To Infinity and Beyond

As it turns out, creating a Space Force may not have been such a bad idea after all

"Brown to Bronze VII: Buzz Lightyear to Star Command!" by CL Photographs is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

By Kevin J. Rogers

"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win." (Sun Tzu, The Art of War)

Maybe it was the ongoing buffoonery of the announcements, maybe it was the utter cluelessness of the president himself about what it would do and what it would be for, but I have to admit — when our new United States Space Force came into being, I was one of the many skeptics, too. It was just a bit too easy to make “pew pew pew” ray gun jokes and scifi saga references. Plus, there was immediately a pretty promising sitcom on Netflix which was, to be honest, a bit of a send-up. If a gentle one.

I also thought we needed, if anything, to put our emphasis on the ongoing Cyber War, perhaps to the point of creating a new service branch dedicated to fighting it. After all, from an administrative perspective the situation was very similar: multiple entities across multiple agencies and departments, all needing to be coordinated in order to achieve a vital national security mission. And we already had the United States Space Command (and still do).

But I was wrong.

For one thing, a Cyber Force within the Department of Defense would only be legally authorized to deal with attacks from without or take offensive action against foreign entities. There’s really no way to fight the Cyber War only by concentrating on state actors or terrorist groups overseas. The cyber battlespace is way more complicated than that; it includes everything from organized crime to politically motivated hackers to people just messing around, all of whom could just as easily be based within our borders as in other countries. Any prospective unified institution tasked with fighting the Cyber War has to be able to look and act both inward and outward.