Space Force: Tragedy or Farce?
Pushing the idea of a Space Force to please his own ego and his supporters, as President Trump seems intent on doing while currying favor with one slice of the military-industrial complex, is likely to prove an extremely costly error. Worse yet, the further militarization of space risks the future of the planet itself. Whether done within or outside the Air Force, as a Space Corps or a Space Force, putting missile interceptors or satellite weapons in space will undermine what remains of Cold War era arms control programs and so make both conventional and nuclear war more likely.
To go boldly into such a project is potentially folly of the ultimate sort. Of course, it's possible that, as with his wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, Donald Trump will continue to brag about "his" Space Force, while Congress simply refuses to fund it. Yes, the Trump 2020 campaign will go right on carrying out its brazen yet comical contest for picking the best logo for the force -- to be displayed MAGA-style on mugs, T-shirts, hats, and other campaign trinkets. The Space Force would then exist in the same sense that Star Trek exists, as a harmless cultural phenomenon that resonates with a certain segment of the populace.
As for those spaced-based weapons systems, perhaps they will go the way of such past efforts. Those have ranged from a Reagan-era proposal by the "father" of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, for a space-based, nuclear-weapons-driven x-ray laser -- a version of which made the cover of Time magazine in 1983 but thankfully was never built -- to "brilliant pebbles," an ill-fated initiative of George H.W. Bush's administration to put thousands of tiny rockets -- those "pebbles" -- into space in hopes that they could take out enemy ballistic missiles in flight. It also never materialized.
Instead of wasting money on research and development, perhaps the newest round of ideas for weaponizing space will simply be rejected from the outset. It's possible that a new Congress, taking office in January 2019 and far less in thrall to Donald Trump, might end up holding the line on the development of space-based weaponry, leaving the president's Space Force on hats, pins, and T-shirts but not in a future Pentagon budget. With the military-industrial complex divided against itself on the issue, it's just possible that the voices of sanity might for once prevail and we could go boldly into the future on this planet without having to keep an eye constantly on the skies.
William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands.
Copyright 2018 William D. Hartung
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
