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Local politics, the county, and the world, as viewed by Tammy Maygra Tammy’s views are her own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Bill Eagle, his pastor, Tammy’s neighbors, Wayne Mayo, Betsy Johnson, Joe Corsiglia, President Trump, Henry Heimuller, VP Pence, Pat Robertson, Debi Corsiglia’s dog, or Claudia Eagle’s Cats. This Tammy’s Take (with the exception of this disclaimer) is not paid for or written by, or even reviewed by anyone but Tammy and she refuses to be bullied by anyone. See Standard Disclaimer.
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TRUMP’S SPACE FORCE
President Donald Trump signed the Space Force into being on Dec. 20.“This is a very big and important moment,” Trump said during a Friday ceremony at Joint Base Andrews where he signed off on the fiscal 2020 defense authorization bill, which establishes the Space Force as a sixth military service under the Department of the Air Force. There’s going to be a lot of things happening in space, because space is the world’s newest warfighting domain," he said. “America’s superiority in space is absolutely vital and we’re leading, but we’re not leading by enough, but very shortly we’ll be leading by a lot. After the legislation was signed, Air Force Space Command was immediately redesignated the Space Force, and 16,000 active duty and civilian personnel from AFSPC will now be assigned to the Space Force. But, technically speaking, there is only one person serving in the Space Force. The legislation gives Trump the authority to appoint a uniformed leader of the Space Force, known as the Chief of Space Operations. the 16,000 personnel transferring from Air Force Space Command are currently still considered U.S. Air Force airmen until they decide to permanently transfer over to the Space Force.“ That would be a deliberate process that goes through in a voluntary manner that allows the individual airman to have a choice to where they go. While all space operators, and certain specialists in space acquisition, intelligence and engineering, for instance, will be eligible to permanently transfer over to the Space Force, those who work for AFSPC as civil engineers, security forces, lawyers and other jobs, will remain U.S. Air Force personnel, the official said.
The Army and Navy aren’t part of the Space Force. The legislation, as currently passed by Congress, only allows for the Air Force personnel to be transferred to the Space Force — a big change from the administration’s legislative proposal, which could have also wrapped in space-related elements of the Army and Navy. However, the Defense Department’s long term vision of the Space Force is to consolidate space operators across the different military branches inside a single service. I bet many people are wondering why we need a space force, well here is the reason the government believes we need a space force. Satellites make much of modern warfare possible, through GPS systems, wireless communications and sophisticated weather forecasting. This makes them tempting military targets. The U.S. Air Force has been responsible for defending American satellites and spacecraft. President Donald Trump said in 2018 that the perils required a separate military branch. More than a year later, House and Senate negotiators have reached a tentative agreement to fund Space Force, the first new military service in seven decades. a Department of Defense plan called for aggressive offensive capabilities to defend U.S. interests in space. It included systems that could “degrade, deny, disrupt, destroy, and manipulate adversary capabilities” as well as joint space training and military exercises with U.S. allies. The force under consideration by Congress would sit within the Air Force, similar to how the Marine Corps sits within the Navy. The main threat is the ability to disable or destroy an adversary’s satellites from the ground. In 2007, China first used a ballistic missile to destroy its own old weather satellite orbiting 535 miles (861 km) above Earth; Russia has been testing a missile that could be used to strike and destroy a satellite or ballistic missile. It’s likely that other nations won’t be far behind. If you destroy a spy satellite, the flow of real-time intelligence from a particular spot in China or Iran could stop. A communications satellite that’s jammed from the ground could mean ground troops suddenly find themselves operating blindly. And because existing international treaties governing space are unclear, even civilian satellites could be targeted by nations looking to contain or punish their enemies. The U.S. military has already been working on systems to protect satellites from threats such as jamming and destruction by “kinetic” objects, such as missiles or other satellites. And there’s a top-secret Air Force aircraft, the X-37B, which has orbited Earth for expanded periods; its missions are unknown. In a speech in 2018, Vice President Mike Pence said America should have “dominance in space.” The creation of a Space Force could mean bigger research and development budgets. Some in Congress have called for weapons that could destroy ballistic missiles from space. On a more workaday level, the Space Force would likely take over the job, now performed elsewhere in the Air Force, of tracking the world’s active satellites to make sure they don’t collide with one another or with space debris and to notify owners to reposition their satellites if there’s a possibility of impact Trump claims that the Spce Force was his idea, well… that’s completely wrong. he was the first president to publicly call for a separate military branch for space. The debate over space militarization dates to at least the Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union first realized that controlling space could give them an edge in a conflict. In 1982, the investigative arm of Congress urged the creation of an “aerospace force” or “space force” to develop “laser battle stations in space” that could defend against a Soviet ballistic missile attack. The following year, President Ronald Reagan called for such a system, the Strategic Defense Initiative, which critics nicknamed “Star Wars.” (It never advanced beyond the research phase; its successor, the Missile Defense Agency, uses Earth-based systems like Thaad to destroy missiles at high altitudes.) In early 2001, a commission led by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld concluded that the U.S. wasn’t prepared to defend its enormous dependence on satellites. In 2017, House of Representatives members led by Representative Mike Rogers, an Alabama Republican, began pushing for a new “space corps. Other countries have such a department already, Russia created its Aerospace Forces in 2015. China’s space program was always part of its military; in 2015 the People’s Liberation Army added a Strategic Support Force in part to coordinate all the military’s space-related capabilities. SO now the US is in the same realm of other nations I guess. Or is it because of the rumor of the secret base on Mars which has triggered the president to act. There has been several people come out and say they were soldiers in the secret base on Mars and that we have been working with aliens for decades. And that there are reptilian and bug species which live under the planet that we are in direct communication with. Sounds crazy? well lets throw in some time travel and robots, then we can talk what is crazy. Whatever is going on the regular people will never know the truth anyways, so why worry if its true or not- there is nothing we can do about it anyways. But it is an interesting topic never the less.
Happy New Year, Tammy
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