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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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<h1 class="reader-title">Trump's Space Force is Worse Than
Reagan's Star Wars<br>
</h1>
By John Feffer – January 21, 2020</div>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Yet what Trump has put together is fundamentally
different, and potentially more destabilizing, than the
previous incarnation.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p><strong>The Next Big Fight</strong><br>
The new Space Force nearly didn’t get off the ground.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>That also entails coordination with allies. The Space
Force is already liaising robustly with European and
Asian partners.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><strong>Space Race</strong><br>
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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p><strong>War Over the Worlds</strong><br>
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.</p>
<p><a
href="https://orinocotribune.com/chinese-government-rejects-us-creation-of-space-force/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">RELATED
CONTENT: Chinese Government Rejects US Creation of
“Space Force”</a></p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?’”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It’s no mystery what this “alternative nation” is.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And that’s where they intersect with Trump as well. At
a meeting of the National Space Council in 2018, he
said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>The Alternative</strong><br>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>So, cooperation among the principal space powers could
begin with a suitable confidence-building mechanism,
like a joint initiative for dealing with space junk.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>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)</em></p>
<p><a
href="https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-space-force-is-worse-than-reagans-star-wars/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Source URL:
TruthOut</a></p>
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