President Donald Trump’s much-ballyhooed “space force” is little more than a costly new bureaucracy that adds no new technology, personnel, or missions to the Pentagon's existing infrastructure for space.
But according to American Media, Inc., the parent company of The National Enquirer, the space force is an elite crew of laser-wielding Republican ass-kickers on a mission to conquer Mars and kill aliens.
AMI’s Space Force magazine, a glossy, 96-page, one-off special that's on sale at newsstands for $15 until April 5, is pure, naked propaganda, misrepresenting Trump’s space force, where it came from, and what its purported goals are.
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And it’s unabashedly partisan, spinning Republican leaders as far back as Richard Nixon as brave defenders of America’s manifest destiny in space, while casting Democrats such as Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as craven enemies of all things orbital.
The AMI rag’s rightward lean should come as no surprise. AMI boss David Pecker has ties to Trump going back decades. The National Enquirer strongly supported Trump's presidential campaign. And in December, AMI admitted to federal prosecutors that it paid Karen McDougal $150,000 in the run-up to the 2016 election in order to bury her alleged affair with the future president.
Now AMI is trying to give the space force a boost, too. It needs it.
Trump first referenced a new military branch for space in apparently off-the-cuff remarks during a campaign rally in March 2018. “We're doing a tremendous amount of work in space, and I said, ‘Maybe we need a new force. We'll call it the ‘space force,’” Trump said at the rally. “I was not really serious, and then I said, ‘What a great idea. Maybe we'll have to do that.’”
‘Space force’ became a rhetorical staple for Trump at his frequent rallies. Finally, in June 2018, Trump directed the Pentagon to plan for the new orbital armed service.
But the AMI magazine portrays space force as an idea that Republican leaders have fought for since the 1950s, only to be thwarted early on by an ignorant public that forced Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, both Republicans, to cut funding for space exploration.
“The turnaround came under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush,” the AMI mag claims. NASA's funding tripled between 1981 and 1993, according to the magazine.
In fact NASA, a civilian agency, isn't space force. And no one in the Trump administration—not even among space force's biggest advocates—has proposed assigning NASA's exploration and science missions to a new military service.
Across its 96 pages, AMI's propaganda magazine constantly redefines “space” and “space force” in order to frame all U.S. government activities in space—and indeed, some high-tech government programs and even Hollywood movies that don't have anything to do with actual space—as part of space force.
NASA's recently-expired Mars rover? Space force. Air Force surveillance drones that fly just 50,000 feet above the ground? Space force. A short-range, experimental laser gun on the Navy's old amphibious ship USS Ponce? Space force. NASA studies into the danger asteroids pose to life on Earth? One of the threats space force will defeat.
The Doom series of video games, in which space marines battle demons on Mars? The reason “younger generations of Americans have embraced the concept of a space force,” according to the AMI special. The 1998 Michael Bay sci-fi flick Armageddon? “Space force in fiction.”
The mag selectively misreads history to craft a narrative in which Republicans are spacefaring heroes and Democrats are Earthbound villains.
“Space was not a high priority during the years of the Clinton administration,” the magazine claims. Never mind that Clinton preserved funding for the International Space Station over his own budget adviser's recommendation. The station, which in 2019 is still humanity's only long-term, off-world habitat, launched under Clinton's watch in 1998.
The AMI publication also targets Obama. “Trump's goal of ambitious space exploration reversed the policies set by Obama,” the magazine claims.
Again, this is untrue. NASA's priorities under Obama were to develop new manned spacecraft to replace the aged, unsafe Space Shuttle and to begin the early planning for a manned mission to Mars.
The first of Obama's new spacecraft, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, flew its first unmanned test flight to the International Space Station this month. Meanwhile, Trump's NASA has put on hold any serious planning for Mars while it works on a new, $3 billion, Moon-orbiting space station that some scientists have called a waste of time and money.
AMI’s writers downplay the strong objection to space force from within Trump's own administration. James Mattis, Trump's defense secretary until January, when he resigned in protest of Trump's erratic foreign policy, objected to space force on cost grounds.
Heather Wilson, Trump's Air Force secretary, pointed out that the military—and the Air Force in particular—already operates in space. Creating a space force would mean adding bureaucracy and reassigning 13,000 space operators from old commands to a new one.
“The Pentagon is complicated enough,“ Wilson explained. “We're trying to simplify. This will make it more complex, add more boxes to the organization chart and cost more money.”
In any event, creating a truly independent new military branch akin to the Army, Navy or Air Force would require congressional approval. That's unlikely to happen now that Democrats control the House of Representatives.
In an act of self-consolation, Trump in February signed a policy directive asking Congress to approve funding for a new space service inside the Air Force, much in the way that the Marine Corps technically is a separate service but falls under Navy administration.
According to Wilson, the new Air Force-managed space force bureaucracy could cost $13 billion over five years. Wilson, who reportedly nearly lost her job over her resistance to space force, on March 8 announced her resignation effective May 31.
With all the strongest Republican objectors on their way out, Trump might get his space force, but only as a pricey new layer of Air Force bureaucracy that doesn't actually change how, and to what extent, the U.S. military operates in orbit.
But if you believe a magazine publisher that has admitted to paying hush money to protect Trump, space force and its fearless space troops are going to change the world and the galaxy, and maybe even save all of us from alien attack. “If it ever comes to a matter of space invaders or asteroids,” AMI’s writers crow, “they, above all, will be prepared.”
Bullshit.
