Ah, there's nothing quite like a good geek-out to get the blood flowing . . .
Over on the SciFi boards - which I can still haunt much like the Flying Dutchman haunted the high seas (and to all the Skiffy forum Admins, I hope you all die slow, horrible deaths, choking on your hourly intake of Fritos and Mountain Dew) - someone has posted an interesting question: if and when we ever get to the point of having a "space-based" military force, what would it look like and who would control it?
Now, that's an interesting intellectual exercise to engage in and, really, it's not all that far removed as it might seem. We are going to move off this rock we inhabit eventually, whether that is done for purely exploratory or economic reasons, or a combination of both. There are just too many resources floating around in the solar system, waiting to be exploited, too much room, and too many reasons impelling us, as a species, to expand for it to be otherwise. Whether such expansion and exploitation will remain the sole province of national governments or be undertaken by private enterprises remains to be seen; most likely, it will be a combination of both.
The fundamental problem with a movement to exploit the solar system, of course, isn't a technical one. With sufficient motivation, the sciences can almost always overcome the challenges involved. No, the real problem will be that, wherever we, as a species, choose to go, we will remain, well . . . us. Simply moving off this planet and into space is not going to be, in and of itself, sufficient to change our most basic nature, despite what people like Gene Roddenberry would have you believe. There isn't going to be any Star Trek-type Federation in our future.
Even if the eventual exploitation of the solar system is led by private entities, governments are inevitably going to follow. Enterprises and governments are going to stake claims, there will still be competition to exploit resources (only on a far grander scale), the off-world activities will have to be defended, and conflicts will inevitably arise. We are, after all, what we are.
There will always be those who come to the conclusion that it is a far easier thing to take from others than it is to actually do the work themselves. This is just as true for nation-states as it is for individuals, and it has been a constant theme throughout our history as species. We still have, for example, pirates - something the shipping companies don't like to talk about, and it's a problem that not only costs them several billion dollars a year but is getting worse. We still have extra-national entities which rival national governments in terms of wealth, power and influence. Nation-states are still in competition with each other, and still go to war. This has been the reality for the whole of recorded history and, if we haven't managed to break that sad litany in the past six thousand years or so, we're unlikely to do it any time soon.
Any exploitation of the resources present in the solar system - and for the purposes of this argument, I'm going to limit it to that - must perforce involve transporting those resources from where they are extracted back to Earth. Those are the two end-points, and defending them should be a fairly straightforward prospect. After all, the national militaries will still exist on Earth, and the resource sites themselves can be defended by either a private force "owned" by the exploiting entity or an extension of the parent nation's military - or a combination of both.
Which would leave the movement of the resources themselves between those two end-points as the point of vulnerability. What I think so often gets overlooked is that it takes time to move around the solar system, and the farther you have to go, the more time it takes to get there. Even on the most direct trajectory, for example, it takes around six months to get from Earth to Mars. Its going to take even longer to get from here to, say, the asteroid belt.
One could be tempted to ask, So what? If any of this is going to happen, and if there are going to be those who would exploit the labours of others, it would seem that the easiest method would be to prey on such shipping as close as possible to the end-points of the journey. Yet there are a couple of problems with that. The first is that you would be attempting that precisely at the points where any defence would be strongest - and, unless you absolutely have to, you never strike where your enemy is strongest. The second is that if, say, you grab a shipment of whatever shortly after it is boosted off Mars, you still have to take it somewhere . . . like Earth. And this is just for activities that are the equivalent of piracy. Moving to a national scale, things are still going to have to be transported between the parent nation-state and the outpost - supplies, personnel, and so forth. Just as the sea-lanes have to be secured for commerce on Earth, these notional "space-lanes" will have to be secured, too.
So, how does on do that? And who would control such a force? Well, in our case, I have two words for you: Air Force.
That's not as far-fetched as you might think. With the exception of the Marine Corps, every branch of the U.S. military has a component that is dedicated to "space operations." Currently, such activities are limited to reconnaissance operations, operating satellites, and anti-satellite operations, but that will change. The Air Force is undeniably the current "top dog" in these activities, with the Navy running a close second. The Army runs a distant third but, of the three services, the Army's missions would also be the least changed by a move out into space. After all, a ground fight is going to be pretty much the same wherever it occurs, whether it's on Earth or on Mars.
The thing is, the Air Force not only wants to be the sole service responsible for space operations, it wants to be the sole service, period. The blue suiters are already stalking the halls of Congress, whispering into receptive ears that they are the only competent service to handle such things. Despite the current rage for "joint operations" and things like Goldwater-Nichols, the Air Force remains firmly wedded to the idea that the other services are an unnecessary luxury and that the blue suiters are quite capable of winning any possible conflict all by themselves.
This isn't a new idea; it has, in fact, been around since its inception as an independent service in 1947, and has its roots in the air power theories of Giulio Douhet. It was the driving ideology behind the Air Force's attempts to lay sole claim to nuclear weapons, and it was behind the successful lobbying effort which led to the cancellation of USS United States, the Navy's first supercarrier design (an act which led to the so-called "Revolt of the Admirals" when, in conjunction with the cancellation, the Air Force proposed that the Navy as a whole was unnecessary and should be reduced to a purely coastal-defence force). It was also the driving ideology behind the Key West Accords, in which the Air Force demanded that all combat aviation assets in the military should be its sole preserve. And, though the Navy successfully resisted, maintaining its own aviation branch for itself and the Marine Corps, the Key West Accords did manage to strip the Army of all its combat aviation (except for rotary-wing aircraft, because the Air Force, in its infinite wisdom, did not believe at the time of the Accords that helicopters would ever develop beyond a purely transport and liason role), much to the detriment of the Army.
The blue suiters point to recent events as further proof that the Air Force can win wars on its own, and that the other services are unneeded except as a sort of constabulary to secure the victory. The favourite examples are the 1991 Gulf War, Kosovo, and the current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yet like Douhet, who postulated that an air force could win a war by by-passing the front lines and bombing an enemy into submission by striking directly at the populace and infrastructure supporting the opposing military, the Air Force is wrong. As seductive as the belief might be, it's not borne out by the reality. In 1991, we bombed the Iraqis for several months; their forces in Kuwait were certainly degraded, but they didn't leave because of the bombing. They left because they were kicked out by ground forces. In Kosovo, the air campaign did absolutely nothing to stop the Serbs from their campaign of "ethnic cleansing" (nor did it in Bosnia, either). In point of fact, Serb operations accelerated and intensified after the bombing started, and halted only when ground forces were introduced to the theatre. In the current campaigns, Iraq did not fall to the Air Force's "shock and awe" campaign; it fell because ground forces occupied the country and destroyed the Iraqi military. Likewise, the Taliban in Afghanistan did not fall because of the activities of the Air Force. It fell to the Northern Alliance, backed up by Air Force (and Navy) bombing and combined with the judicious use of American ground troops. And let's not forget in the latter campaign that, aside from the heavy bombers, the Air Force was unable to bring significant tactical air power to bear because of the ranges involved, until we secured basing and overflight rights in neighbouring countries. Only the Navy and Marine Corps, by virtue of the mobility of the aircraft carriers, were in a position to rapidly deploy tactical aviation assets to that theatre.
The lesson here is that you can fly over a piece of land all you want. You can bomb it, you can strafe it, you can atomize it to your heart's content. But if you want to control it, if you want to deny it and its uses to the enemy, then you need boots on the ground.
The same principle would apply to the operations of a space-based military force. Boots on the ground isn't really the issue here - whether its ground here or ground on, say, Europa, the operations aren't going to change that much. Operations that are limited to the realms of the orbital and sub-orbital could very well be handled by the Air Force; after all, the application of air power is their business. But the "space lanes" would still have to be secured . . . and you're going to need ships to do that.
Ships are big, complex machines, and they're not something that you can just build and man and expect to use effectively (sorry, all you Stargate: SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis fans). A bomber or a fighter and a ship are fundamentally different things, and they neither fight nor maneuver in the same ways. Even in a space environment, they're not going to do that. Operating a group of ships as a cohesive fighting unit is another thing entirely, and again requires a different kind of mind-set than operation a group of aircraft.
By and large, combat vessels in space are going to operate much as they do here on Earth; one could even argue that the closest analogy to such a vessel would be the nuclear submarine. But operating ships effectively isn't a skill that one develops overnight or on demand. Its a process, and like all learning processes, it takes time. The U.S. Navy, for example, is so good at what it does because it's had over two hundred years of practice at it (longer, if you take into account the fact that it inherited many of its traditions and practices from the Royal Navy). Even so, some navies never get a good grasp on what's involved - the Russian Navy springs to mind as an example of that.
The point is, the Air Force has little to no experience in operating ships, with that scale heavily weighted to the "no experience" end. There is a pervasive belief among blue suiters, almost a religious dogma, that "If it flies, it should belong to the Air Force," but that isn't necessarily so. And while it's called "space flight," that doesn't mean that the Air Force is perforce the most, or only, competent force to operate such assets. In demanding that all current and future operations in space be placed under its purview, the Air Force is setting itself up for a situation it is not trained for and in which it has no competency.
It would be both unreasonable and unnecessary to expect the Air Force to learn the skills to operate ships "on the job," particularly when there is already a service that is intimately familiar with doing just that. Operating and fighting ships should be left to the people who already know how to do that. There would, indeed, be a significant role for the Air Force in any space-based operations, but only as one component of such a force, and not as the sole actor.
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