Space Force Score

I don’t believe Donald Trump’s stupid idea of a new military branch called “Space Force” is a serious initiative.

First, it’s just going to do what the Air Force Space Command, which has 36,000 personnel and a budget this year of $8.5 billion, already does. Creating a new branch is creating a new fiefdom competing with the other branches for dollars. Republicans love to claim they’re against increasing the debt, but if you show them a picture of a rocket with “We’re America, bitch” painted on the side, they’ll throw $8 billion at it.

Is there an actual danger of our adversaries, like China and Russia, using space against us militarily? Yes, there is. But, posting horrible logo ideas on the Trump/Pence 2020 website isn’t going to counter those threats. It just fires up campaign donations. “Space Force” is also fun for deranged lunatics to chant at Trump rallies.  The Space Force idea seems more of a distraction and fundraising tool than a serious initiative.

Another reason I don’t think this is a great idea is that stupid people are supporting it. Donald Trump doesn’t understand that rivers flow into oceans. Their chairman of the Environment Committee threw a snowball on the floor of the Senate to prove climate change isn’t real. These are the guys to push scientific endeavors like a Space Force?

Before Secretary of Defense James Mattis flipped to support it, you couldn’t find anyone in the Pentagon who thought it was a great idea. People without any working knowledge of how anything detailed actually works, like Trump sycophants, think it’s a tremendous idea. These are the same people who don’t believe Russia was capable of meddling in and altering the 2016 presidential election but can build a Death Star. Being Dear Leader sycophants, they would believe and support any proposal from Trump, no matter how ridiculous, like making Mexico pay to build a wall on our southern border. The new normal is not being able to identify truly stupid ideas anymore, like baby jails, hiring your daughter and son-in-law as advisers, changing the paint job on Air Force One, listening to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, etc. This is the administration that gave a White House job to Omarosa.

Maybe the biggest reason that militarizing space is a bad idea is that we have a treaty against such measures. We’re not just a party to the international treaty, we helped write it. It’s based on the international treaty forbidding nations from militarizing Antarctica, which means we’ll probably start arming penguins.

Trump’s supporters worry if we don’t do it first, that the bad guys will militarize space. I worry that if we violate a treaty and are the first to fully militarize space, then we’ll be the bad guys.

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