Wednesday, June 20, 2018

United States Space Force (USSF)

President Trump is now pushing this.  As an old Air Force veteran I am luke warm to the idea.  I assume he is talking about creating a Department of the Space Force, with a separate Congressionally approved budget, and moving all the Air Force people and facilities working on space projects over to the new service, creating a new uniform, titles of rank, and regulations for the Space Force, in short setting it up like they did the Air Force back in 1947.  
   One objection to the idea.  The existing armed services actually engage in real combat, the kind where people get killed.  I don't see the Space Force mission as involving combat.  Launching missiles from an underground command center is pretty risk free.  Much of the morale that makes the current armed services so effective comes from membership in an elite fighting force.   In my Air Force units the enlisted men never fired a shot in anger or flew into enemy airspace, but they took great pride in keeping their fighter planes in the air, and combat ready.  Plus, the enlisted men bore the title of "Airman", until they made sergeant.  How would the Space Force enlisted men feel about bearing the title of "Spaceman"?
   The United States presently relies upon a whole lot of satellites, recon sats, comm sats, GPS sats, and others.  These satellites are not that far up, and in wartime the enemy could shoot them down, or jam their transmissions.  It would be nice to defend them somehow.  But I don't really see how this might be done.  All the enemy needs to do is lob something, with a little maneuvering fuel and an IR sensor, up as high as the target.  The target satellite is moving at 18,000 mph, and when it runs anything at that speed it is blown into dust.  Bright flash, easily seen from the ground.  Short of equipping all the satellites with a battery of anti-missiles, or nuking the enemy launch sites, I don't see any way to stop it. 
   If the independent Space Force could be freed of the existing Department of Defense (DoD) procurement regulations, it could achieve faster, cheaper, and better procurement, especially of expensive, custom built flight hardware.  Current procurement regulations slow everything down, jack up cost, and deliver inferior flaky hardware.  Getting out from under them would be a big improvement.  But, since the new Department of the Space Force would be under DoD, I don't see this as very likely. 

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