Congress Close to Approving a New Space Army

[Boats]

Congress Close to Approving a New Space Army
Rhett Jones - Yesterday 2:17pm Filed to: STAR WARS
RE: http://gizmodo.com/congress-close-to...rmy-1796743127

While fighting climate change and providing health care are both just too economically burdensome for America, members of the House believe there’s still enough cash to fund a space army that would fight off... the space enemies?

The idea of preparing the US for war in space has found supporters off-and-on for several decades. Talk began to heat up again back in 2007 when China demonstrated an ability to destroy a satellite with a weapon from Earth. Earlier this year, military officials started beat the drum again, insisting that US needs space fortifications. It looks like they may get their wish. This week, the House Armed Services Committee voted 60 to 1 in favor of the creation of a new military branch to be called the United States Space Corps.

The proposal is part of negotiations for this years National Defense Authorization Act. The annual military budget will have to pass a vote in the full chamber before it becomes official but the overwhelming vote in the Armed Services Committee bodes well for the space army’s chances of becoming a reality.



The United States Space Corps would be the first new branch of the military since 1947, when the Air Force was formed. The current proposal would classify the USCC under the Air Force in a way that mirrors the Marines classification under the Navy. The Space Corps’ chief of staff would be ranked as equal to the Air Force chief of staff and would report to the Secretary of the Air Force.

A bunch of guys in Congress who believe space carnage is on its way might be feeling positive about this military overhaul but not everyone in the military feels the same way. According to CNN, the Air Force’s secretary and chief of staff are opposed to the plan. One reason is that we already have the Air Force Space Command and the military believes that the creation of the Space Corps would just cause more complications. Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters that “this will make it more complex, add more boxes to the organizational chart, and cost more money.” Wilson is currently fighting for budget increases and claims that the Air Force has become too small to accomplish what it’s expected to do. “If I had more money, I would put it into lethality, not bureaucracy,” Wilson said.

Representative Mike Rogers, R-Alabama, has been a major cheerleader for the Space Corps. “I’ve been shocked by the response by the Air Force leadership,” he said recently at a hearing. Speaking to NPR at the end of June, Rogers said that “The Russians and Chinese have realized that if they can take our eyes and ears out, which is what our satellites are, they might actually be able to compete or have an advantage against us.”

At least one member of Congress has expressed doubts about the plan. Arizona Representative Martha McSally, a Republican Air Force veteran, said that more discussion is needed. “This is sort of a shocking way to hear about a very major reorganization to our military, and I think it deserves at least a couple hearings and discussions on the matter at the full committee level,” McSally told reporters.

It’s really tough to say just how necessary it is to have an army dedicated to space warfare at the moment. On the one hand, we haven’t really experienced any signficant space aggression. On the other hand, the military can be very helpful in advancing technology and we do need to get off this rock at some point. On the other other hand, we’re facing an actual cyberwar that’s just getting started here on Earth and our president won’t even acknowledge it. Yeah, this is probably stupid.

[Boats]

Earlier post on this subject
Military Officials Say We Need to Prepare for Space War
By: Rae Paoletta - 3/30/17 10:02amFiled to: GODDAMMIT
RE: http://gizmodo.com/military-official...war-1793774231

What’s old is unfortunately new again: Recently, two military officials said that we should be getting ready for a war in space, a sentence I am ashamed to write in the year 2017. Their advice was seemingly bolstered by a Hill article penned by two national security experts this week, which reminded Americans that North Korea could in theory use a satellite weapon to send an electromagnetic pulse over the United States, triggering widespread blackouts and ultimately, societal collapse. It seems like all those Cold War fears Baby Boomers have repressed for decades are finally getting their chance!

“Just as nuclear assets deter aggression by convincing potential adversaries there’s just no benefit to the attack, we have to maintain a space posture that communicates the same strategic message,” US Navy Vice Admiral Charles A. Richard, deputy commander of U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), said on March 22nd during a conference in Washington, D.C., as reported by Space.com. “I submit [that] the best way to prevent war is to be prepared for war, and we’re going to make sure that everyone knows we’re going to be prepared to fight and win wars in all domains, to include space.”

As if that wasn’t unsettling enough, a few weeks earlier, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein told Washington Post writer David Ignatius that his branch of military is working toward “space superiority,” which he explained as “freedom from attack and freedom to maneuver.”

While Richard and Goldfein’s comments might seem out of the blue, there’s actually a long history of policy—and action—about space as a battleground. In 1967, toward the beginning of the Space Race, the United Nation’s Outer Space Treaty banned the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction from being used anywhere in outer space. But that didn’t stop Cold War powers from propagating the idea that an all-out space war was nigh—in 1983, President Ronald Reagan introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as Star Wars, which was a plan to launch an anti-ballistic missile system into space to protect Americans from a Soviet attack. Similarly, Russians entertained the idea of creating “suicide satellites,” which were essentially spacecrafts with rapid-fire cannons attached to them. Like SDI, the idea was eventually scrapped.



Then, in the early 2000s under the tenure of President George W. Bush, the notion of bringing our battles beyond Earth resurfaced again.

“The idea of ‘space war’ lived primarily in science fiction realms for many years, but became a serious part of US policy discussions with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who talked about the inevitability of space warfare— because war had occurred in other domains of air, land and sea,” Joan Johnson Freese, Professor and former Chair of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College told Gizmodo. “[He talked about] even a ‘space Pearl Harbor.’”

Things got a little more real in 2007, when China used an antisatellite weapon from Earth to blow apart one of its own weather satellites in space. Shortly after, the New York Times reported that arms control experts called the test a “troubling development that could foreshadow an antisatellite arms race.” Once president Obama took office, there was a short cooling down period until 2013, when China launched a rocket that was ostensibly for a science mission; reportedly, some researchers were concerned that this was a practice run for future antisatellite weapons. Gizmodo has reached out to the Department of Defense for comment and will update this post if and when we hear back.

“With the 2013 Chinese launch the consensus on strategic restraint began to unravel,” Freese said. “The launch, coming soon after both Russia and China testing maneuverable satellites in low Earth orbit—a capability that, until recently, had been demonstrated only by the United States—led to something of a ‘quiet panic’ within the US national space security community.”

So while the fear of a space war is nothing new, this perennial anxiety doesn’t get any easier to deal with. While recent comments from military officials might seem aggressive and sort of alarmist, Freese said that all things considered, they’ve dialed it back quite a bit. To be fair, a shooting war in space could be disastrous for astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), communications satellites, and by extension, the rest of us here on Earth. The human toll from an EMP attack that blacks out the electrical grid is also no laughing matter—although claims that such an attack would kill 9 out of every 10 Americans may be a gross exaggeration.

“Air Force General and STRATCOM commander John Hyten has toned down that muscular rhetoric, now seemingly advocating deterrence to avoid conflict, because conflict will damage or destroy the space environment critical to US military and civilian daily operations,” Freese said. “This more prudent approach makes much more sense—in terms of achieving US space goals of stability, assured access and protection of the environment—than saber rattling.”