This is not a joke, this is an actual branch of their military.
This should be alarming because it’s only a matter of time before they start fielding troops in space.
This is not a joke, this is an actual branch of their military.
This should be alarming because it’s only a matter of time before they start fielding troops in space.
It’s nothing new. Pretty much every nations with space assets have a branch in military deal with space-related stuff. Most smaller nations relegate this to part of their air force, while larger nations have their own sub-branch or entire branch dedicated to it. For example, Chinese space warfare branch is part of PLA Strategic Support Force, while Russian’s version is known as the Russian Space Force, one of the three sub-branches of Russian Aerospace Force.
The US Space Force were created because of bureaucratic and political reasons (TL:DR: they were removed about Air Force not giving them the budget for their toys), but the exact same thing has been existing in one form or another since the dawn of space race. To say the recent development is alarming is misleading since US imperialist agenda toward space is probably older than Sputnik itself.
This. It was just a reorg. Existing air force stuff was moved to its own branch for uhhhhh reasons.
It was likely done, in part anyway, as a provocation to Russia and China. Having 1) a subordinate space command, which can’t lobby effectively for funding and weapons, and 2) an independent if severely underfunded “civilian” space agency (NASA) sends the message that the US is mainly interested in space exploration for scientific reasons. By contrast, moving space operations to their own special branch is an open statement of intent to weaponize space.