If you haven’t been paying attention, the United States’ self-imposed space race with China is getting close. Beijing’s nationally-coordinated space program is rapidly closing its technological gap with the US, while the Trump administration strips NASA for parts.
And with the US’ technical abilities in space wavering, war hawks in the Pentagon are scrambling to plug the holes, quality be damned.
Speaking at a press conference this week, Space Force chief of space operations general Chance Saltzman said the US needs to accept that things aren’t always going to be perfect — weapons of war included.
“Now, high-quality space systems are mandatory, but they’re not relevant if we wait for them to be near-perfect before we put them in the hands of warfighters,” he told reporters, using the updated term for “service members.”
“Effective systems don’t require perfection to be combat credible,” Saltzman continued, stressing a quantity-over-quality approach to weapons acquisition, according to Space News. “I’ve been doing this a long time, so I know kind of what the constraints are, but I’m very optimistic that there’s still places we can do better.”
The general criticized the Pentagon’s typical acquisitions strategy, which, to be fair, isn’t exactly a font of government efficiency. For decades, national security hawks have prioritized expensive, tailor-made hardware over more readily available commercial units, resulting in exorbitant costs that only increase as weapons systems age.
The knock-on effect is that the military industrial complex gets fat and happy at enormous cost to US taxpayers, not to mention those caught on the wrong side of the Pentagon’s unprecedented arsenal.
As far as those unfortunate souls go, it seems the US rulers are divided between who should be next. At the moment, there appear to be two dominant schools of thought, one lusting for a new cold war with China — Saltzman’s stance — and another for continued US involvement in the Middle East.
The result of that squabbling, plus a lust for a military presence in orbit, has been a confused and disjointed approach to US military and foreign policy, manifesting in bizarre schemes like the Space Force’s failed Space National Guard, and Donald Trump’s bizarre Golden Dome initiative.
That said, the balance of power may change as Trump shows signs of softening his hard heart against the People’s Republic, a stance which seems to be weakening the China camp’s overall influence.
With that in mind, it might be best to view Saltzman’s cost-cutting measures as more of an act of desperation than a clever show of pragmatism.
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