U S of A drags itself not merely out of recession but out of its slow geopolitical decline, again becoming as dominant on the world stage as it was immediately after the Cold War.
A generation or four passes. We’re ready to start exploring the galaxy ourselves, and as it turns out there is plenty of territory available for colonization, exploitation, and so forth. But not every star-faring civilization is as pacific as the GF, so it’s clear that we’re going to need an armed space force. Should we base its hierarchy on the Navy or the Air Force?
Explain your answer. And, no, I didn’t forget the poll, so stop waiting for it to appear.
Navy of course. You are looking at ships (ha!) that will be out of contact with the rest of human society for months/years at a time. That’s what the Navy is set up to do. If someone in the Air Force doesn’t have a base to set down on, they get all melancholy. Their routine and training is: get up, suit up, take off, bomb brown people, RTB, cocktail hour. Besides, we will eventually have to get down in the mud on some planet, and that’s what the Marines are for. All the AF has are MPs.
I think it doesn’t really matter; the DoD has standardized the ranks for decades now, so a ship captain will still be an O-6, regardless of whether he’s called a Colonel or a Captain.
I think the bigger question is institutional culture.
On one hand, you have the Navy with 200+ years of dealing with ships and all that it entails, but on water.
On the other hand, you have the Air Force, which has its experience primarily dealing with more physics-based operations (flight), and also with some space experience already.
Practically speaking, I think the Air Force would be the parent service for whatever space service spins off eventually, because the Air Force already has responsibility for space stuff - there is actually an Air Force Space Command at the present time, so it’s unlikely that the Navy would somehow supersede that.
What would probably happen is that the Air Force would cherry pick some good Navy practices, and ditch some others in the move to large, crewed space ships.
This is why the Air Force works as the offworld agency in Stargate, since the gates allow brief excursions rather than 5-year missions. I think when dealing with more general space travel like the OP says, the Navy would be better suited.
Really though, I think what would probably happen is NASA would get repurposed, probably as a joint Navy/Air Force agency. All three agencies have a lot of potentially valuable insight when it comes to large-scale interstellar mobilization, though the actual mix of Navy to Air Force influence is going to depend a lot on the details of space travel which up until now have been mostly theoretical.
Your fleet should be based on the Air Force, just because I’m tired of WWII in space.
There won’t be neat armadas of warships engaging line of battle style and splitting off to deal with their counter parts. No space battleships trading broadsides.
I don’t have any good real life reason I’m just tired of this worn out analogy.
I am not writing a story about this, so there is no “my” fleet to consider. 'Twas just an idle thought I thought might make an interesting thread. The question is what real-life reasons you can give for basing this PIEF on one service branch or another.
For the reasons capably discussed above, I don’t think the rank structure matters all that much. But if we’re talking about the organizational basis in a broader sense, I submit that our hypothetical paramilitary force should more closely resemble the Coast Guard than the Air Force or Navy. Like the Navy, the Coast Guard has institutional experience sending folks on long trips on large, long-distance crewed vehicles. (The largest class of Coast Guard cutters are nearly as big as an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer).
But unlike the Navy, the Coast Guard is accustomed to a wide range of tasks that goes far beyond the use of force. Most cutters are armed, but they’re also equipped for search and rescue work, drug interdiction, and often (as with icebreakers) scientific research. In many ways, the Coast Guard is the most Starfleet-like of the uniformed services - and possibly a valuable model for our interstellar exploration force.
I’m going with Navy too. Mr. Excellent has many of the basic points I would have made and I would expand upon them by pointing out that the Coast Guard is a branch of the Navy. So are the Marines.
The Navy has ships, planes and ground troops (I’m thinking of SEALs here. In know they’re special forces, but between them and the Marines you get people who fight on land as a matter of course.) And I seem to recall at least one recruiting TV spot that shows Navy personnel involved in something Earth-orbit-oriented. (Satellites?)
So other than the Air Force having a prior claim to a space force, it seems the Navy has quietly subsumed actions on all frontiers.
Besides, I think it’s cool that whomever is in charge of the ship is Captain regardless of the rank on their sleeves.
The USCG becomes part of the Navy only during declared wartime. Otherwise it has been historically part of the Departments of Treasury, Transportation, and lately Homeland Security (some of the entities that became the USCG were under Commerce at one time IIRC)
As to the greater point I agree naval/maritime institutional culture is more akin to what you’ll need if your technology for interstellar travel will involve large vessels operating autonomously for prolonged time periods. Think a nuclear-powered sub on patrol.
OTOH If your FTL model is jump-gates that will bring you back to a fixed station or planetside base quickly and a large number of smaller craft and crews, with the missions very actively controlled from base, you may be closer to the Air Force model.
I say something completely new will evolve, just as the Air Force evolved in the first half of the 20th Century. Sure, the USAF may have evolved from the Army, but today, except for the names of the ranks, it has no more in common with it than it has with the Navy. Wherever it comes from, within a decade the Space Force will be a completely unique organization.
Also, I can imagine a combination of possible future technologies that may require spaceships to line up and blast at each other at point blank range. Seeing as we have no idea what technology will be like in the future, any guess is equally valid.
I think you may have misunderstood the question. I wasn’t asking people to predict what will happen; I was asking y’all to recommend what you think should happen.
In terms of your post, that would translate into saying, "Okay, though I think something new will come into being here, I would choose to use the (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, X-Men ;)) as a starting point.
In that case, I would establish it on the basis of the existing government space agency. In other words, instead of taking a military force and converting it to space, I’d take the space force and militarize it. That way they can keep the same hierarchy they’ve always had.
One truism I heard when I was a defense contractor: “The army starts with the man; the navy starts with the ship.”
The air force is based on the army, and in many ways is organized from the soldier up.
In the navy, the ship is the basic organizational structure - if you’ve got sailors that aren’t in some sense attached to a ship or group of ships, they’re nothing.
So, ranks aside (they map one-to-one), I’d say the navy’s structure has a slight edge over the army’s for space travel. You need to start with the ship and fill roles from there.
