US MILITARY: BE PREPARED TO FIGHT ON THE MOON, AND ELSEWHERE… ...

As you can tell, this week's blogs are focused on all the weird news coming out about space lately, including (if you read last Monday's blog) the very weird weather pattern that the North American continent has been experiencing this summer. Last Monday I suggested that we might be looking at a "demonstration" or "proof of concept" experimental technology, one also designed to send messages to the USA's competitors. That technology, I suggested, was the extension of ground-based ionospheric heaters such as HAARP or EISCAT by means of space-based platforms designed to fine-tune the steering and interferometry of ground-based microwave broadcast signals (such as HAARP and EISCAT) by means of specially-adapted horn antennae or other such equipment, giving the USA an awesome strategic offensive capability that is not thermonuclear.

Speculation? To be sure! But it occurs in a context of more or less contemporaneous - and very unusual - set announcements from the American military about space, including these articles shared by Gizar article-spotter-and-sharer, E.E.:

The Pentagon must prepare for battles around the moon: Joint Chiefs chair

China urges US to ‘stop preparing for war in outer space’

US Space Weapon Claims Risk Igniting Orbital Arms Race - Expert

Note in the first article these statements, which I pointed out in last week's video blogs and News and Views, and which I view as important enough to repeat in this week's written blog:

“Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now, so the Joint Force is prepared to fight, endure, and win, in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine told airmen, guardians, and industry figures during his keynote address at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference.

Caine later repeated the thought—“today’s modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space”—but he did not clarify whether he meant on the moon’s surface. U.S. law is ambiguous, defining(opens in new tab) cislunar space as “the region of space from the Earth out to and including the region around the surface of the moon.” At least one Harvard Law Journal article interprets(opens in new tab) the clause to mean on the moon itself, and the White House’s National Cislunar Science and Technology Action Plan explicitly said(opens in new tab) in late 2024 that it includes the lunar surface. But the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 2021 “Primer on Cislunar Space(opens in new tab)” appears to treat space and the moon’s surface as two different domains.

In other words, the US military is now claiming that the entire space, from the floors of terrestrial oceans to the lunar surface are a proper theater and war-fighting domain, and that the military must have the doctrine (i.e., the technique) and the technology to fight in those environments. As I pointed out in those video blogs and podcasts, the use of "orbital" to define the placement of weapons in space is a very "adjustable" term: an orbit can be literally any distance from a central point, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of miles:

“The United States Space Force will continue to execute safe and responsible space operations in all regions of space and in all orbits,” he said. (Emphasis added)

The problem here is - as I also pointed out in those video blogs and podcasts last week - that the language is deliberately and calculatedly ambiguous, because while most people will be inclined to understand that statement as referring to all orbital distances from planet Earth, the language could be interpreted to me all the orbits of all the celestial bodies in the entire solar system.  In other words, the statement may be read as a call to readiness and the ability to maintain military operations in a much larger theater than that which ends at the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, or its surface. And as for oceans, one needs to remember that some satellites of the gas giants are thought to contain vast oceans beneath their icy surfaces.

And this thought - highly speculative though it certainly is - is buttressed by two other very odd statements. The first is that the military has announced that the USA is indeed going back to the lunar surface with a manned expedition, to establish a permanent manned base there (again, the article is courtesy of E.E., with our gratitude):

NASA Chief Says Critical For US To Win Space Race With China

Additionally, there are also plans to double the size of the Space Force (article also shared by E.E.):

And then there was the statement of the U.S. Army Secretary, Dan Driscoll, who referred to the lunar astronaut "who is a soldier"(Article again courtesy of E.E. with our gratitude):

U.S. Army Secretary Refers to Astronaut “On the Moon Who’s a Soldier,” Igniting Secret Space Program Conspiracies

Driscoll made these highly provocative remarks on Fox news:

“We talked to an astronaut yesterday who’s on the Moon who’s a soldier,” Driscoll said, “including actually going to war and fighting to defend the freedoms that are, uh, that make our nation so great.”

Unfortunately, the Secretary's remarks were not the calculated and deliberate ambiguity of the Space Force general in chief, Gagnon, nor of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and of course, they are being explained away as a slip of the tongue. But, in the high octane speculative environment I've been entertaining in this week's blogs, perhaps not. Perhaps the slip of the tongue was entirely intentional, like President Trump's remarks of some years ago when he highlighted the need for "another" space force. Another one? You mean, we already have one, and now we need another? At the time of  that slip of the tongue, I speculated that perhaps it was not a slip of the tongue at all, but an acknowledgement that space-based capabilities had outgrown the ability of a "coast guard" (space force number one) and now the USA needed a real "deep water Navy" (space force number two). Indeed, if we're to go out and mine asteroids, the latter is an inevitability.

The Army secretary's remarks, however, are not a one off, and for that reason I strongly suspect this was not a mere slip of the tongue, but more message-sending, for recall the remarks of general Thoroughly Modern Milley at the US Air Force Academy a few years ago, where he noted that the soldier of the future would have to be prepared to fight "little green men." Those remarks, too, were explained away in the most torturous manner possible: we were told that the phrase "little green men" was a kind of military slang for the camouflage uniforms worn by Russian soldiers, and thus that the General was merely indicating that we had to be prepared to fight Russia.

What big steaming cauldrons of nonsense, codswallop, and horse plop. The phrase "Little green men" has been popular slang for extra-terrestrial intelligent life since at least the end of World War Two, and everyone - including Thoroughly Modern Milley - knows it. Add to that British hacker Gary McKinnon's claims to have hacked into Department of Defense computers to discover an entire American "secret space fleet" complete with the ship names and names of commanding officers, or Ronald Reagan's admission in his memoirs that the US even back then had a space lift capacity of 300 persons - far in excess of the then-existing space shuttle fleet - and you get the idea.

So did Secretary Driscoll actually talk to a soldier on the Moon? Maybe, maybe not, but I'm open to the possibility. And that too, has some disturbing implications, for it implies the existence of a technology that got that soldier to the moon, and moon rockets are hard to hide, and launching them without people noticing is even harder. And that implies that there may already be another technology in play...

... but we're not quite done with space and the torrent of stories and announcements in this season of Not One Atlantic Hurricane Thus Far... we have one more part for this coming Friday...

See you on the flip side...

(If you enjoyed today's blog please share it with your friends.)