- April 28, 2024
- Posted by: admin
- Category: Uncategorized
By Federico Maiozzi
In the first four decades of the twentieth century, the armed forces of the major powers had to develop warfare doctrines for the astonishing amount (considering the previous centuries) of inventions that appeared in those years.
The integration of the military aviation within the armed forces was undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges. An enormous endeavour, not only technical but also organizational and speculative, in the noble sense of the term. It was not enough, in fact, to build or buy good aircrafts, but it was also necessary to guarantee a logistics chain in order to kept them efficient, an organization to coordinate them and an elite of aviation officers and theorists to foreseen their developments and usage strategies.
The answers to the problem were very different. Some countries entrusted almost everything that flew to the new Air Forces (among others, Italy, Germany, partly Great Britain and Soviet Union), while others took longer to create air corps organized into autonomous armed forces, and they assigned for decades to the Army and the Navy powerful air forces (among others, Japan and United States).
Mutatis mutandis, today the situation is not so far from the one just described with the spatial dimension. In an era when space is crucial for almost every human activity, civil and military, nations are starting to reflect if create or not an autonomous armed force that has only that sector as its field of action.
In this short article, without claiming to be exhaustive, the reader will be provided with food for thought on both a qualitative and quantitative level.
The numerical factor
Before even asking whether a Space Force could be useful, it is necessary to understand whether it could be possible to physically establish it.
Within NATO, the only country that could honestly answer yes to this question is the United States, and in fact the first independent Space Force within NATO was founded on December 20, 2019[1] in the United States when then president Donald J. Trump signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for the (US) fiscal year 2020, in which the creation of the sixth US armed force, the United States Space Force- – USSF, was planned; the new born took the heritage of eighty years of US military operations in which the space component had always been present.
The USSF has grown rapidly in budget, personnel and resources, reaching an estimated staff of 14,000 people for the 2023 (US) fiscal year[2] among military and civilians, as well as bases, infrastructure, research centers, satellites, spaceships and a requested budget for 2024 of approximately 30 billion dollars[3]. This is without considering the communication effort made to immediately popularize the new force. New uniforms, new logo (clearly similar to the one used by the Star Trek astronauts), new motto[4], new march and new nickname for its soldiers, the guardians[5]. Without forgetting the TV series Space Force released in that same period.
The situation of the European members of NATO is largely different. First, the USSF’s budget alone is larger than that of most NATO militaries in their entirety[6].
It would not be completely far from the truth to think that that the nations of Western Europe did not create Space Forces to avoid becoming ridiculous, or less emphatically because the space component can still be widely integrated into traditional armed forces, given its relatively small size.
These two observations, despite not entirely wrong, alone they are not conclusive.
The speculative factor.
On the one hand, it is certainly true that the Europeans’ prudent approach is certainly appreciable, given the significant gap in capabilities between the two sides of the Atlantic. Likewise, it would be wrong indulging in a sort of technical determinism whereby if Western Europe is “weak” today it must also be so tomorrow.
Given this concept, it appears clear that the opportunity to establish or not independent Space Forces at European level does not escape the questions that every human action should answer: why do it? How to do it? When to do it? And last but not least, given the prosaic nature of the world, with what resources can we do it?
The author will not answer any of these questions here, limiting to an analysis of them.
Why do it? Essentially, it could be said that if one considers everything above the Kármán line as an extension of what lies between it and the sea, then the Space Forces are useless and the French approach (among others) whereby the Armèe de l’Air became the Armée de l’Air et de l’Espace[7], it is certainly the preferable one. Otherwise, if we think that war events will be able to be fought only in the spatial dimension, then it will certainly be useful to create dedicated armed forces, obviously also equipping the others with space instruments, similarly to what happened with the air force.
How to do it and when to do it? In this case, cooperation with the civil world will be essential, as a wise political leadership. Building an efficient space armed force from scratch would be unrealistic for any European state, consequently it will be necessary to use what is already present in the civil sphere, integrating it and in some way “copying” it, managing in in the meantime – and here politics will be crucial – jealousies, attempts at speculation and anger that such a complex phenomenon inevitably brings with it.
With what resources? Analyzing this question, we must not immediately think about money, which is also necessary, but much more about the necessary natural resources. This topic, which would require a separate article, can only be addressed quickly by citing a fact: the European NATO countries are practically devoid of all the raw materials necessary for the construction of a space vehicle. In this state of affairs, a foreign policy with a very straight back is necessary.
At the end of the paragraph, the writer allows himself an extra question, namely: where to launch future European military spaceships from? Not at all a trivial point at this moment, given that european nations part of EU and NATO can count on a single European launch base, protected by French soldiers, in Kourou, French Guiana. All others must necessarily resort to those of the United States or third countries.
The importance of debate.
Although the role of the press and scientific literature is often marginal in the decision-making process, rightly in the hands of the political leadership, in the same way, the creation of a healthy debate on the Space Force topic could prove functional in avoiding at least two common aberrations in the dynamics of modern states not only in the military sphere.
First of all, it is absolutely necessary to avoid the creation of Space Forces for internal reasons, a sort of technological re-edition of parade troops useless for combat but effective in a political – or even worse, purely electoral – key. It would represent a weakness in the defense of the countries and an unfair debasement of the civil and military professionalism involved.
Finally, the debate on the issue is necessary to develop an approach to space from a military perspective (but in fact we could say from a general perspective) which is not only technical but also humanistic. Technicians are certainly necessary for the development and creation of technologies that materially allow action in the spatial dimension, but at the same time we need a class of humanists who manage these innovations towards the realization of a shared objective and prevent or control the social repercussions that these same innovations will inevitably have. Everybody should act with collaborative spirit, since a world of only humanists would send us back to prehistory, and a world of only technicians would take us back towards pseudo-superhumanistic perspectives that Europe has already sadly experienced.
Closing credits
In alphabetical order, my sincere thanks go to two soldiers who saw space very closely above their helmets: generals Bruno Clermont and Giancarlo Maragucci. With their profound reflections on the topic they have allowed me to exponentially improve the quality of this short article.
[1] https://congress.gov/116/plaws/publ92/PLAW-116publ92.pdf, p. 365.
[2] https://www.spaceforce.mil/About-Us/About-Space-Force/
[3] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3330161/space-force-focuses-on-partnerships-spirit-combat-readiness/
[4] https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article/2282948/the-us-space-force-logo-and-motto/
[5] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/18/pence-announces-space-force-members-will-be-called-guardians-448509
[6] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_197050.htm
[7] From Sept. 11th 2020, https://www.defense.gouv.fr/air/mieux-nous-connaitre/lhistoire-larmee-lair-lespace