National Space Council Meeting to Focus on Space Force
Vice President Mike Pence addresses NASA employees, Thursday, July 6, 2017, at the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (Credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)
The Trump Administration’s plan to create a sixth branch of the Armed Services named Space Force will he the topic of the next meeting of the National Space Council on Tuesday.
The council, which is chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, will hear from three witnesses:
- Ret. Lt. Gen. James K. “Kevin” McLaughlin, former Deputy Commander, U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), Fort Meade, Maryland;
- Doug Loverro, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy in the Obama Administration; and,
- Mark Sirangelo, former head of the space division at Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC).
The meeting will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. EDT at the National War College in Washington, DC. There will be a live stream of the meeting on whitehouse.gov and NASA TV.
9 responses to “National Space Council Meeting to Focus on Space Force”
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Space farce
What ever. I am focusing on the New World Order, Leave Me Alone or SRB strategy. SRBs are cheap and easy to build. They can last a very long time in storage. If a country feels threatened by any other country, simply build a SRB with a hi explosive warhead that will reach that country. Short, medium or long range. All countries has hi value cities or targets. Would anyone like a 2000lb bomb to explode downtown? Trumps’ 500 cruise missile drop on Syria would be laughed at. Build enough to overwhelm any defense. If they do not believe you, launch a few satellites. Or use a pressure switch to explode one 10 miles above one of their cities. This would also tell the people that if you have elected a leader and Whoops! he is crazy and is doing something that would hurt you to remove him quickly.
I am just thinking about this and I may have missed something. SRBs forever!
Sorry, Sam. That was incoherent as a whole, incorrect in detail, and has nothing to do with the article you are commenting on. Was that as intentional as Mr Oler’s bit?
It was the kindest thing I could think to say
SRBs with “hi explosive” warheads are also called “ICBMs”. If you start launching them at people you’ll start WW3, because everyone will assume they have nuclear warheads.
What Space Force mission could be considered independent of the other armed services? (Like strategic bombing was for the Air Force.) Don’t say satellite protection, because those satellites play a supporting role for earthbound military operations. Don’t say spaceborne offensive capabilities, because those are prohibited by treaty and international law.
I may be beating a dead horse, but without Planetary Defense (from asteroids with our name on them) a separate Space Force doesn’t make much sense. Their “independence” will be jealously resented by the other services and when push comes to shove (yearly, at budget time) the interests of the Space Force will take a back seat. This is exactly opposite of what took place to the Air Force when it was created in 1947. At that time, strategic bombing was poised to become the most critical mission capability of the new Cold War and it coincided with the introduction of nuclear weapons. During the 1950s, the Air Force budget nearly ate the Army budget.
For whatever reason Trump really, really, really wants a Space Force, it had better be chartered in a way that will provide it with viability and a guiding ethos. Otherwise, it will just be a bureaucratic exercise that fails to inspire anyone or have any staying power.
Your objection is baseless. None of the armed services are really independent of one another. That’s why the word “joint” shows up so much in military terminology – it’s not ’cause they’re smokin’ dope.
U.S. space-based assets are, without question, vital to the ability of all extant military services to perform their missions. That, of course, makes them tempting targets for attack by enemies, especially as said assets are completely defenseless at present. Both Russia and China have weapons systems designed to attack U.S. space-based assets. The U.S. has no real choice but to respond. There is no status quo, only a changing situation that puts the U.S. further behind the eight ball with every day we don’t get busy doing things to repair a rapidly deteriorating correlation of forces.
Improving the capabilities of U.S. space-based assets and fixing their current vulnerabilities will be the main purposes of the Space Force. That will, among other things, require the stationing of both defensive and offensive weapons systems in Earth orbit and possibly elsewhere in cis-lunar space.
This is not prohibited under international law. The Outer Space Treaty prohibits only nuclear weapons or other WMD’s in space.
The Russians have had an ASAT capability since the 1960’s. I’m still not feeling the urgency in 2018. If, on the other hand, the Space Force is really intended to blind adversaries before a nuclear first strike, I wonder when Trump has that scheduled so that I can make sure I’m far away when it happens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/…
We need to proliferate and both passively and actively defend space assets so that we are not realistically blindable prior to an enemy first strike. Then we need to make it abundantly clear that any nation attempting such a thing will be permanently blockaded from space and any remaining assets of theirs there will be destroyed. Russia remains a modest threat in this regard at present, but will fade to essential insignificance over the next three decades. China, a rising threat, is the real object of such an exercise.