Posted on 08/10/2018 10:11:20 PM PDT by cba123
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. The Pentagon's top engineer criticized Russia and China this week for militarizing space, a move the Trump administration wants to address with the formation of a sixth service branch dubbed Space Force. His remarks came a day before Vice President Mike Pence laid out President Donald Trump's vision for creating the Space Force by 2020. "We are not the people who choose to weaponize space, but if we are challenged we will respond," Dr. Michael Griffin said Wednesday at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Ala. "The Defense Department is today working on a means to defend our existing capabilities and we will be working on methods to project our national power ...
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“Takes shape”?
We’re probably 5 years if not a decade behind the Chicoms & Russians and if in a year the “Space Force” had more than 2 rusty 747’s to fly generals around in, I’d be surprised.
We don’t need the bureaucracy and unnecessary overhead for a Space Force. Keep it under the aegis of the Air Force, I say.
Ping
Ping
The existing Space Command (38,000 people, been around for decades) conducts other space related activities as well, like launch operations at Vandenberg AFB.
Space Command was created as part of the Air Force back in 1982. Trump is advocating spinning it off on its own as a separate service.
From 1907 right through WWII the Air Force was still a division of the Army, the USAAF. It didn’t become its own service until 1947.
And its a mistake were still dealing with to this day IMO
I’m wondering if this new focus on our Space Force will lead to at least some declassification of capabilities for the sake of justifying past/present/future funding, if nothing else.
It is the uncountable quadrillion dollars in wealth from asteroid belt behind this.
The Air Force hierarchy needs to be made more accountable to the actual combat commands, and made to focus on things like air support.
Could it be combination of both separate but part of the Air Force like the Marines are part of the Navy?
The USAF simply needs to be forced to turn over fixed-wing close air support aircraft to the Army. Meaning Warthogs and anything similar. There is absolutely no good reason for allowing USAF to prevent this and it puts infantry at risk.
Trump should do this.
I think that’s the current arrangement. It looks like Trump intends it to be a separate service.
We currently have a lot of bureaucratic overhead duplication between the space systems R&D, procurement and operations activities of the Air Force, Navy, Intelligence Community, organizations within the DOD that lease commercial satellite capacity, organizations that buy commercial imagery, and aspects of NOAA.
Integrating all of this into a Space Force should reduce overhead, increase efficiency, reduce operational duplication, and eliminate jockeying between services for control of various space capabilities and the associated paralysis and delays. It should lead to quicker decision making rather than having six competing committees "studying" things for years and then nothing happens.
But if the Space Force has old-guard leadership, it isn't going to work. The key will be to put a non-nonsense leader at the top of this thing, preferably from industry, but not one of the Boeing, Lockheed, or Northrop Grumman people who have helped preserve and profit from the ineffective current structure.
No, this creates costly duplication of facilities. Aircraft maintenance, air traffic control, etc.
What's needed is for it to be the case that air force generals get their fitness evaluations done by the theater commanders (who will generally NOT be air force) based on how well the commanders see the air force handling support. And have the theater commanders have a big voice on what kind of planes get bought.
We have the XB-37 with a payload bay and robotic arm. Why haven’t we already mined every Russian and Chicom satellite in orbit?
Good response. I don’t agree with you (yet), but you raised valid issues. And I agree, if you have it, it needs to be run by someone that won’t get bogged down in bureaucracy.
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