By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Donald Trump has once again said something about space.
And according to the former president’s reflexive critics, it is positively
hilarious.
“One of my proudest achievements in my first term was to
create Space Force, the first new branch of the armed forces in over 70 years;
it’s a big deal,” Trump said in a Monday address to the National Guard
Association conference in Detroit. With that legacy achievement in his pocket,
Trump announced a plan to build on it. “I agree that the time has come to
create a Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the U.S. Space
Force,” he said. In addition, “We’re going to build a great Iron Dome for
missile defense around our nation.”
Trump’s skeptics are enjoying a hearty guffaw over the
former president’s latest proposal. “Trump’s campaign has earthly problems,”
read Politico’s gratuitously impish headline, “but he’s
focusing on outer space.” Trump “promises to waste BILLIONS of tax dollars,”
the super PAC American Bridge remarked. Indeed, the former president
backed the creation of a sixth branch of the armed forces devoted to low-earth
orbit only “because he thought it sounded cool,” MSNBC’s Steve Benen posited. And what’s with the Iron Dome talk? “I
have a hunch it’s because he likes the words ‘iron’ and ‘dome,’” he speculated.
This fits a pattern, but by now, Trump’s hecklers should
have trained themselves out of exhibiting it. It was obvious from the moment it was proposed that a new branch
of the armed forces devoted to exo-atmospheric operations was necessary, if
only because space had already become a theater of war. Likewise, creating a “a
Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the U.S. Space Force,” as
Trump proposed, is a remedy to an unworkable proposal offered by Joe Biden.
The president had proposed shifting thousands of Air
National Guard members to Space Force — a proposal to which 48 state governors objected because the Biden plan “reduces
governors’ authority within their states and territories, and undermines
longstanding partnerships, precedence, military readiness, and operational
efficacy.” A stand-alone National Guard reserve for Space Force might be more
expensive, but it does not risk “disconnecting” Guard members from their
specialties.
As always, there are turf wars between the service branches at work here and
political divisions in Congress over the efficacy of the Trump proposal. But it
was not some flight of fancy that sprang from Trump’s lips absent any
consideration. He certainly didn’t settle on the proposal because it sounded
“cool.”
There is much to be said for the equivalent of a domestic
missile-defense system, but not in the manner Trump said it. I am sympathetic
to those who cringe when Trump’s allies try to translate his semi-coherent
ramblings into a decipherable thought. But Trump is not precisely advocating an
Israeli-style short-range interceptor system — which would not make any sense
given that the U.S. is not threatened (yet) by short-range rockets or artillery
fire from Mexico or Canada. Rather, what Trump said was that “Ronald Reagan
wanted this many years ago, but we didn’t have the technology at that point.”
Since Reagan was not himself concerned by the threat posed by Canadian
Katyushas, we can reasonably deduce that Trump is unnerved by the threat posed
by multi-stage ballistic missiles.
He should be. America’s short-range ballistic missile
defense systems are largely forward-positioned closer to the locus of threats
abroad, as are most of America’s Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD)
systems. Intercepting an incoming missile at “boost” phase on takeoff is easier
than taking it out in “midcourse,” when a warhead travels in space without the
heat signature produced by rocket thrusters. And they’re both easier than
intercepting a warhead as it descends on its target at seven kilometers per second.
The U.S. homeland is not entirely defenseless, but, for now, America’s primary
protection against a preemptive strike is the promise of retaliation.
Critics insist that intercepting incoming threats either
with inert “kill vehicles” or high-powered lasers is technologically unfeasible
at the moment. But it won’t be forever. Creating the “dome,” a network of
orbital infrared and radio sensors that can detect incoming ballistic missiles
before they reach terminal stage, provides U.S. planners with options they do
not presently have in the event of an attack. At minimum, telegraphing to U.S.
adversaries and rogue states that a small volley of nuclear warheads can be
disabled disabuses them of the notion that the U.S. can be “self-deterred” by the prospect of losing its population
centers in a second strike.
In sum, neither a space national guard nor an “iron dome”
(metaphorically, at least) is the dumbest idea Trump has ever promoted. But his
critics, just as they did in 2018, expose their own ignorance when they indulge
their impulse to mock his every word.
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