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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday June 19 2018, @01:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the The-only-good-bug-is-a-dead-bug dept.

Trump orders creation of space-focused U.S. military branch

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he was ordering the creation of a sixth branch of the military to focus on space, a move critics said could harm the Air Force.

"It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space," Trump said before a meeting of his National Space Council. "We are going to have the Air Force and we're going to have the 'Space Force.' Separate but equal. It is going to be something," he said later.

The United States is a member of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bars the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space and only allows for the use of the moon and other celestial bodies for peaceful purposes.

The idea of a Space Force has been raised before, by Trump and previous administrations, with proponents saying it would make the Pentagon more efficient. It has also faced criticism from senior military officials. Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein told a 2017 congressional hearing that creating a new space branch would "move us in the wrong direction." The Air Force oversees most of the nation's space-related military activity.

The move would require the budgetary approval of the U.S. Congress, which has been divided on the idea.

President Trump orders the creation of new Starship Troopers/Space Marines memes.

We should have a separate "Space" topic on SoylentNews at this point. We are all going to be drafted to fight aliens eventually.

Also at BBC (#winning image).

Previously: The United States Space Corps Wants You...
Congressional Panel Puts Plans for a US Space Corps in 2018 Defense Budget
The Case for a U.S. Space Force


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday June 19 2018, @03:31AM (11 children)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday June 19 2018, @03:31AM (#694815) Journal

    Just remember that the (un)Holy Trinity of the modern "conservative" consists in projection, hypocrisy, and willful ignorance, and their actions begin to...well, not make sense, but be understandable as to why they were chosen.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2018, @06:39AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2018, @06:39AM (#694858)

    If you were projecting, and you also had hypocrisy, and willful ignorance, wouldn't you then wrongly say that conservatives do all that? You just did.

    • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday June 19 2018, @04:35PM

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday June 19 2018, @04:35PM (#695110) Journal

      *Everyone* projects, and everyone has some degree of hypocrisy and ignorance. The difference is, I try to minimize mine and root it out day by day. Whereas people like that turn it into a lifestyle. Tu quoque is *also* a fallacy.

      --
      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday June 19 2018, @01:37PM

    Don't that apply to anyone who subscribes to any philosophy rather than figuring what they believe out for themselves?

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 19 2018, @02:31PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 19 2018, @02:31PM (#695006) Journal

    ROFLMAO!!

  • (Score: 3, Disagree) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 19 2018, @03:20PM (6 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday June 19 2018, @03:20PM (#695052) Journal

    I honestly don't think that characterizes conservatives any more or less than anyone else. Progressives like to think they don't do any of that, but they do just as much. How else could they pretend Obama didn't also treat illegal immigrants the same way? I remember the (few) stories that bucked the MSM narrative and reported how awfully Obama treated them. He, in turn, was merely continuing how Bush & Cheney treated them. So let's not pretend that the federal government has done anything but treat illegal immigrants disgracefully.

    But that's not the only yardstick by which to measure Obama's "progressive" administration. How about black progress under his 8 years? Did they make any real progress at all? Nope, their unemployment rate was multiples the average.

    How about administration transparency? Obama prosecuted leakers like Snowden mercilessly. Did he pardon Snowden when he was about to leave office? Nope. Greatest American hero in my lifetime, no one else having done so much for so many at the cost of his own future, but Mr. Progressive, Barack Obama, couldn't be bothered to do the one thing that was entirely within his power to do. And where were the principled progressives, the pundits, the very serious people (tm) then? Were they crying out and calling Obama every name in the book? Nope. Hypocrisy, much? Yep.

    Healthcare? Obama passed a plan designed by Mitt Romney. Progressives exercised a great deal of willful ignorance on that one.

    In short, it's not helpful at all to keep playing the game the lizard people want us to play, which is pointing fingers at each other instead of at them.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday June 19 2018, @04:31PM (4 children)

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday June 19 2018, @04:31PM (#695104) Journal

      See, Phoenix, I'm not a big fan of Obama. He was slightly less bad than Clinton would have been and (the other) Clinton was, but still basically a midline Republican, i.e., to the civilized world a borderline fascist. His extrajudicial drone killings did not escape me, nor his mania for deportations, nor his slavish (oops!) worship of the intelligence agencies, nor his opaque, arrogant cabinet. Don't get the false impression I treat this stuff like a team sport, okay? They're ALL corrupt as hell and have been since before I was born.

      --
      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2018, @06:25PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2018, @06:25PM (#695192)

        Kinda funny how Phoenix has switched to the conservative "team" since Trump got elected. Survival instinct? New Yorker pride?

        It is kind of amusing how pointing out the flaws of others immediately gets a bunch of bullshit reverse accusations. Whatabout Hannity? Whatabout Maddow? Whatabout North Korea? Whatabout the EMAILS!!??!?!

        Critical thinking at its finest!

        • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday June 19 2018, @07:52PM

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday June 19 2018, @07:52PM (#695246) Journal

          Christ knows. I've just about given up on humanity as a whole honestly.

          --
          I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
        • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 20 2018, @06:40AM

          by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday June 20 2018, @06:40AM (#695477) Journal

          I have not switched to the conservative "team." It might look like that to folks who view the world through the lens of teams. It's more that I have become disenchanted with teams, especially when those teams have been designed with such divisive, nefarious purposes in mind.

          (FWIW, I have no position on Hannity vs. Maddow. I cut the cord more than a decade ago. Before then I never watched Hannity, and have never. Maddow I used to enjoy on Air America but never really watched on TV, except for an exceptionally incisive conversation she had with Jon Stewart who simply eviscerated her as a media hack; it broke the spell of Maddow for me then and I never looked back.)

          What I was reacting to in Azuma's post was the characterization of conservatives, because it echoes the trope of the teams. It is hard to stop echoing that trope, but we must. We can't have watched the mask being ripped off the progressive "team" since the election, with even the #metoo stuff alone, and still buy into the fiction that one team is better than the other. We can't have the exposes on the election rigging the DNC did in the primary process, which has been substantiated, and claim that Trump colluded with Russians, which is unsubstantiated, to rig the general election with a hundred thousand dollars of Facebook ads and focus nearly exclusively in the national MSM narrative on the latter to the total exclusion of the former, and still talk about "this team is better than that team, these people are less or more virtuous than those people."

          It won't do to redefine the labels through a "No True Scotsman" hermeneutic cycle, in the way that many progressives are backing away from the DNC mess in a quest for "true" progressives, or in the way conservatives are parsing their perceived team into "true" conservatives vs. RINOs. We have to chuck it all out.

          We need a new discursive alignment that maps to the realities of today. That's all.

          --
          Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:21AM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:21AM (#695495) Journal

        I know that, Azuma; you do pierce the veils of BS out there.

        It was the use of the team labels I was reacting to. I wouldn't even bother to raise it with others, because they do treat it all like a team sport and pointing it out would be a waste of breathe. With you it's a plea to resist autonomically repeating tropes that need to die, because I am trying very hard myself not to autonomically repeat them. It is made harder by the absence of a newer, better intellectual framework to use instead, right?

        Yes, Trump wants to create a Space Force. It sounds silly, but China has been adding anti-satellite weapons to its arsenal and military doctrine. Other countries are quickly developing their own space programs. As much as we'd like to see it as a unifying, Federation of Planets experience, it would be foolish and contrary to historical experience to think space won't be militarized.

        It also sounded silly when Reagan announced the Star Wars program. But that research continued, and now we have the US navy implementing rail guns on its ships.

        History is replete with other shifts in military thinking. At the outset of WWII the Poles still had a cavalry with actual horses that was promptly slaughtered by German panzers. The old men who knew everything in the Polish military command surely thought armor was silly, too.

        Generals in the American Civil War still used the massed infantry formations that had been used in the American Revolution, but meanwhile rifling replaced smooth bores and Gatling guns were invented, and the casualties were accordingly massive.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday June 19 2018, @05:33PM

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday June 19 2018, @05:33PM (#695138) Journal

      How else could they pretend Obama didn't also treat illegal immigrants the same way?

      I think it's probably because he did not, in fact, treat immigrants in the same way.

      Attorney General Announces Zero-Tolerance Policy for Criminal Illegal Entry (Friday, April 6, 2018) [justice.gov]

      This is the result of a NEW policy.