US Space Force finally creates targeting unit – better late than never, right? It's taken a few years, but the US Space Force finally has a unit dedicated to target analysis, development, and engagement. While one would assume a targeting squadron would be a fundamental part of establishing a Space Force, the 75th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron (ISRS) only stood up last week at …
Not a stupid question at all.
The short answer is "they couldn't figure out how to build it."
A long answer is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
"What is this actually doing?"
Probably nothing that wasn't previously being adequately addressed by the US Air Force, US Navy, and the "black" agencies. It's a Trump initiative and gives every appearance of being neither necessary nor useful. But I don't think it actually costs very much. It's budget is around $30B out of a total "Defense" (i.e. War Department) budget of $1770B. And that $30B is mostly funding for things that would be (and were previously) done by some other part of the military.
A legend in their own mind, mpi, before they have studied to conquer and fully understand the complex workings and simple correlation of time and space, has them standing as wilfully ignorant and arrogant wayward children before truly almighty omniscient GOD ..... Global Operating Devices.
And the fate of not the very best of such children if unable or disinclined to both learn from childish serial and monumentally stupid mistakes and change course fundamentally, has never been great since wilfully ignorant and arrogant wayward mistakes became such a deadly dangerous life-threatening thing for them to suffer.
You can shoot them up; you can never shoot them down. It's the atmosphere in its thinness that'll do that, eventually.
Lack of understanding of orbital dynamics should be a disqualifier for any role in any such "Space Force"; except this is a Donald Trump establishment, and like Donald Trump's casinos in Atlanta, I'm not expecting it to either last, or do anything of any use.
Even disabling some random opponent's military satellite's fraught with risk - if you haven't "shot it up" because it can't come down like an aircraft, and won't go down like a ship, and instead you've just rendered it "harmless", in the same way Kosmos 2251 was "harmless", you've left it around to take out some future Iridium 33. You've put a certain number of communications and remote sensing satellites at risk, which means you might find them missing when you need them.
Earth Orbit's more in need of some Hague Convention of the Neutrality sort, recognizing it as covered by the same sort of neutrality the Antarctic's covered by, than any muscle-pumping, fist-thumping Rambo All-American Can't Do!!!
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