Military Satellites Will Now Be Operated by the Space Force:
The U.S. Army transferred its satellite ground stations to the Space Force on Monday as the latest step in establishing the sixth branch of the U.S. military devoted to demonstrating national dominance in space.
The U.S. Department of Defense announced the transfer last year, which took effect on August 15. All in all, 15 global units with 319 military and 259 civilian personnel from the Army and Navy will transfer to the Space Force's Space Delta 8, the unit responsible for satellite communications, as stated in the announcement. Space Delta 8 is now in charge of the Wideband Global Satcom and Defense Satellite Communications System, a constellation of military communication satellites, as well as the Global Positioning System constellation for both military and civilian users, among other communication satellites, according to Space News. These satellites were originally built by the U.S. Air Force, and later operated by the military for decades.
In addition to the satellites, the U.S. Army also transferred $78 million to the Space Force's budget to cover their costs.
[...] But other branches of the military aren't totally out of the satellite game just yet. DARPA, part of the department of defense for military research, recently announced that it's working on a plan to standardize communication between satellites in Earth orbit (including civil, government, and military satellites). The U.S. Army is also looking into ways to use space technology for nontraditional warfare.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2022, @12:19PM (5 children)
Anyone know if this marginalization is going to improve or hurt the general situation?
Historically, I have a feeling that the different services (Army, Navy, etc) don't cooperate all that well, so maybe separating satellite comm and out into a new entity will open up some doors and improve the service & utilization of the satellites we have. Or, the opposite could happen and this new communication branch of the pentagon will become the latest BOFH, and no one will get better service.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2022, @12:21PM
marginalization --> reorganization (my spell check error)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 18 2022, @02:16PM (3 children)
IIRC part of the rationale for Space Force was that the Air Force leadership was not taking Space Command seriously enough. Now each branch is being made to dump their satellite and space stuff into Space Force. I think the Army and Air Force enjoy having satellite images of things to destroy, so it should work out in the end?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18 2022, @05:21PM
Right, just waiting for the Army to raid a target found by sat photo, and then the Air Force targets the same area a few minutes later with a missile. Of course the snafu (and dead Army group) will be blamed on latency by Space Force, not updating the pics of the area while the Army raids it.
Perhaps there is battlefield coordination in place to limit this, but I bet it's not perfect. And in the case of "international terrorists" there isn't a defined battlefield, they could be anywhere in a variety of countries.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2022, @12:10AM (1 child)
The space force started as a half-baked off-the-cuff comment resulting in a sudden need and desire to fulfill by some, to show that it wasn't a half-baked and off-the-cuff idea. Everything that was initially put forth to justify the need was already taken care of by existing groups and commands. Once it gained enough steam and was declared to finally be a thing, then they had to go out and find missions for it to support. In Washington, the size of your budget is proportional to the power/influence you have (note the $75M transferred statement), and they pushed hard to put all DoD space stuff under them. The problem with that, those things always sound like good ideas (cut out redundancy! Streamline and efficiency!), but of course never turn out that way (c.f., The Department of Homeland Security). One of the reasons the different branches had their own space groups in one form or another is that the different branches have different needs. What's important to the Army isn't the same as the Navy and Air Force, etc. If all of space was put under one branch (and the Air Force had pushed that idea before), most of the space development focus would gravitate to the needs of that branch. That concern is still here [brookings.edu] since the Space Force was largely carved out of the Air Force, and a number of these turf wars have already been fought [airforcemag.com].
Now we're stuck with this thing, which maybe will be good, maybe it will be excessive and wasteful bloat (c.f., The Department of Homeland Security). We'll have to see how it turns out, which will depend upon whether they make good organizational decisions and empower the right people to do the job right (I know, we're doomed, but one can hope). Here's a very comprehensive take on the issues surrounding setting up this new military branch [cato.org].
Sorry, I started to write some kind of simple reply to your origin rationale comment, but it just kept getting longer and longer!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 19 2022, @03:09AM
Bloat and pork is the safe prediction. Maybe we'll be surprised. In the very long term they will get involved with the asteroid mining biz if humanity survives that long. Planetary protection from asteroids would be a nice mission for them but there just isn't any big threat from the largest near-Earth asteroids within the next couple of centuries. I guess there's potential for a hard-to-detect but worse-than-Chelyabinsk impactor (0 deaths, 1,491 injuries, $33 million damage).
Anti-satellite warfare fully in space (craft/sat vs. sat) seems to be materializing so their jobs will get more interesting, at least.
Space Force is/was bipartisan and the idea predates any interest by Trump:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force#History [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2022, @04:44AM
C'mon, Space Force. It's endgame civilization here, tragedy/comedy. Gotta admire the Universe, she knows poetry.