Hilarious memes aside. There was an insightful comment on reddit that covered the specifics of what this would actually mean.
Trying to format it properly here:
Let's read the article:
So this is largely focused on organizational change.Trump previously floated the idea of a space corps in March in a speech to military members in California. The proposal, which has received congressional support in the past, is facing criticism from the Pentagon. The creation of such a force would mark the first new military branch since the Air Force was established in 1947.
"I was saying it the other day – 'cause we're doing a tremendous amount of work in space – I said, maybe we need a new force. We'll call it the space force," Trump said in March. "And I was not really serious. And then I said, what a great idea. Maybe we'll have to do that."
In fact, the military has conducted operations in space for a long time, says Terry Virts, former commander of the International Space Station and a 30-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force.
For Virts, the debate is "not advocating for somehow militarizing space. That happened 50 years ago," he tells Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd. "Every nation on Earth that has a significant military has some space component to it. What I'm advocating for is really making it more efficient and a more effective way to organize the military."
Currently, the Department of Defense is actually the umbrella organization for the Department of the Army, Department of the Navy, and Department of the Air Force.
The Army falls under the Dept. of the Army, the Air Force under the Dept. of the Air Force.
The Navy and Marine Corps are separate branches that both fall under the Dept. of the Navy.
Just so you understand: that's larger than NASA which has ~18,000 employees.Most of the country's military operations in space are handled by the U.S. Air Force Space Command, a division of the Air Force that employs about 36,000 people at more than 130 sites around the world.
So Air Force Space Command actually does quite a bit - they are responsible for launching, maintaining, upgrading, and operating GPS, for instance. They also track space debris for NASA and other organizations, as part of their bigger job:One of the Space Command's main priorities is to operate GPS, weather and communication satellites, Virts says.
The military has opposed the idea on the grounds that more bureaucracy isn't what the military wants in an era where people want them to spend less, not more:"A big part of what Space Command does is called space situational awareness," he says. "They track objects in space and keep track of what other countries are doing in space. There's a lot of what happens in space that directly affects combat operations in the Army or Air Force or Navy."
As far as some questions/points people have raised:For years, the Pentagon has opposed the idea of creating a space force because leaders argue it would make the Defense Department bureaucracy more complicated.
"The Pentagon is complicated enough," Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters last June. "This will make it more complex, add more boxes to the organization chart and cost more money. If I had more money, I would put it into lethality, not bureaucracy."
Isn't this Weaponizing Space?
So actually, the Outer Space Treaty only prohibits WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) in Earth orbit, on the Moon, or on any other celestial body or stationing them in orbit. It also exclusively limits the Moon and other bodies for peaceful purposes which prohibits military maneuvers, facilities, etc.
There is no prohibition on conventional weapons or for the use of space for military purposes though: you can certainly use spy satellites, communications satellites, weather satellites to support military operations, etc. in space.
GPS, after all, was invented by the military for military use in the 70s before it became available to the general populace.
What would this Space Force Do?
Per the article, and other articles on the subject, it seems to largely be focused on keeping the Space Command operations of Air Force separate and independent from the Air Force.
Keep in mind that the Air Force has an extremely broad mission - from maintaining air superiority to its strategic bomber force to maintaining the land-based ICBM and bomber-based nuclear deterrence/stockpiles to maintaining the country's airlift/aerial refueling command.
Space, as you can imagine, falls to the wayside when the different areas compete for funding or focus.
What Congressional members are proposing is that by creating a separate branch, it will be focused entirely on space and space-operations so that they don't have to compete with other parts of the Air Force for funding anymore.
Will this lead to an arms race? Another Space Race?
Hard to say - every modern military has space operations and increasingly relies on space for communications, intelligence, reconnaissance, etc. Even seemingly mundane things - like predicting the weather - is incredibly important, if history is any indication.
It's hard to capture the Space Race of the 60s which pitted not only the US against the Soviet Union, but pitted Western styles of government and economy vs. Eastern/Soviet styles of government and economy, etc. and thus transcended a lot more than just geopolitical boundaries (hence why so much was focused on PR to generate innovation and interest to show dominance in our way of living, etc.)
Today, you don't see that so much - there isn't nearly the clash of ideals/culture between the US and China or Russia.
Will this spur advancements in the area?
Maybe.
After all, the military has had classified reusable space planes for nearly a decade now, and the history of the DOD and DARPA teaming up with NASA on a ton of experimental planes and rockets is long.
To say nothing about sending some personnel that you may have heard of that simultaneously worked in the DOD and NASA, or the numerous DOD facilities they share with space industry and NASA in general is huge.
People often forget that the government agencies are in it together.
