Trump Speechifies About the Space Force

Last week, Vice President Mike Pence announced the plan for the creation of a Space Force, a sixth branch of the armed forces that Donald Trump had ordered the Pentagon to establish.

Today, Trump spoke to troops at Fort Drum in New York, where he explained that the United States needs a Space Force to defeat our enemies.

"It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space," Pres. Trump brings up Space Force to troops at Fort Drum, New York. https://t.co/qKWR9Gpv7C pic.twitter.com/YG4SBBHsam

— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 13, 2018

Transcript: In order to maintain America's military supremacy, we must always be on the cutting edge. That is why we are also proudly reasserting America's legacy of leadership in space.

Our foreign competitors and adversaries have already begun weaponizing space, developing new technologies to disrupt vital communications, blind satellites, and just — I mean, they've given me rundowns; I've seen things that you don't even want to see, what they're doing and how advanced they are. We'll be catching them very shortly.

They want to jam transmissions, which threaten our battlefield operations and so many other things. We will be so far ahead of them in a very short period of time. Your head will spin.

China even launched a new military division, to oversee its warfighting programs in space. Just like the air! The land! The sea! Space has become a warfighting domain.

It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space.

Well, this is terrifying.

Based on this speech, it sounds like Trump envisions having a bunch of starship troopers flying around in space jets shooting laser guns at the space robots our "competitors and adversaries" have launched into the stars.

That's not how satellite communications are disrupted, but never mind the details. The point is to waste a whole lot of money that might otherwise be used to feed or house or provide healthcare to people in need, to give a bunch of kleptocratic chickenhawks boners over "America's military supremacy."

And let us all appreciate the bitter irony that Trump wants to invest enormous resources forming his ridiculous Space Force, ostensibly to protect a country on a planet he is meanwhile abandoning to the devastation of climate change.

It's really something that I have to listen to this vile bozo yammering on about a Space Force on the same day that excessive rainfall exacerbated by climate change has caused flash flooding and required water rescues all over the region where I live.

People are literally having to be rescued from their rooftops by helicopters on the eastern seaboard and people are being displaced and killed by an unfathomably immense wildfire on the west coast, and this dirtbag is banging on about a Space Force while ignoring climate change.

For fuck's sake.