Space force

Last week’s announcement of US President Donald Trump to add a space force to its five military branches did not surprise the world more than his generals. The US armed services are supposed to be cost-cutting after spending at least $3.6 trillion in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria from 2001 to 2017 based on estimates by Brown University researchers.

There is no question as to capability as the US is a space-faring nation since the space race with the then Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s.

The main issue is the price American taxpayers would have to pay to copy the Russian Space Force established in 1997 and to avoid being overtaken by China and India, the two emerging powers in terms of space exploration technology and capability.

The Pentagon’s budget for space-related defense systems is around $7 billion this year and it plans to increase this to $12.5 billion for 2019. For the proposed stand-alone space force, the cost is still unclear.

Trump’s planned space force takes off from a 2017 space corps provision under the defense budget bill that was eventually shot down in the US Senate last year. But this proposed military branch, lampooned by American TV shows as an army of camouflaged and armed astronauts trained to combat “alien” invaders, is actually a defense against Earth-based and orbiting threats to US national security.

Trump is actually not initiating the militarization of space which has already happened technically with the hundreds of military satellites hovering above the atmosphere and ballistic missiles passing the zero-gravity zone during test flights.

Trump just wants the US to keep its dominance in space wary of the competition from China, Europe, India and Russia in planetary exploration.

In case of war, a space force would not be scrambling fighter spacecrafts to engage in orbital dogfights a la Star Wars.

They would still fire conventional weapons to destroy, disrupt, disable or displace enemy military satellites and Earth-based military installations remotely using computers hidden somewhere in orbit, the US mainland, a stealth plane, a secret base in the Pacific Ocean, a submarine or a naval ship.

Even with space forces, a space war is a long way to go, except in a sci-fi movie.