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VP Pence Lays Out Trump's Vision For Establishing a US Space Force (nbcnews.com)
Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday laid out details for President Donald Trump's proposed new branch of the U.S. military responsible for protecting national security in outer space. From a report: In a speech at the Pentagon, Pence said the new Space Force would be established by 2020. "As President Trump has said, in his words, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space -- we must have American dominance in space. And so we will," Pence said. "Space is, in his words, a war-fighting domain just like land and air and sea." He added, "History proves that peace only comes through strength, and in the realm of outer space, the United States Space Force will be that strength in the years ahead." The Space Force would ultimately become the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces and would be equal to the other five, Pence said. The Department of Defense has prepared a report laying out the phases of creating the new branch, which will ultimately have to be reviewed and approved by Congress.
Elon is gonna become the biggest defense contractor on earth
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Yep. Major communication infrastructure is in the deep sea as well. If the only way to protect our interests is to display strength, the military is going to need a serious budget increase.
Jack of all trades are the master of none. With enough specialization the justifications to expand or reduce a particular asset of the military becomes large enough to be under its own authority and budget and command structure. What works for the Army (the backbone) does not work for the Marines (the tip of the spear) likewise what works for the Air Force may not work for a potential (IMO inevitable) Space Force.
As access to space becomes cheaper the strategic importance grows as does our nations dependency on access to space. It was an inevitability for the military to recognize space as a potential theater of war if the costs justified it to be.
Military spending accounts for ~16% of federal spending (discretionary and mandatory). It is one of the specific jobs of the federal government to do under the constitution. Health care and education are not enumerated responsibilities of the federal government.
Probably not. It's not too hard to figure out that stuff in orbit is extremely vulnerable and will be shot to pieces in the first 12 hours of any serious conflict. ICBMs and cruise missiles are more reliable, less vulnerable, and orders of magnitude cheaper. That's probably beyond the comprehension of Trump, Pence, the press and most of the bozos in Congress. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff will understand it.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Trump is more than a bit of a clown, but Pence scares me. He actually believes the crap he spouts. If the media was doing it's job his radical religious beliefs would have been front and center during the campaign. If he had his way we'd go back the the 50s with mandatory prayer in schools (yes, that was a thing until a SCOTUS decision shut it down).
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Horseshit. There's already been a $120 billion increase in the defense budget this year, and the DoD has already requested another $12 billion just to begin the process of realignment. Have you ever heard of an additional government agency that didn't cost more money? How much do you think it cost just to put on Pence's little ceremony today announcing the Space Force? How much will the grand military parade Trump is planning for November cost taxpayers (and China)?
OK, so we're going to be protected from the Klingon empire. Noted.
You know that additional $120 billion that we're spending on the military this year? It's almost entirely borrowed from China. Goddamn, man, do you not see the folly of going into debt to the country so you can build defenses against that country?
You are welcome on my lawn.
It only happens if the US issues formal notice that it is withdrawing from the Outer Space Treaty. The Outer Space Treaty forbids weapons of mass destruction anywhere above the Earth, to include installations on other celestial bodies. Warmongers like to try to claim this only forbids nuclear bombs, and therefore allows kinetic bombardment. This is some bullshit of the highest order. A megaton explosion is mass destruction regardless of how it was initiated.
As you note, the OST only outlaws WMDs in space, but low size kinetic or energy weapons - i.e. satellite destroyers - are not banned. And yes, taking out an enemy's GPS satellites would be a terrible idea due to the Kessler Syndrome it would lead to, but it's not explicitly or implicitly against the treaty.
Similarly, you could put armed guards on your station or moon base without violating the OST.
Bollocks. You can't hide nukes in orbit. The US already has anti-sat weapons too.
This would be a major escalation of it happened.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
1984 - "Excess" productivity transferred to continuous war so the "lower classes" can be kept poor and down trodden rather than getting an increased share in worldly goods. Nationalism cranked up to keep them accepting their poverty from the resulting continuous war.
It wasn't ALL Big Brother.
What makes it hard to hide nukes in orbit? Plenty of RTGs in orbit, and that lump of plutonium in my sat is absolutely an RTG, not a bomb. You can trust me, because I'm a politician.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Pentecostalism, which is the predecessor of modern-day Dominionism, arose out of folk churches.
They very literally believe - as did medieval scholars - that enough biblical exegesis coupled with faith and self-abnegation will allow them to engage in divination.
Never mind that such practices are expressly condemned in old testament texts, and would have been (relatively) heretical even to the batshit english puritans who settled the east coast of North America. The current Dominionist belief structure reflects a post-enlightenment level of absolute savagery, albeit dressed up in a nice suit for Sunday, but still red in tooth and claw.
Dominionists slough off proscriptions against divination as "old testament" and claim that the personal relationship with the numinous supersedes both older rules (which, granted, were intended to maintain control over belief change) and (the scary bit) logic and reason. They claim that only 'experiential faith' is valid, and all other forms of religious observance are shams.
The truly scary bit is that the notion experiential faith expressly incorporates the validity of revelatory experiences - and the mandate that revelatory experience is to be taken as truth, and challenges to it represent heretical behavior that requires prosecution in the name of holiness. Such a system has no internal checks and brooks no challenges, and is an ideal basis for an authoritarian state. For if A has a revelation and reveals it, B and C are bound to obey it, whether it is to their benefit or not.....
Thomas Paine, who I revere, has this to say about this sort of revelation-trumps-all thinking in Part2/Sec20 of Common Sense. He was responding to earlier forms of socially-sanctioned illogic occasioned by the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 40s, led by Jonathan Edwards and
"Revelation then, so far as the term has relation between God and man, can only be applied to something which God reveals of his will to man; but though the power of the Almighty to make such a communication is necessarily admitted, because to that power all things are possible, yet the thing so revealed (if anything ever was revealed, and which, bye the bye, it is impossible to prove), is revelation to the person only to whom it is made. His account of it to another person is not revelation; and whoever puts faith in that account, puts it in the man from whom the account comes; and that man may have been deceived, or may have dreamed it, or he may be an impostor and may lie. There is no possible criterion whereby to judge of the truth of what he tells, for even the morality of it would be no proof of revelation. In all such cases the proper answer would be, "When it is revealed to me, I will believe it to be a revelation; but it is not, and cannot be incumbent upon me to believe it to be revelation before; neither is it proper that I should take the word of a man as the word of God, and put man in the place of God." This is the manner in which I have spoken of revelation in the former part of the Age of Reason; and which, while it reverentially admits revelation as a possible thing, because, as before said, to the Almighty all things are possible, it prevents the imposition of one man upon another, and precludes the wicked use of pretended revelation."
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment