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Johnson argued that if it didn’t seize mastery of space the US would be just as helpless as a post-Second World War state without an air force. ‘That is the ultimate position – the position of total control over Earth.’ As Johnson saw it, it was in space that decisive power over humanity’s future would be won or lost:Ĭontrol of space means control of the world, far more certainly, far more totally than any control that has ever or could ever be achieved by weapons, or by troops of occupation … From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the Earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change temperate climates to frigid.Ī state that controlled space would have the ability to refashion the Earth itself according to its will. ‘But there is something more important than any ultimate weapon,’ Johnson told the Senate. The first hydrogen bomb test had taken place five years earlier.
#SPACE WARFARE BOOKS SERIES#
In January 1958, Lyndon Johnson, then Senate majority leader, convened a series of hearings that occupied the front pages of newspapers every day. Sputnik provoked a frenzy among the American political establishment. The US already had the technology needed to build an artificial satellite but had refused to fund one. As a catalyst for military development, however, it was unmatched. As a satellite, Sputnik was unimpressive: a beach ball with antennae that maintained orbit for just three months. But it was the old Soviet Union that fitted the part best – and never better than in 1957, when Sputnik was launched into orbit from a test range on the Kazakh steppe. The latest existential phantom is the ‘malign influence’ of China on the Indo-Pacific and beyond. The new millennium saw the (never convincing) rise of transnational ‘terrorism’. In the 1990s the ‘threat’ was Japanese corporate power. To ward this off, the political class periodically conjures up imminent threats to US superiority. The American strategeion sees itself as waging a constant battle against complacency. Hyten, has described space war as ‘inevitable’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John E. When asked about this, the second in command of the space force, David Thompson, said: ‘We don’t need to tell the world everything we’re doing.’ The US hasn’t yet made what aerospace analysts call the transition from ‘space operators to space warfighters’. It will operate systems that can jam communications satellites, and there is much speculation about new tests of the Boeing X-37 robotic spacecraft. It’s not yet clear what equipment it will have at its disposal. But the space force has a planned annual budget of $15.4 billion (and an official motto – ‘Semper Supra’).
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In part, this is an organisational drive, designed to bring US government space organisations under one roof. The old air force wings – a wing is a unit incorporating a number of squadrons – have been reorganised into space deltas and garrisons, which have attracted plenty of bored volunteers from the terrestrial military branches. It has since added more than eighty Air Force Academy lieutenants, and plans to have a permanent staff of 16,000 within a few years. For the first four months of its existence the space force had an official staff of two: thousands of its personnel were technically still working for the air force. But even some military space enthusiasts thought the 2019 announcement was premature. In 2001, a commission chaired by Donald Rumsfeld concluded that it was being neglected, and recommended setting up a separate ‘military department for space’, something that has remained a goal of American generals ever since. Its precursor, air force space command, was set up in 1982. Though founded by the Trump administration, the space force was not a Trump invention. I n December 2019, the US space force was established as the sixth branch of the US armed forces.