[News] Trump's Space Force is Worse Than Reagan's Star Wars

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://orinocotribune.com/trumps-space-force-is-worse-than-reagans-star-wars/ 



  Trump's Space Force is Worse Than Reagan's Star Wars

By John Feffer – January 21, 2020

With a stroke of a pen, Donald Trump created an entirely new branch of 
the armed forces last year. It’s the first new branch of the U.S. 
military since 1947.

The Space Force is not exactly a new idea. It’s a revival of a 
Reagan-era initiative that had been set up to oversee missile defense, 
which the George W. Bush administration repurposed after 9/11 to focus 
on the war in Afghanistan.

Yet what Trump has put together is fundamentally different, and 
potentially more destabilizing, than the previous incarnation.

Unlike virtually everything else that Trump has touched, this boondoggle 
has generated almost no controversy. Congress approved Trump’s 
initiative, which was folded into the annual National Defense 
Authorization Act, by an overwhelming bipartisan vote at the end of 
2019. Not only have very few voices of protest been raised against this 
extraordinary expansion of U.S. militarism, it has even generated some 
unexpected praise.

In The Washington Post, for instance, David Montgomery wrote a long 
encomium in the magazine section in early December entitled “Trump’s 
Excellent Space Force Adventure.”

    Creating a Space Force is arguably an excellent idea, one for which
    Trump may deservedly go down in history, along with all the other
    things he will be remembered for. No, really. I’m tempted to laugh
    at myself as I type these sentences because I, too, greeted news of
    the Space Force with incredulous guffaws… What I missed at the time,
    though — and what everyone else mocking Space Force doesn’t seem to
    appreciate — is the sheer range of problems that could ensue if
    other countries are able to establish extraterrestrial military
    supremacy.

This would be an easy-to-dismiss article if David Montgomery were one of 
the right-wing crazies, like columnist Marc Thiessen, that the Post 
publishes on a regular basis. But no, Montgomery is a very good 
journalist who has dutifully covered labor issues and progressive 
activism even as the rest of the media universe has run screaming in the 
other direction.

That makes it incumbent to take his article and this topic very 
seriously. What exactly is this Space Force? And why has Trump’s latest 
contribution to ensuring America’s “full-spectrum dominance” been such 
an easy sell?

*The Next Big Fight*
The new Space Force nearly didn’t get off the ground.

Former Pentagon chief Jim Mattis was so cool to the idea that in July 
2017 he wrote a letter to Congress declaring his opposition on the 
grounds that it would, among other things, create unnecessary military 
bureaucracy. But the proposal had bipartisan support in Congress — Mike 
Rogers (R-AL) and Jim Cooper (D-TN) of the House Armed Services 
Committee — and an enthusiastic booster in Donald Trump as well. So, it 
rocketed through Congress when so any other initiatives have stalled.

The Space Force will be cobbled together from various existing agencies. 
Its 400 staff are based temporarily at an air force base. Its second in 
command comes out of the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command. It 
will oversee more than 70 Army, Navy, and Air Force space units. It will 
soon employ 16,000 people, but all of them previously worked for the Air 
Force Space Command.

Its budget will be around $40 million. That’s not a lot of money in 
Pentagon terms, given that the most recent budget provided the Air Force 
with $3 billion for the B-21 bomber alone and the Navy with a whopping 
$34 billion for shipbuilding. But expect significant increases in future 
allocations. After all, the military budget contains around $14 billion 
for space operations distributed across the various services. When it 
comes to the Space Force, not even the sky’s the limit.

Like any proper government agency, the Space Force’s first priority is 
planning, according to its new head, Gen. Jay Raymond: “His command is 
building integrated planning elements to embed with other commands. Lead 
staffers have already been hired and the command is preparing to 
establish the first teams at U.S. European Command, U.S. Indo-Pacific 
Command, and U.S. Strategic Command.”

That also entails coordination with allies. The Space Force is already 
liaising robustly with European and Asian partners.

That all sounds benign: planning, liaising. But let’s not forget the 
purpose of this new branch of the military. It has taken over 
responsibility from the Strategic Command — in charge of the U.S. 
nuclear arsenal — for any war-fighting that takes place in space.

As Pentagon head Mark Esper has said, the Space Force will “allow us to 
develop a cadre of warriors who are appropriately organized, trained, 
and equipped to deter aggression and, if necessary, to fight and win in 
space…The next big fight may very well start in space, and the United 
States military must be ready.”

*Space Race*
When it comes to nuclear weapons and drones and cyberwarfare, it’s too 
late for the United States to turn an initial technological advantage 
into a global moratorium on production. Since it quite deliberately 
missed such opportunities for multilateral disarmament, Washington now 
feels obliged to spend scads of dollars to ensure that it maintains a 
significant lead over its various adversaries, ostensibly to deter the 
bad guys from using their weapons.

The same applies to space. “The ultimate goal is to deter a war in 
space,” David Montgomery writes. “In the Pentagon’s view, space must be 
considered a warfighting domain precisely to keep it peaceful.”

Well, that’s what the Pentagon always says. It’s why it calls itself a 
“Defense Department” to obscure what it really is: a bureau devoted to 
wage war, not simply deter it. As for space, the Pentagon sees a 
virtually limitless terrain for expansion.

According to the “deterrence” model, however, such expansion requires a 
clear and present danger. One major vulnerability the Pentagon has 
identified in space is the U.S. complex of commercial and military 
satellites.

The fear that other countries would take down U.S. assets in orbit 
around the earth has been around for some time. During the Carter 
administration, the United States and Soviet Union began negotiating a 
ban on anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons. The Reagan administration 
abandoned those talks, largely because it feared they would restrict the 
president’s cherished “Star Wars” plan of constructing a massive missile 
defense system.

Both sides then began building ASATs, and others joined the race. To 
date, no country has actually used this technology to take down the 
satellite of another country. Rather, they’ve only used it to take down 
their own satellites — as a test of capabilities. Four countries have 
done just that: the United States, Russia, India, and China.

However, it’s actually not so easy to take out a satellite. GPS and 
communications satellites orbit at altitudes above what an ICBM can 
reach. A space rocket could do the trick, but that would cost a lot of 
money and still require multiple hits to disrupt communications.

“Killer satellites,” orbiting weapons that can take out neighboring 
satellites, are another option. The United States has accused Russia of 
deploying four such potential weapons. Russia has responded that these 
small satellites serve an entirely different purpose: to repair other 
satellites that have suffered malfunctions. In truth, it’s hard to 
discern from the outside the ultimate purpose of such repair vehicles: 
remedy a friendly satellite or ram an unfriendly one. Such are the 
inherent dangers of dual-use systems.

Then there’s the threat of hypersonic vehicles that can deploy 
satellites, killer or otherwise, as well as potentially conduct 
operations in space. China is working on a hypersonic glider, as is 
Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin made a big splash at the end of 
2019 when he announced a new Russian missile that can fly 27 times the 
speed of sound. Such systems make any missile defense systems, which 
already face major challenges in taking out conventional missiles, 
absolutely (as opposed to mostly) useless.

The United States has tested its own hypersonic missile. Lockheed Martin 
is developing a new hypersonic SR-72, which would be a combination drone 
and stealth bomber. DARPA has teamed up with Boeing to get a hypersonic 
plane into operation, which would fall somewhere between a traditional 
airplane and a rocket. The Pentagon has also developed its X-37b 
military space plane, which it insists is not designed for military 
purposes but only to test out new satellite technologies (a frankly 
dubious contention).

*War Over the Worlds*
A third realm of space conflict — in addition to weapons that enter 
space on their way toward terrestrial targets and weapons that aim at 
each other in space — is over the territory and resources of nearby 
moons and planets.

RELATED CONTENT: Chinese Government Rejects US Creation of “Space Force” 
<https://orinocotribune.com/chinese-government-rejects-us-creation-of-space-force/>

That might seem far-fetched, since no country seems close to setting up 
anything like a base on the moon or on Mars. But militaries are 
voracious in their ambitions. And they’ll always have their visionary — 
read: kooky — boosters like Newt Gingrich, who wants to team up with 
Trump on his colonizing space idea, “occupying the moon, developing the 
moon, and continuing to Mars.”

Just as powerful nations are scrambling to claim territory in the Arctic 
that has become accessible due to climate change, these space cadets are 
looking to stake claims to an even larger set of commons that lie beyond 
this planet.

Just listen to Maj. Gen. John Shaw, the leader of Space Force’s Space 
Operations Command: “I’ve been telling the team, ‘Don’t think about a 
warfighting service for the next decade. Create a warfighting service or 
the 22nd century. What is warfighting going to look like at the end of 
this century and into the next?’”

In other words, let’s ask Congress for a blank check to spend on any 
outlandish idea we might have about the future of war.

In an Air Force report published in September, military personnel and 
academics considered various space scenarios for 2060. The “positive” 
scenarios — titled Star Trek, Garden Earth, and Elysium — all assume 
that the “U.S. coalition retains leadership over the space domain and 
has introduced free-world laws and processes that have led to 
significant global civil, commercial, and military expansion in space 
and resulted in large revenue streams.”

Sounds like extraterrestrial colonialism to me, though for the time 
being without the indigenous populations to exterminate first. Not 
surprisingly, in these scenarios the United States maintains its 
leadership through overwhelming military power deployed in the 
stratosphere and beyond.

The “negative” scenarios — titled Zhang He (sic), Xi’s Dream, and Wild 
Frontier — assume either an “alternate nation” leads in space or no 
clear winner emerges from a vigorous national competition.

It’s no mystery what this “alternative nation” is.

Zheng He was a great explorer of the fifteenth century who might have 
established China as the preeminent colonial power in the world if the 
emperor at the time hadn’t decided to focus on affairs closer to home. 
Xi is, of course, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his dream of a 
prosperous and powerful China.

The report makes no mention of arms control, international negotiations 
to preserve the commons of space, or even the dangers of a military 
space race. Instead, these blue-sky thinkers could only imagine a battle 
between the United States and the up-and-coming hegemon over all the 
marbles.

And that’s where they intersect with Trump as well. At a meeting of the 
National Space Council in 2018, he said:

    I want to also say that when it comes to space, too often, for too
    many years, our dreams of exploration and discovery were really
    squandered by politics and bureaucracy, and we knocked that out. So
    important for our psyche, what you’re doing. It’s going to be
    important monetarily and militarily. But so important for right up
    here — the psyche. We don’t want China and Russia and other
    countries leading us. We’ve always led.

And so the United States has. We’ve always led the way in devising 
destructive technologies and, for a good many decades, using them to 
wage war across the planet.

*The Alternative*
The first attempts to extend arms control to space came in the 1960s. 
The Limited Test Ban Treaty banned nuclear tests in space. The Outer 
Space Treaty of 1967 banned weapons of mass destruction from space, but 
all attempts to ban conventional weapons have failed. China and Russia 
have proposed something along those lines. The biggest naysayer? The 
United States, which argues that the treaty only forbids technologies 
that China and Russia currently don’t possess.

Perhaps — but that doesn’t prevent the United States from starting 
negotiations on various mechanisms to demilitarize space. Restarting 
negotiations to ban anti-satellite weapons would be a good start, but 
that might be too ambitious for the current moment.

So, cooperation among the principal space powers could begin with a 
suitable confidence-building mechanism, like a joint initiative for 
dealing with space junk.

The Europeans are out there trying to harmonize the various national 
initiatives for dealing with all the debris circling the earth. There 
are 14,000 pieces of garbage larger than 4 inches across (pieces of 
satellites, rocket stages), and even smaller items can do irreparable 
damage to a spacecraft. The United States could take a proactive 
approach to the commons by working with others to clean up space — and 
not just catalog the problem as it is doing now.

Alas, cleaning up trash is also probably a stretch for the Trump 
administration, given how blind it is to environmental problems, even if 
that trash is a national security hazard.

But what the United States is doing now with the new Space Force is the 
worst kind of response to the problem of the increased militarization of 
space. It is creating an imaginary “space gap” that the United States 
has to pour money into closing, just like the various missile and bomber 
gaps of the late twentieth century. It will increase the risk of 
conflict in space, not reduce it.

The Space Force is a huge white elephant, worse than the Reagan-era 
missile defense system dubbed Star Wars. In fact, it’s Star Wars without 
end, sequel after sequel hitting military theaters near you. Even in the 
unlikely event that all is quiet on the terrestrial front, the new Space 
Force and its promise to keep the universe safe from bad guys will serve 
to justify astronomical Pentagon budgets for decades to come.

/Featured image: The U.S. military is creating and filling an imaginary 
“space gap,” wasting funds while increasing the risk of conflict. 
3DSCULPTOR / GETTY IMAGES; EDITED: LW / TRUTHOUT)/

Source URL: TruthOut 
<https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-space-force-is-worse-than-reagans-star-wars/>



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