Dedication To all the pastors worldwide, whether enjoying freedom or enduring persecution, who, according to their consciences, seek to speak the truth in love.
Foreword by US. Senator Rick Santorum
In 2002, Michael Newdow, an atheist lawyer with a daughter in a California public school, challenged the constitutionality of the Pledge of allegiance. Newdow argued that although his daughter was not required to recite the pledge, she was injured 'when compelled to watch and listen as her state-employed teacher in her state-rune school led her classmates in a ritual proclaiming that there is a God and that our is 'one nation under God'. A federal Ninth Circuit appellate panel agreed with Newdow, ruling that the words 'under God' constituted an establishment of religion and hence, violated the First Amendment. Despite popular outrage and bipartisan criticism of the decision in congress, a second Ninth Circuit panel reaffirmed the original ruling in early 2003, again declaring the Pledge of allegiance unconstitutional.
The American people were overwhelmingly surprised and outraged at the ruling, as well they should have been. However, the uncomfortable truth is that the Ninth Circuit's decision declaring the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional has a certain perverse logic, given the Supreme Court's confused church-state jurisprudence over the past half-century. The decision of the Ninth Circuit simply confirmed what conservative critics of the supreme Court have been saying for decades, namely that so-called 'strict separationist' interpretations of the first amendment's 'Establishment Clause' based on the 'wall of separation' metaphor is not merely neutral toward religion, but hostile toward religious sentiment the results in driving religion out of the public square. despite their protestations, this is the direct result of the influence of 'strict separationist' advocacy organizations such as the american Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and People for the American Way.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution begins, 'Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...' For over the past half-century, a small but
*14 influential cadre of academics, activists and activist judges has tried to insist that the First Amendment's 'no Establishment Clause' requires a 'high wall of separation of church and state'. for decades these activists and jurists sought to defend this view as an accurate description of the views of the founders generally, and that it expressed the intent of the authors of the first Amendment. Their favorite citation was Thomas Jefferson's private letter to the Danbury Baptists in which he referred to a 'wall of separation' between church and state.
However, as Dr. Lillback shows, as a simple historical matter, our founders were more than willing to accommodate religious expression and symbols in the public square. Indeed, in word and deed they encouraged it. That is why Justice William Rehnquist was right to declare over two decades ago in his dissenting Opinion in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), that'The 'wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned'.
Justice Rehnquist was probably being too charitable. Not only has the 'wall of separation metaphor' been useless, it is often more incoherent and pernicious that that. One here recalls the famous quip of senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan remarking on the massive confusion generated by a series of Supreme Court decisions which ruled that while a state could permissibly lend school books to parochial schools without violating the Establishment Clause, it was unconstitutional to lend teaching aids and maps. Ghat caused Senator Moynihan to ask about the constitutionality of an atlas, a book of maps.
Senator Moynihans's caustic quip was a pithy way of saying that a consistent application of the high wall of separation principle leads to absurd results. as one informed commentator observed,
The Pledge case reveals that something has gone drastically wrong with Establishment clause jurisprudence. If the Pledge is unconstitutional, so too are teacher-led recitations of the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln claimed'that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of r.' Teaching public school students that the Declaration of
*15 Independence is true - that our rights are, in fact 'endowed by our Creator' and that the American Revolution was just according to the 'Laws of nature and of nature's god' -would violate the Constitution. Even an invited performer signing 'God
Bless America' at a government-sponsored event, like a local county fair, would be constitutionally suspect. ('Establishing Free Exercise' by Vincent Phillip Munoz in first Things, December 2003)
When the Declaration of Independence can in some light be thought constitutionally suspect, and would be but for public outcry at a judicially-imposed decision, it is long past time to reexamine the basis for the precedents that lead to such absurdities.
The fundamental problem, of course, is not simply the bad history and the absurdities that would result from a consistent application of the 'high wall of separation' principle. The fundamental problem, as Dr. Lillback suggests, are activist judges willing to impose their own ideological understanding of the proper relation between religion and public life. typically, such an understanding is based on the highly controversial opinion that religion is a purely private affair, that religiously informed argument in the public square is at best a barrier to enlightened discourse and at worst sows the seeds of intolerance and bigotry.
The consequences of this view go well beyond the impact on individuals' and groups' rights to freedom of expression and religion, they cut to the hear of what is required to sustain our democracy. This grand experiment is not guaranteed to last forever, and our founders understood the necessity of the electorate to be a virtuous people for freedom to be maintained, and that religion is essential to form virtue. a diminished or ghettoized civic religion will only diminish our democracy and threaten its sustainability.
Here we must be clear. If the American people, for whatever reason, through their elected representatives decide that the Ten Commandments should be removed from local court houses, that 'under God' should be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance, that 'in God We Trust' be
*16 removed from currency and coinage, that legislative and military chaplains should no longer be paid out of public funds, that Christmas nativity scenes should be removed from areas of public display, or that the Supreme Court should no longer open with a declaration of 'God save this honorable court', then it is perfectly in keeping with the Constitution and the democratically determined decisions of a free people to do so. while I do not think such decisions would be wise, the Constitution does not require the presence of such symbols. It does, however, permit them, and activist judges exceed their authority when they require their removal, and they deserve derision when they try to persuade us that support for such can be found in either the test of the constitution, in the meaning, or intent of the authors, the history of the American republic. And if confused Establishment Clause precedents logically lead to such absurd and pernicious results, then it is long past time to reconsider those precedents.
The Article
*17 The following is an article I wrote, published by The Providence Forum in the fall of 2002:
September 11th and the 9th Circuit Court:
At Least For the Moment, we are still 'One nation Under God'.
When the Ninth Circuit Court declared that the Pledge of Allegance was unconstitutional, many finally began to understand. In spite of all our national expression of dependence on god in the aftermath of September 11th, there is still a relentless movement afoot to strip our nation's Judeo-Christian heritage from our official culture. its message is. 'Sure, in the privacy of your home, say the Pledge, but don't force your belief in god down the throats of the rest of our secular nation.
While this decision made the headlines of our national news, a more quiet, but just as potent assault was occurring in the federal courthouse in Philadelphia. The verdict reached by a single judge, without a jury of the people, in less than 24 hours, was that the Ten Commandments that had been on the wall of Chester County's Court house, had to come down. Once again, the theme was, 'to have such statements in public is to violate the first Amendment by making our secular nation acknowledge God'. It was ironic, indeed, that the same court opened with the declaration 'God save the Court of the United states!' we must be clear. this movement will not stop if they are successful here. god in government is the enemy. Nothing less than his utter and total removal from public discourse is the goal. 'For such a time as this', The Providence Forum has been called into being. Our existence through your support has enabled us boldly to remind our culture in federal courtrooms, on courthouse steps, at Independence all, in
*18 academic institutions, in the presence of the president himself, that our Judeao-Christian heritage gave birth to this great nation of religious and civil liberty.
In spite of our nation's spiritual interest expressed recently in the memorial services on the first anniversary of the terrorists' attacks, the day may come when we are forced to censor even the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But let us until then not fail to declare that the first teaches us of 'our Creator', of 'the God of nature', of 'the supreme Judge of the world', and the 'protection of Divine Providence', and the later was written in 'the year of our LORD, 1787' May our Lord graciously use all of our efforts to preserve and advance this legacy of liberty bequeathed to us by our founders.
Perhaps in the wake of news stories such as ominous potential terrorist attacks, the homosexual abuse of boys by priest, the malfeasance of auditing firms in league with deceiving corporate entities, and the violent volatility of the financial markets, we may once again wish to be 'one nation under God' after all!
By the way, a good reason to get registered and to vote is that our elected officials appoint our federal judges. Your vote indirectly elects judges who either believe or do not believe that we are 'one nation under God'. Dr. Peter A. Lillback
*23 Chapter 1 GOD IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE : Public Schools And the Pledge of Allegiance
'However, I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anyone would fail to see the problem with requiring public school students to recite their allegiance to 'one nation under God'.
Your comment clearly raises the question of the legitimacy of using the Pledge of Allegiance in public setting. We might ask, 'Can official 'secular' documents make reference to God'? Ultimately, your question raises the matter of which worldview will impact our national thinking.
('We are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource in peace and war. ' President Dwight D. Eisenhower...photo)
Your candid astonishment that 'anyone' could miss the 'problem' of requiring public school students to recite their allegiance to 'one nation under God' is peculiar indeed. Long before your letter was written - about a half-century ago -Congress passed the act that incorporated the words 'under God' into the pledge. At that time, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with the United States Congress, perceived a very different problem facing America than the one you fear. it was to find a national point of transcendence that would enable america to remain strong in the face of daunting challenges to the very fabric of american freedom.
The Historical Context of the Pledge of Allegiance
You are undoubtedly aware of the history of the Pledge. However many Americans do not know that the phrase 'under God' was not in the original form when it was written by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister from Boston in 1892, which was the four-hundreth anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. Sixty-two years later, on flag Day, June 14, 1954, President Eisenhower signed the legislation that added 'under God' to the Pledge. Explaining his support for Congressional Act,Joint Resolution 243, he declared...(see above)
* 25 These words are particularly significant coming from President Eisenhower. Only a decade before, he had been the military commander to the most powerful force ever assembled in history. yet in his view, the most powerful weapons for our nation in peace or in war were not economic or military, but spiritual. In his mind, the government had nothing to fear from faith, for America's government understood the importance of faith in the nation's past and its need for such trust in its future.
In fact, the Pledge's new language of 'under God' had its source in Lincoln's immortal Gettysburg address. Lincoln believed that the healing of a nation torn asunder by civil war and grieving in the face of the unparalleled human carnage of the Gettysburg battlefield could only be found when the afflicted nation saw its proper place as being 'under God'. thus, in the Gettysburg Address, delivered on Nov 19, 1863, 'the theologian of American anguish' encouraged his fellow citizens affirming,
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -
*26 that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, of the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Given this history, background and sources, it is no wonder that school children and adult teachers used to say daily the Pledge of Allegance. Perhaps you can remember saying it ourself.
Yet you are concerned that children might be 'required' to pledge allegiance to a flag that represents 'one nation under god'. Clearly, we must be concerned about protecting the religious liberty of our students. but is it possible that this liberty of conscience exists precisely because historically we have claimed to be a 'nation under God'?
Recent Cultural and Constitutional Viewpoints Impacting the Use of the Pledge of Allegiance
What has transpired in the half century between President Eisenhower's enacting the words 'under god' into the pledge and into law in 1954 and the opposing view of the U.S. Ninth Circuit court's 2002 ruling that holds that the use of the pledge is unconstitutional? To answer this,we must come to grips with the massive shift of worldviews and cultural values that has occurred in the past half century.
An incredible sea change has in fact occurred in public opinion, worldview, and governmental policy in these last decades. actually, to better understand this, a good place to start is by considering your own words as a pastor expressing his concerns about what he sees as God's role in the public square.
Initially, notice the assumption that is made by your statement 'requiring to recite their allegiance'. the fact is that no one in America is 'required' to say the pledge! Free speech is our First
amendment constitutional heritage. The very way you have couched the matter masks what is really transpiring in the Court's decision. today, we are encouraged and permitted to recite our allegiance to the flag by using the words 'one nation under God'. should we choose to do so, we are doing it in a lawful way. should we choose Not to say it, we are doing so in a constitutional way. Where is the reality of 'required' action in this discussion? It is in the Ninth Circuit
*27 Court's move to strike the 1954 Congressional Act, Joint resolution 243 as unconstitutional!
While the Supreme Court's decision not to review this decision leaves the pledge in force in all areas except the Ninth Circuit, if that ruling were ultimately to become the opinion of the Supreme Court, we would be 'required' to forego saying the pledge ever again in a public setting. what then becomes of our free speech? What then becomes of religious liberty for those who can in good conscience say the pledge in its legal form? They will no longer be encouraged and permitted to do so. They will be required not to recite their allegiance.
Isn't it interesting that you have unconsciously misstated the entire matter? By allowing our rhetoric to be controlled by inaccurate terminology, we are not only going to love our historic freedom to say or not to say the pledge, but we will have unconsciously abandoned a freedom for a court mandated lawful behavior. Sadly, we will never even know what hit us. this process of the erosion of our liberties was well understood by the great architect of our Constitution, James Madison, when he said,
Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people, by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations. (James Madison, Virginia Convention, June 6, 1788. In Padover, The Complete Madison, 339)
Worldviews in Collision: Competing Answers to Ultimate Questions
Christian cultural analyst, the late Francis Schaeffer, agreed with Madison's insight. Schaeffer argued that our culture's movements away from Christianity's values are the consequence of a conscious shift in how people interpret their world.
The basic problem of the Christians is this county...in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and peices instead of totals. They have very gradually.
*28 become disturbed over permissiveness, pornography, the public schools, the breakdown of the family, and finally abortion. But they have not se
Saturday, March 7, 2020
Wednesday, March 4, 2020
3.4.20 IMPRIMIS (A Publication of Hillsdale College) 'The Urgent Need for a United States Space Force' -Steven L. Kwast, Lieutenant General, united States Air Force (Ret.)
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on Nov 20,2019, at Hillsdale College's Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation lecture series.
In June 2018, president Trump directed the Department of Defense to 'begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces'. The reason for a space force is simple: space is the strategic high round from which all future wars will be fought. If we do not master space, our nation will become indefensible.
Since that time, entrenched bureaucrats and military leaders across the Department of Defense, especially in the Air Force, have been resisting the President's directive in every way they can. And this December, although Congress voted to approve a space Force, it did so while placing restrictions on it - such as that the Space Force be built with existing forces - that will render it largely useless in any future conflicts.
at the heart of the problem is a disagreement about the Mission of a Space Force. The Department of Defense envisions a Space Force that continues to perform the task that current space assets perform - supporting wars on the surface of the Earth. The Air Force especially is mired in an outmoded industrial age mindset. it sees the Space force as projecting power through air, space , and cyberspace, understood in a way that precludes space beyond our geocentric orbit.
Correspondingly, the Defense Department and Congress think that the Air Force should build the Space Force. So far, this has amounted to the Air Force planning to improve the current Satellite Command incrementally and call it a Space Force. It is not planning to accelerate the new space economy with dual-use technologies. it is not planning to protect the Moon or travel corridors in space to and from resource locations - raw materials worth trillions of dollars are available within a few days' travel from Earth - and other strategic high grounds. it is not planning to place human beings in space to build and protect innovative solutions to the challenges posed by the physical environment. It is not developing means to rescue Americans who may get stranded or lost in space.
In short, the Air Force does not plan to build a Space Force of t;he kind American needs. In its lack of farsightedness, the Air Force fails to envision landmasses or cities in space to be monitored and defended. Nor does it envision
Americans in space whose rights need defending -despite the fact that in the coming years, the number of Americans in space will grow exponentially.
This lack of forward thinking can be put down to human nature and organizational behavior: People in bureaucratic settings tend to build what they have built in the past and defend what they have defended in the past.
We have seen this kind of short-sightedness before. In the 1920s, the airplane and the tank were developed by the Army. Even the most respected military leaders at the time, Generals John LH Pershing and Douglas MacArthur, opposed independent development of the airplane and the tank because they saw them as subservient to the infantry. Infantry had always been the key to military success, and the generals' reputations were build on that fact. for them, slow and cautious steps were prudent, and revolutionary steps were reckless.
These generals defended the status quo even to the point of court-martialing General Billy Mitchell, who had the audacity to say that the airplane was going to change the character of war and needed to be developed independently in order to achieve its full potential.
This type of status quo thinking in the 1920s resulted in needless loss of life during world War II. More airmen were lost in the European theater alone than were marines in the entire war. And countless soldiers died in America's Sherman tanks, whose shells would bounce off Germany's Panzer and Tiger tanks. Frontal infantry attacks were launched in order to get Sherman tanks behind the German tanks to fire at close range - the only range at which they could be effective. many more of our fighting men would have come home and the war would have been shorter if American generals had taken a revolutionary approach to tanks and planes from the beginning.
On the other side, consider that a major reason we won World War II when we did was the revolutionary -not slow and cautious - approach we took to developing nuclear weapons with the Manhattan project. Likewise today, instead of blindly following the bureaucrats and generals in the Defense Department, we need a Manhattan-type project in order to develop the kind of Space Force needed to meet future military challenges.
America's gratest competitor for the high ground of space is Communist China, which is already fully engaged in building effective space capabilities. America is not, and unless it gets off the mark soon, China will dominate the economy and domain of space.
Our Air Force today can be compared to a race car that has been winning every race for the last 70 years by averaging 100 miles an hour. We are still in the lead , but China is gaining and averaging 150 miles an hour. The Chinese will quickly surpass us if we do nothing - and when they do, they will set up roadblocks that will make catching up difficult if not impossible.
Today, while American is building lighthouses and listening stations that can see and hear what is happening in space,China is building battleships and destroyers that can move fast and strike hard - the equivalent of a Navy in space. China is winning the space race not because it makes better equipment, but because it has a superior strategy. The Chinese are open about their plan to become the dominant power in space by 2049, the centennial of the end of the Communist Chinese Revolution and of the founding of the people's Republic of China under Mao Zedong.
If China stays on its current path, it will deploy nuclear propulsion technology and solar power stations in space within ten years. This will give it the ability to beam clean energy to anyone on Earth - and the power to disable any portion of the American power grid and paralyze our military anywhere on the planet. America is developing no tools to defeat such a strategy, despite the fact that we are spending billions of dollars on exquisite 20th century military equipment.
Over the past tow centuries, we have seen that technology drives economic prosperity nd that economic prosperity is essential to sustaining national security.chin's plan is to profit from the multi-trillion dollar space marketplace while simultaneously acquiring global domination. We are capable of forestalling China's plan, but only if we begin to build a space Force soon and on the right plan. to do this, we must first understand China's strategic goal, which is to dominate the sectors of economic growth that historically have held the key to world power: transportation, energy, information and manufacturing.
Space presents unique economic opportunities because space technology operates on network principles. a network can deliver power, information, or goods from one node to many nodes at a fraction of the increase in cost per customer, as compared to the linear system on which most of our land-based economies are modeled. Compare the cost of sending 100 letters to the cost of sending 100 emails. A space infrastucture, by its nature, is a network system - and these types of systems will always translate to economic advantage.The first nation to build such and infrastructure will
dominate the global economy of the 21st century and beyond.
China is developing the kind of technologies required to do so: hypersonic missiles and aircraft, 5G telecommunications, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, quantum computing and robotics. Last January, China landed the Chang-e 4 spacecraft on the far side of the Moon. The mission provided valuable knowledge in terms of commercial and military applications. At one time this sort of mission was not beyond u. S. capabilities, but it is today, and it shows a commitment to space that we lack. To be sure, China has yet to achieve the ability to launch a manned spacecraft, but this is also a capability that we no longer possess -the U.S. relies on Russian rocketry to man and resupply the International Space Station.
China's goal is to have the capability to shut down America's computer systems and electrical grids at any time or place of its choosing, using directed energy and 5G technologies from space. Space is the strategic high ground from which China will seek to gain control of our media, businesses, land, debt and markets. although American companies are working on these new technologies, they are doing so in separate silos. real power lies in tethering or combining the technologies together in space to achieve a dominant economic advantage.
If we choose to compete with China in space, we have cultural advantage. We are more creative and innovative than China, because we have an open society and a free market. But we must be ambitious and act soon.
With the right vision and strategy for space, america can develop the means to:
*Deliver unlimited, clean, affordable energy to every human on the planet without power lines or terrestrial power plants.
*Provide fresh water for every human without the need for aquifers or pipes.
*Build a new low-cost internet that is designed to be secure so that every human can connect, share,and learn with assured privacy and data safety.
*Defend Earth against small asteroids like the one that it Russia in 2013.
*Develop a deterrence capability that will render ICBMs and nuclear weapons useless relics of the past.
*Revolutionize manufacturing by acquiring and deploying resources from space and in space.
*Provide a shelter in space where we can protect and preserve people seeds and life-saving medicines, so humanity can recover from any unexpected contamination, illness, or disaster.
*Design defense capabilities to preserve our economy, our people,and our sovereignty,and to allow our allies to defend themselves instead of sacrificing American lives.
*Reduce the loss of life and property due to natural disasters y managing the eyes of hurricanes and the funnels of tornados with energy from space.
Some of this may sound like science fiction, but technologies exist to achieve thees goals if we can summon the will to act. Status quo thinkers in the Defense Department say that these goals are futuristic and unaffordable. But recall that the New York Times, relying on the opinions of leading scientists and engineers, predicted that airplanes were 'one million to ten million years' off - a prediction made less than three months before the Wright Brothers made history at Kitty Hawk.
Engineers at countless private companies outside the military-industrial complex will assure you that we can achieve these goals and soon. As for those who say it's unaffordable, look to the automotive, aerospace,and tech industries, all of whose capabilities were built from profits earned in markets that valued their usefulness. The same will hold true with the marketplace of space.
Why the urgency? because being first in space is imperative. Space will be a multi-trillion dollar market that will disproportionately benefit the first nation to build a vibrant space infrastructure and define the principles and rules of the marketplace of space.
If America is first, its principles -the rule of law and the protection of liberty - will be in a position to prevail. If Communist China is first, the market place will look much different.
Americans must not allow themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by reassurance from the military-industrial complex that we have the best military in the world, with the finest equipment ever made. At present this is accurate, but a superior strategy in space will render out fine equipment obsolete in short order.
*to develop a proper and winning Space Force the mission to defend commerce in space and define
Cis-Lunar space as an area of responsibility in the United Command Plan.
*Congress should give the Space force complete independence from the U.S. Air Force so that funds are not diverted from the former to the latter, and so that the Space Force isn't developed as a mere support function for air power.
*The President should issue an executive order protecting the space industry from China's predatory practices.
The president should promote policies and strategies to maximize the contribution of the private sector, such as directing the Space Development Agency to partner with private companies to develop new space capabilities.
If development of the Space Force continues along the lines of what is currently planned, America will lose the strategic space race to China,. This must not be allowed to happen. Our elected leaders must take action now.
earth to moon
In June 2018, president Trump directed the Department of Defense to 'begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces'. The reason for a space force is simple: space is the strategic high round from which all future wars will be fought. If we do not master space, our nation will become indefensible.
Since that time, entrenched bureaucrats and military leaders across the Department of Defense, especially in the Air Force, have been resisting the President's directive in every way they can. And this December, although Congress voted to approve a space Force, it did so while placing restrictions on it - such as that the Space Force be built with existing forces - that will render it largely useless in any future conflicts.
at the heart of the problem is a disagreement about the Mission of a Space Force. The Department of Defense envisions a Space Force that continues to perform the task that current space assets perform - supporting wars on the surface of the Earth. The Air Force especially is mired in an outmoded industrial age mindset. it sees the Space force as projecting power through air, space , and cyberspace, understood in a way that precludes space beyond our geocentric orbit.
Correspondingly, the Defense Department and Congress think that the Air Force should build the Space Force. So far, this has amounted to the Air Force planning to improve the current Satellite Command incrementally and call it a Space Force. It is not planning to accelerate the new space economy with dual-use technologies. it is not planning to protect the Moon or travel corridors in space to and from resource locations - raw materials worth trillions of dollars are available within a few days' travel from Earth - and other strategic high grounds. it is not planning to place human beings in space to build and protect innovative solutions to the challenges posed by the physical environment. It is not developing means to rescue Americans who may get stranded or lost in space.
In short, the Air Force does not plan to build a Space Force of t;he kind American needs. In its lack of farsightedness, the Air Force fails to envision landmasses or cities in space to be monitored and defended. Nor does it envision
Americans in space whose rights need defending -despite the fact that in the coming years, the number of Americans in space will grow exponentially.
This lack of forward thinking can be put down to human nature and organizational behavior: People in bureaucratic settings tend to build what they have built in the past and defend what they have defended in the past.
We have seen this kind of short-sightedness before. In the 1920s, the airplane and the tank were developed by the Army. Even the most respected military leaders at the time, Generals John LH Pershing and Douglas MacArthur, opposed independent development of the airplane and the tank because they saw them as subservient to the infantry. Infantry had always been the key to military success, and the generals' reputations were build on that fact. for them, slow and cautious steps were prudent, and revolutionary steps were reckless.
These generals defended the status quo even to the point of court-martialing General Billy Mitchell, who had the audacity to say that the airplane was going to change the character of war and needed to be developed independently in order to achieve its full potential.
This type of status quo thinking in the 1920s resulted in needless loss of life during world War II. More airmen were lost in the European theater alone than were marines in the entire war. And countless soldiers died in America's Sherman tanks, whose shells would bounce off Germany's Panzer and Tiger tanks. Frontal infantry attacks were launched in order to get Sherman tanks behind the German tanks to fire at close range - the only range at which they could be effective. many more of our fighting men would have come home and the war would have been shorter if American generals had taken a revolutionary approach to tanks and planes from the beginning.
On the other side, consider that a major reason we won World War II when we did was the revolutionary -not slow and cautious - approach we took to developing nuclear weapons with the Manhattan project. Likewise today, instead of blindly following the bureaucrats and generals in the Defense Department, we need a Manhattan-type project in order to develop the kind of Space Force needed to meet future military challenges.
America's gratest competitor for the high ground of space is Communist China, which is already fully engaged in building effective space capabilities. America is not, and unless it gets off the mark soon, China will dominate the economy and domain of space.
Our Air Force today can be compared to a race car that has been winning every race for the last 70 years by averaging 100 miles an hour. We are still in the lead , but China is gaining and averaging 150 miles an hour. The Chinese will quickly surpass us if we do nothing - and when they do, they will set up roadblocks that will make catching up difficult if not impossible.
Today, while American is building lighthouses and listening stations that can see and hear what is happening in space,China is building battleships and destroyers that can move fast and strike hard - the equivalent of a Navy in space. China is winning the space race not because it makes better equipment, but because it has a superior strategy. The Chinese are open about their plan to become the dominant power in space by 2049, the centennial of the end of the Communist Chinese Revolution and of the founding of the people's Republic of China under Mao Zedong.
If China stays on its current path, it will deploy nuclear propulsion technology and solar power stations in space within ten years. This will give it the ability to beam clean energy to anyone on Earth - and the power to disable any portion of the American power grid and paralyze our military anywhere on the planet. America is developing no tools to defeat such a strategy, despite the fact that we are spending billions of dollars on exquisite 20th century military equipment.
Over the past tow centuries, we have seen that technology drives economic prosperity nd that economic prosperity is essential to sustaining national security.chin's plan is to profit from the multi-trillion dollar space marketplace while simultaneously acquiring global domination. We are capable of forestalling China's plan, but only if we begin to build a space Force soon and on the right plan. to do this, we must first understand China's strategic goal, which is to dominate the sectors of economic growth that historically have held the key to world power: transportation, energy, information and manufacturing.
Space presents unique economic opportunities because space technology operates on network principles. a network can deliver power, information, or goods from one node to many nodes at a fraction of the increase in cost per customer, as compared to the linear system on which most of our land-based economies are modeled. Compare the cost of sending 100 letters to the cost of sending 100 emails. A space infrastucture, by its nature, is a network system - and these types of systems will always translate to economic advantage.The first nation to build such and infrastructure will
dominate the global economy of the 21st century and beyond.
China is developing the kind of technologies required to do so: hypersonic missiles and aircraft, 5G telecommunications, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, quantum computing and robotics. Last January, China landed the Chang-e 4 spacecraft on the far side of the Moon. The mission provided valuable knowledge in terms of commercial and military applications. At one time this sort of mission was not beyond u. S. capabilities, but it is today, and it shows a commitment to space that we lack. To be sure, China has yet to achieve the ability to launch a manned spacecraft, but this is also a capability that we no longer possess -the U.S. relies on Russian rocketry to man and resupply the International Space Station.
China's goal is to have the capability to shut down America's computer systems and electrical grids at any time or place of its choosing, using directed energy and 5G technologies from space. Space is the strategic high ground from which China will seek to gain control of our media, businesses, land, debt and markets. although American companies are working on these new technologies, they are doing so in separate silos. real power lies in tethering or combining the technologies together in space to achieve a dominant economic advantage.
If we choose to compete with China in space, we have cultural advantage. We are more creative and innovative than China, because we have an open society and a free market. But we must be ambitious and act soon.
With the right vision and strategy for space, america can develop the means to:
*Deliver unlimited, clean, affordable energy to every human on the planet without power lines or terrestrial power plants.
*Provide fresh water for every human without the need for aquifers or pipes.
*Build a new low-cost internet that is designed to be secure so that every human can connect, share,and learn with assured privacy and data safety.
*Defend Earth against small asteroids like the one that it Russia in 2013.
*Develop a deterrence capability that will render ICBMs and nuclear weapons useless relics of the past.
*Revolutionize manufacturing by acquiring and deploying resources from space and in space.
*Provide a shelter in space where we can protect and preserve people seeds and life-saving medicines, so humanity can recover from any unexpected contamination, illness, or disaster.
*Design defense capabilities to preserve our economy, our people,and our sovereignty,and to allow our allies to defend themselves instead of sacrificing American lives.
*Reduce the loss of life and property due to natural disasters y managing the eyes of hurricanes and the funnels of tornados with energy from space.
Some of this may sound like science fiction, but technologies exist to achieve thees goals if we can summon the will to act. Status quo thinkers in the Defense Department say that these goals are futuristic and unaffordable. But recall that the New York Times, relying on the opinions of leading scientists and engineers, predicted that airplanes were 'one million to ten million years' off - a prediction made less than three months before the Wright Brothers made history at Kitty Hawk.
Engineers at countless private companies outside the military-industrial complex will assure you that we can achieve these goals and soon. As for those who say it's unaffordable, look to the automotive, aerospace,and tech industries, all of whose capabilities were built from profits earned in markets that valued their usefulness. The same will hold true with the marketplace of space.
Why the urgency? because being first in space is imperative. Space will be a multi-trillion dollar market that will disproportionately benefit the first nation to build a vibrant space infrastructure and define the principles and rules of the marketplace of space.
If America is first, its principles -the rule of law and the protection of liberty - will be in a position to prevail. If Communist China is first, the market place will look much different.
Americans must not allow themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by reassurance from the military-industrial complex that we have the best military in the world, with the finest equipment ever made. At present this is accurate, but a superior strategy in space will render out fine equipment obsolete in short order.
*to develop a proper and winning Space Force the mission to defend commerce in space and define
Cis-Lunar space as an area of responsibility in the United Command Plan.
*Congress should give the Space force complete independence from the U.S. Air Force so that funds are not diverted from the former to the latter, and so that the Space Force isn't developed as a mere support function for air power.
*The President should issue an executive order protecting the space industry from China's predatory practices.
The president should promote policies and strategies to maximize the contribution of the private sector, such as directing the Space Development Agency to partner with private companies to develop new space capabilities.
If development of the Space Force continues along the lines of what is currently planned, America will lose the strategic space race to China,. This must not be allowed to happen. Our elected leaders must take action now.
earth to moon
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