Space Force, Go!
“We will go to the moon. We will go to the moon, in this decade, and do the other things… not because they are easy, but because they are hard — ”
— Sorry, I’m thinking of the wrong presidential oratory that launched an era of American dominance in space. President Kennedy’s eloquent aspiration to the highest achievement of human civilization, the speech which created NASA and eventually sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon, was not actually the one I was trying to remember.
No, I meant to invoke the more recent executive declaration of Lady Liberty’s conquest of the cosmos, which is every bit as poetic and rousing as the former, at least if one has taken a substantial quantity of OxyContin. If I may:
“I’ve got two words for you: Space. Force.”
-President Donald J. Trump
I could see how an 11 year-old could find those words as inspiring as my own father found JFK’s at that age. Don’t get me wrong: I definitely would’ve been able to tell how stupid that name was when I was 11, because it sounds so made-up and generic; however, the mere mention of space does inspire the boundless sense of adventure that kids see in the night sky, reinforced by countless Saturday morning cartoons and the Star Wars they like so much. The ‘-Force’ bit gives it just a little aggressive, martial edge, too.
On the other hand, if you’re more than 11 years old and you’re still into anything about this concept, you’re an idiot who knows nothing about the military, space, or physics. You’re also a masochist as a taxpayer, and in spite of your own sentience, you’ve been taken in by a nonsense phrase which Trump blurted out because he thought it would sound cool.
Counterintuitively, the words don’t actually sound cool at all. Like so many hack sci-fi writers before him, Trump just jammed the word ‘Space’ into an extant phrase (say what you will about him, but the man has a wondrous imagination) and despite the ecstatic reaction from the whooping jackasses at his rallies, the results fall flat. ‘Space Force’ sounds like a knockoff brand of action figures you’d find on a forgotten shelf at T.J. Maxx, the kind whose overtly cheap packaging evokes a Dickensian tableau of latchkey kids frittering away the long, lonely hours of their single mother’s meth-fueled double shift at a rest-stop Sbarro on a forgotten stretch of I-80.
When I look at the above selection of mock-ups, sent out so that Trump supporters could pick their favorite, I can’t help but think that his people designed them with that exact same forgotten child of the American underclass in mind. Every single one of these looks like it was lifted off a $5 children’s graphic tee from Old Navy, found crumpled and heavily discounted in the bottom of the clearance bin at Ross.
Not one of them looks remotely like the emblem of a uniformed service, and they aren’t even patriotic. For all the stellar motifs, there is only one tiny star in the 5-pointed style of the Stars & Stripes, and only the top left has a color scheme that is specifically American in any way (the top right is a straight-up Communist version of the NASA logo). The one on the bottom right suggests that America is now planning to conquer Mars by force, which further implies that NASA is no longer involved with the mission. That would be appropriate, since the only apparent stylistic requirement was that they steal some element of NASA’s design.
And that’s just the civilian redundancy. There is already a space division at the very same United States Air Force that Trump was half-thinking of when his syphilitic brain made this bullshit up, and Space Command has absolutely no strategic, financial, or administrative reason to be separated from the USAF proper. We are creating a fake branch of the military in order to realize a rambling applause line that killed in a half-empty middle school gym, evoking a vague mission that sounded vaguely badass to someone who is vaguely a person. In terms of Trump’s thinking, it’s The Wall: In Space.
The worst part of all this pointless foolishness? The truly unbearable irony? If we had the sixth branch we really need two years ago, we wouldn’t be listening to any of this crap, because Trump wouldn’t be the president.
Information warfare didn’t seem like it was something America had to be worried about before 2016. We invented the internet, so presumably we were always going to be the best at internetting, even if South Korea had faster connections or whatever. Furthermore, we won the Cold War, so our open society had proven its political and cultural invincibility for all time. We held to that belief even as we built platforms that allowed anyone on Earth to anonymously participate in that open society, and we kept those avenues as unregulated as possible to “spur innovation,” despite that meaning “spurring 15 people in San Francisco to have more money than God” in practice.
Two years after this foolishness came to its illogical conclusion, when Russia used our own time-wasting crap and seditionist conservative media against us, fomenting the mass hysteria required for 63 million literate adults to vote for the worst person on Earth, our collective ego still can’t bear the thought that we let a Russian psy-op really affect our politics. We can’t leave our comforting fantasy that we are the freest country on Earth and thus have the freest form of free will, so we are too free-minded to fall for proven exploits of human psychology. Also, as a fiercely democratic people, our image of how much actual thought we put into our votes is excessively flattering, to say the least.
We are so certain of our individual democratic integrity that we are refusing to enact any policy response that admits any real, concrete effect of Russian lies, propaganda, or sock puppetry on our votes: in other words, we’re sticking our heads in the sand and letting them do it again. It’s a deep a denial that has support at both ends of the spectrum, on account of all the Sanders voters who still believe that they had only logical, principled reasons to hate Hillary Clinton with an intensity normally reserved for ethnic cleansing.
Even after this great catastrophe, we hold to a blind, collective belief that we’re too smart for information warfare to work on us, but we are just as human and gullible as anyone from the places where these dark arts were created and honed. Because of our refusal to face our own fallibility, Russia is still getting away with putting a six year-old child in our highest office.
It doesn’t have to be like this. The Pentagon needs a unified cyber command, certain roles need to be redelegated from Justice to Defense by statute, and we need installations monitoring every fiber line that crosses America’s borders. I won’t pretend to understand the particulars, at least anymore than I already have, but we need a robust force of coders who are constantly working on the next Stuxnet, so once the internet of things and self-driving cars put American lives in the hands of networked systems, foreign aggressors will know that any deadly cyberattack on our soil will be met in kind.
If our military had faced reality a few years back, and Russia had gone into 2016 knowing that American cyber command was armed and ready to rain digital fire and death upon them— hacking their internet censors and regime spooks, spreading counter-propaganda among the Russian people, dropping retaliatory data dumps on Putin’s corruption, or any other number of possible tricks — they probably wouldn’t have pulled the stuff they did. They’re a weak, broke country that attacked us for freezing the bank accounts of like 30 people, so they can’t afford to deal with real consequences.
But Putin knew going in that no such response would be forthcoming. America spent the past decade & change ceding the digital battlefield to Chinese espionage (notably around IP theft) without mounting any meaningful national retaliation, so Putin was sure that his own efforts wouldn’t be met with substantial resistance or unacceptable consequences. America gave birth to the internet, and we’ve grown richer yet off its rise, but we’ve made it quite clear that we take its vast power for granted.
So we got caught with our pants down, the GRU hit us with impunity, and their resounding success crippled our ability to respond — if you weren’t already aware, Donald Trump will not be fighting back against “the cyber.” We don’t even know what effect they had on our voting machines, voter rolls, and state election commissions, and we’re not really doing anything to find out. Apart from a handful of piddling legislative actions whose very existence is taken as a personal insult by our Commander-in-Chief, we’re doing nothing to prepare, so whatever Russia did to us last time, they can do it again.
America’s most pressing strategic imperative is being ignored while our enemies destroy us by that very means, and the agent of that destruction ain’t doing a damn thing about it because he likes the results. In lieu of answering this very real threat against the United States, we’ll have to settle for a glorified bureaucratic reshuffle of the USAF that will somehow cost $80 Billion over the next five years.
At least we will sleep soundly knowing that our President made at least $500M in kickbacks on the whole deal, and that aliens won’t be messing with Earth anymore.
