Is this just more of the effort to destroy all international agreements? There's a treaty against weapons in space.
Bolton had to be paid for biting his tongue on North Korea, so he got to destroy another international agreement?
I'm pretty sure it's going to be animated, not live-action, so there's that.
I think I agree with KDrum; this is solely about doing something that will get him noted in the history books. Every history of the US military is going to have to say that, of the six military services, the US army, navy, marines and coast guard date back to the 1770s, the US air force was set up in 1947 under President Truman, and the US space force was set up in 2019 under President Trump.
"It was immediately sold for parts to a Chinese-based multinational recycling firm that made a payment to Wilbur Mills."
Trump doesn't know about books.
5, 6: Wilbur Mills! Ah, the innocent scandals of our youth!
AIMHMHB, the only US president whose name will survive the destruction of Earth is Richard Nixon, because it's his name on the plaque on the LEM descent stage.
Want there alresdy a Space Command? Not a separate branch but as part of the AF.
8: Turns out he has quite a legacy ---
... Wilbur D. Mills Treatment Center for Alcoholism, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences's Wilbur D. Mills Endowed Chairs on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, and the Masonic Grand Lodge's fundraising campaign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilbur_Mills#Sex_scandal,_alcoholism,_and_retirement
Is it me, or does it look like Mills's scandal was registered as hanging out with a stripper period, and little notice was taken of the fact that she ran out of his car and ran into the tidal basin trying to escape when the police came? (Oh, she was drunk/mentally unstable, okay.)
Trump: "It is not enough to have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space"
"Good thing we have a President that takes up so much space"
But if you don't make it it's own service it won't be able to achieve the heights of excellence professionalism esprit d'corps moronic never-ending tribal infighting expected of the American armed services.
Want there alresdy a Space Command? Not a separate branch but as part of the AF.
There was a separate Space Command (on the same level as Africa Command, CentCom and so on). They rolled it into Strategic Command a few years ago. There is still a USAF Space Command.
14: yes. Heaven knows no one is perfect on joint operations but the US military seems to be really appalling at it. It's as though there is some law mandating that no US operation shall ever have a unified command structure. WW2 famously had two entirely separate wars happening in the Pacific because the Navy and the Army refused to work together, at god knows what waste of lives and resources.
Much of the blame attaches to the USMC who generally refuse to work with the army if they can possibly avoid it.
There is still a USAF Space Command.
A perfect scenario for the "moronic never-ending tribal infighting expected of the American armed services."
17: Is this kind of structure and tradition helpful in preventing military coups?
Although if you accused me of wanting Space Command you would not be wrong.
You know what it is? I bet somebody told him that Xi made the PLARF a full service.
PLARF is such a great and yet simultaneously terrible acronym.
Is this kind of structure and tradition helpful in preventing military coups?
That is a good question.
According to Luttwak, "Coup d'Etat: a Practical Guide", the normal way to prevent coups is to have a large but poorly-equipped army to repress your population and maybe try to defend the country, and a smaller well-equipped force (like the Iraqi Republican Guard, for example, or the German SS) to protect your regime from the army, with commanders who are tied to the regime (for example, relatives of the ruling elite).
Often capabilities are deliberately split up when good sense would keep them together. German army formations, for example, didn't control their own anti-aircraft guns; they were manned by Luftwaffe personnel. That was partly empire-building by Goering, but also partly intended to ensure that a rebellious army couldn't defend itself against a loyal Luftwaffe. Other similar regimes after 1945 followed this model.
Common additional anti-coup measures include discouraging training for joint operations. Not only could a large joint exercise be used as cover for coup preparations, but it could build bonds of trust between the commanders involved which could be used to support a coup. A coup-proofed army will be unused to operating in large all-arms formations, with commanders of small formations (regiments, brigades) in the habit of referring all orders to central authority for confirmation before acting on them.
This is, of course, a recipe for military inefficiency. If your infantry brigades won't move without direct orders from the Ministry of Defence, then it is likely that they will stay in place and not do anything very much at all before they are chewed into little pieces by an oncoming US armoured division, UK airborne brigade or Israeli ugdah.
But in countries like that, the primary concern of the regime is not defending the country but defending itself; an efficient Egyptian army with divisional commanders used to operating independently in command of all-arms divisional task forces could no doubt have made a good stab at defeating Israel Tal, but it might also have turned itself around and had a stab at defeating Gamal Nasser.
The wartime Japanese government had major service rivalry/incompatibility, and no coups, but both civilian and military leaders were constantly afraid of assassinations from zealous junior officers, and that helped shape their behavior.
It's not really my period, but I don't think the Japanese army had that sort of structure. There was the army, and the naval infantry. There wasn't any sort of elite regime-protection force.
And hadn't there pretty much already been a military coup before the war?
Although IJN and IJA also ended up starting their own mostly separate, equally unwinnable wars, and the Kwantung Army had a go at starting a third. So there's that.
Yes, Japan was quite like the US in that respect, and less like Germany and the postwar German-influenced dictatorships in the Middle East and South America.
The Iraqi Perspectives Report is a really interesting look at how 25 felt from the inside under Saddam.
Yes, I just mean rivalry between army and navy was high. (Snide comments in history books about how zero of their equipment or procurement was mutually compatible, although I don't know if today's US forces hold up to that standard.)
28: Was Germany that different? All the German services also had their own separate ways to win the war. Difference being that Germany couldn't afford any of them.
Asking "what would a thirteen year old oafish bully do
if he somehow became President of the United States" is basically the complete explanation for ehat Trump does. Would a thirteen year old oafish bully demand Space Force? Yes. The only thing that Occam's razor-like question can't explain is why he spends so much time playing golf, but maybe some 13 year old bullies like golf.
Wacky hijinks will kill us all.
I'm surprised he hasn't turned his attention to UFOs by now.
Tell him they're brown aliens and maybe he'll get preoccupied by that.
Do you think the green attendants cheat for him while he's right there or while he isn't looking, so he can pretend?
What would a thirteen-year-old oafish bully do? I think he cheats all by himself, shamelessly.
This song comes next on the record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzvtEtZZ014
This one completes the set. Which ought to have been in the goddam canon somehow.
The idea of a Space Command has been around for quite a while now, especially in the more paranoid sectors. Shortly after the hackers developed the first Space War program, Saga Magazine sent their man to investigate:
http://www.kaleberg.com/spacewar/
Long story short, the reporter has never played a computer game before which wasn't surprising since a cheap computer cost more than a house. There had to be a reason the US government was spending all that money to develop a space combat training system. What aren't they telling us? This was a cult favorite in gamer circles in the early 1970s.
32 is excellent. Remember the trucks on the White House lawn? Just that. The key quality is puerility.
43 The 300+ Daniel Drezner Trump toddler thread is pure gold.
https://twitter.com/dandrezner/status/856876322001432581?lang=en
17. My recollection is that MacArthur (aka "the army") wanted to roll up the Japanese forces by taking one big island after another along the more southerly route (which would get him to the Philippines more quickly) and the Navy (Nimitz, Halsey, et al.) wanted to take the most direct route possible and inadvertently invented the "island-hopping" strategy that left contained, blockaded Japanese forces behind them as they moved along an arc leading toward Saipan (from which one could bomb the Japanese homeland) and then to Okinawa and Iwo Jima.
The USMC certainly didn't like the Army and vice versa, but the Navy didn't like him either, and figured they could get there faster doing it their way without as much wastage of Marines (though they wasted plenty). Special bonus: no MacArthur in all the meetings!
OP: To be on topic, there is really nothing for a Space Force to do, so this is just about publicity and preening. We have a Space Command already, and it does all the stuff we actually care about (monitoring what's going on in space). If the Chinese or Russians start putting military muscle in space or messing with our satellites and such, this all would change. They may have already; there are some items in space that are ... interesting.
