A Strategy & Tactical Build for the US Space Force (USSF)

[Norfolk nChance]

A Strategy & Tactical Build for the US Space Force (USSF)

This is a tad left field, a sort of future History...

The Naval Action community once again amazes me at the depth of knowledge and passion you carry for military theory from all ages covering Land sea or air. We look back with the advantage of hindsight (or God Mode) citing ways Generals, Admirals or Countries used someone’s strategic theory to win or lose. With this in mind and following @admin lead “only hardcore will do”. Let’s take Hindsight or God Mode away to see if we can still solve a military challenge.

 

Task.

YOU as a Military Strategist tell me Why the United States needs a Space Force by 2020? How will it be able to achieve tactically its (USSF) objectives over the coming 10 years 2030? What are its Objectives? Battle Strategy ideas and thoughts. I’ll write my thoughts over the weekend, I would love to hear yours. War domains now cover Land, Sea, Air and Cyber with Outer Space just 60 miles straight up to be the next theater...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaSnwTjnhQE

Mike Pence outlines plans to create the USSF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarisation_of_space

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theater_(warfare)

(part of the war series)

 

Outer Space as been under funded by the United States for decades allowing other countries and Private Corporations to catch up. The US losing its cold war dominance now sees potential future threats from Russia, China, and India. This from an NSA report to the Pentagon in 2017. Private Businesses with launch vehicles from SpaceX, Boeing, Orbital ATK are cutting out NASA from the lucrative Satellite business just through its years of underfunding now needing to play catch up also.

How will @Sir R. Calder of Southwick a real-life professional Navy man's knowledge tackle this unknown future threat. Will @Sento de Benimaclet use his knowledge of Vo Nguyen to solve the complex problem? Am sure @Louis Garneray will fall back on the popular On-War theory... Maybe @Sir Hethwill the RedDuke comes up with a simple Logistics operation using the ordinary man behind the machine?

 

Without hindsight, let me know what you’d do to protect effectively America’s interests in Outer Space over the next 10 years.

 

Norfolk nRocketman

 

[Urchin]

Because Space Force is an 80's cartoon and Trump is a child. 

[Urchin]

He even sounded like a cartoon (child) when he announced it. Didn't take the internet long to make the connection. Even when Pence tried to follow that ridiculous announcement up with his best speech and political acting, still looked and sounded comical when he said Space Force.

 

 

 

 

[Norfolk nChance]

@William Wade

 

The Opening Point is not about President Donald Trump. He didn’t come up with the idea, just the ridiculous name. The USAF core missions are air, space, global strike and command & control. They have over 5,000 aircraft, 400 ICBMs and 170 Military Satellites and a nearly new space shuttle Atlantis in the Smithsonian.

The Air Force was becoming swamped and reporting lines unclear. The Air Force Space Command [AFSPC] a subsidiary of the USAF mission was to “Provide resilient and affordable Space and Cyberspace capabilities for the Joint Force and the Nation” and this is where the reporting lines crossed or become unclear. It needed spinning of as Cyber and Satellites became more important.

The USAF needed cleaning up and the catalyst came in 2007 when China shot down a defunct weather satellite. The process started however the armed forces already in a war and within a year we saw a global financial meltdown. Had funding issues.

With the economic recovery underway and set to continue The Republican Party and Donald Trump took advantage or Hijacked the reform by allocating more funding (remember his campaign to the armed forces?) to this project...

This is why he gets to call it his idea...

If you don’t think there is any Space threat out to 2030 then fine, but please it is not about a President. Fake News will get him into trouble soon enough. This was a very brief summary of course.

 

Norfolk.

 

[HachiRoku]

Warfare in space is really never going to happen in my opinion. You might have orbital bombardment with kinetic energy weapons but its just way to expensive and there are far more effective ways to do it with ICBMs. To get your weapons and whatever you need to support them into space will cost you more delta v than an ICBM simply because an ICBM doesn't need orbital velocity and the warhead would be way lighter than any other weapon. Sending an ICBM to bomb a rebellion on a mars colony from the surface of earth would also simply be the cheapest solution. Keep mass in mind because getting a bomb to mars is far less than anything we normally send so launch trajectory can be way faster. You don't need a hydrogen bomb warhead though. Space is cold and this makes hiding weapons or spaceships impossible. You need to keep weapons of any kind warm somehow because they will not survive the freezing cold. They will also be using some kind of signals to communicate.

Great channel you should watch all his vids if you like space

Also is there no way to hide part of the post like spoilers? Im sure we used to be able to

 

 

 

[Urchin]

29 minutes ago, Norfolk nChance said:

 

This is why he gets to call it his idea...

 

 

Gets to call it his idea, exactly! Bone spurs wants his name to have a legacy in the military other than as a five times draft dodger.  Military doesn't need another branch that will do nothing but waste time,thinking and money. 

Economic recovery? Obviously you're not watching the debt and bond markets.

"Fake News will get him into trouble soon enough."  He does that every day all by himself, even long before he became POTUS. 

Edited August 18, 2018 by William Wade

[Hethwill]

Star Wars is not the galactica pewpew but the first Global Information war. Whoever has full control of the bubble around the earth can, effectively, have all the intelligence it needs for whatever purpose - population control, misinformation, secret services deployment and support, rebellion insurgency etc, you name it.

As an analogy we are brought to the late 1800's, when the gyroscope torpedos first hit the oceans. Suddenly the small could kill the big easily. The hegemony of the past victors was at stake and the race was on.

Same now with the information wars and counter intelligence being deployed.

It is the true hearts&minds games, for information is democratic and freely available, be it false or fact, and who controls information... can use it or misuse it.

Regarding the man behind the machine - why send someone up there when you can remote drone it if needed ?

In a real scenario it would become a "drone wars" up there and a "shadow ops" down here, with attacks and counter attacks on black sites harboring "guerrilla" teams of data experts.

 

That how I see it. The ultimate "weapon" to enforce your will into the enemy is to "remove" all their comms and links. In a sense it is like "bombing them back to the rock age".

 

 

[Norfolk nChance]

@HachiRoku

 

Interesting YouTube channel and will watch more. I agree with your thesis on space warfare to be an unlikely if not an unusual affaire up to 2030. Up to 2030 the valuable assets are the satellites for communications, GPS and so on. USAF with 170 satellites to look after its highly unlikely China would try to shoot them all out of the sky.

More likely is to attack their ground receiver stations spread across the globe with servers and databases that were retroactively woven to together. This leaves countless weak spots. China-based hacker groups have already targeted defense manufacturing firms and satellites are surprisingly easy to hack. US Space Force’s first role would be Cyber Security of its primary SATS.

As an offensive role, the X-37B unmanned mini shuttle spent 2 years in space and before that 270 days. That’s very good reliability as you state the cold is no good for avionics over that length of time.  Usage could deliver a small “First-Strike” orbital bombardment using kinetic energy not violating the Outer Space Treaty. But that’s really it.

Space Force probably will see more action down the gravity well than orbit.

https://www.amazon.com/Dauntless-Lost-Fleet-Book-1/dp/0441014186

If you like more realistic sci-fi battles try this guy. The series gets tired but battles are good with distance time and visibility issues. The author is a retired Naval Officer so you get good feel how a warship might run.

Norfolk

[HachiRoku]

50 minutes ago, Norfolk nChance said:

As an offensive role, the X-37B unmanned mini shuttle spent 2 years in space and before that 270 days. That’s very good reliability as you state the cold is no good for avionics over that length of time.

No what I mean by cold is that you can keep the electronics warm but that will cause heat and heat is VERY visible in space. 

[Norfolk nChance]

I get you, the minute it wakes up it becomes very visible.

[Sir Lancelot Holland]

There is to be honest no requirement for space based weapons systems, the fastest way to win a modern technological war is to destroy the Command and Communications structure, once that is gone, cohesion is gone, no centralised strategy can be established or transmitted, all actions would be at a tactical level.

Once all electronic signalling is gone, what is left? Line of sight communications? Carrier pidgeons? The pony express? 

Develop satellite killer missiles, launched from aircraft in the stratosphere, combined with cyberspace technology and it is all over, no communications = no warfare ability, this is why technology is warfare's greatest liability, it's too complex, and the military and political sectors are overdependent  on it.

[HachiRoku]

15 minutes ago, Norfolk nChance said:

I get you, the minute it wakes up it becomes very visible.

 

not when it wakes up. Space is cold and spacecraft need heating non stop or they die. 

[Captain Jean-Luc Picard]

7 hours ago, Norfolk nChance said:

@admin
@Sir R. Calder of Southwick@Sento de Benimaclet@Louis Garneray@Sir Hethwill the RedDuke

 

 

 

7 hours ago, Norfolk nChance said:

@admin

 

YOU as a Military Strategist tell me Why the United States needs a Space Force by 2020? How will it be able to achieve tactically its (USSF) objectives over the coming 10 years 2030? What are its Objectives?

Outer Space as been under funded by the United States for decades allowing other countries and Private Corporations to catch up. The US losing its cold war dominance now sees potential future threats from Russia, China, and India. This from an NSA report to the Pentagon in 2017. Private Businesses with launch vehicles from SpaceX, Boeing, Orbital ATK are cutting out NASA from the lucrative Satellite business just through its years of underfunding now needing to play catch up also.

@Sir R. Calder of Southwick@Sento de Benimaclet@Louis Garneray@Sir Hethwill the RedDuke

Without hindsight, let me know what you’d do to protect effectively America’s interests in Outer Space over the next 10 years.

Couldn't cut out the mentions from the quote, anyway:

The states don't need any space force in the near future.

There is no relevant imminent military threat justifying such a thing, and emerging competition in space capabilities would be better dealt with by investing ever more and more in NASA rather than by investing disproportionate amounts of money into something unnecessary.

For realistic threats that already do exist, it would be much more efficient and less costly to reinforce the services already dealing with those already existing threats than to create a new branch.

Cash is not infinite, and there are many other priorities, be it NASA, the army/navy/air, intel and diplomacy to avoid those threats, or simply internal development.

Private biz and competition has always been the motto of the oh ever so capitalist united states, hell even the army is going full mercenary ( sorry, it's a taboo word, military contractors ), with pretty much every part being privatized to various degrees, and NASA commercial ventures, which have never been its goal, are not gonna do better with cash that could go to it going into a space force instead.

Hell, when the day does come where a space military is necessary, i won't be surprised to see the states have space contractors for everything. If a space force is created i am certain it will spend its money on those companies you mention, furthering the gap between nasa and those.

But since we mention nasa, let me link here a report about science https://www.ucsusa.org/center-science-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/scientist-survey-2018#.W3LlNthKjUo

 

 

Edited August 18, 2018 by Captain Jean-Luc Picard

[Sir Lancelot Holland]

36 minutes ago, HachiRoku said:

No what I mean by cold is that you can keep the electronics warm but that will cause heat and heat is VERY visible in space. 

I think Hachi has it about right, my early years were spent maintaining platforms that kill submarines, and submarines are traceable via noise, magnetic variation, and heat exchange, Satellites are capable of picking up small heat signatures in the oceans, they can detect nuclear power plants and tell if a ship is preparing to go to sea by heat signature alone even if it steam, diesel or electronically  driven! 

[HachiRoku]

15 minutes ago, Sir Lancelot Holland said:

Develop satellite killer missiles, launched from aircraft in the stratosphere

hard to do, com sats are in GTO and to take one of them out the missile would be to large for planes. The only satellites destroyed so far were in LEO. 

[Sir Lancelot Holland]

1 minute ago, HachiRoku said:

hard to do, com sats are in GTO and to take one of them out the missile would be to large for planes. The only satellites destroyed so far were in LEO. 

Yes perhaps lasers are the way forward  certainly more feasible than a large missile, the Phoenix/Tomcat combination while spectacular and effective proved to be prohibitively expensive.  

[HachiRoku]

 

Just now, Sir Lancelot Holland said:

Yes perhaps lasers are the way forward  certainly more feasible than a large missile, the Phoenix/Tomcat combination while spectacular and effective proved to be prohibitively expensive.  

I doubt lasers anytime soon and the phoenix missile was a terrible missile. 

[Captain Jean-Luc Picard]

As a side note i recommend the book Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security, by burrows..

[Cecil Selous]

Was the Phoenix ever planned to be used against satellites. I only remember the special ASAT missile in combination with the F-15. SM-3 is also capable of targeting satellites in LEO. Main targets also were radar- or other spy satellites. Like Hachi said, GEO can't be reached by current missiles intended for the anti-satellite role.

[HachiRoku]

1 minute ago, Cecil Selous said:

Was the Phoenix ever planned to be used against satellites. I only remember the special ASAT missile in combination with the F-15. SM-3 is also capable of targeting satellites in LEO. Main targets also were radar- or other spy satellites. Like Hachi said, GEO can't be reached by current missiles intended for the anti-satellite role.

no, I doubt it. You would need a multi staged missile for that I think. Most Air to Air missiles only burn for a couple of secs and glide towards the target.  The reason pilots do sharp turns is to bleed of the missiles energy. The phoenix would burn longer but was not successful at hitting fuck all. 

[Norfolk nChance]

Satellite Quick Facts (includes launches through 4/30/18)

Total number of operating satellites: 1,886

United States: 859 Russia: 146  China: 250       Other: 631

LEO: 1,186              MEO: 112      Elliptical: 40    GEO: 548

 

Total number of US satellites: 859

Civil: 20

Commercial: 495

Government: 178

Military: 166

 

https://www.space.com/41511-weird-russian-satellite-not-so-abnormal.html

 

That’s the working SATS breakdown, look at China. I seem to struggle from the offensive point of view. How do I effectively attack from Space another or multiple Space objects with efficiency? How do I attack from Space to a ground target accurately?

Without the use of ICBMs it seems a lot harder than it first looks. SPY or Surveillance gathering seems to be the best role by a long way.

 

 

[Sir Lancelot Holland]

2 minutes ago, HachiRoku said:

 

I doubt lasers anytime soon and the phoenix missile was a terrible missile. 

I think the concept was sound, in practice however despite the radar/missile/platform working well, it was far from being cost effective, to work it required salvo firing from 200 miles with no guarantee of a sufficient number of hits, although the small reduction of enemy aircraft numbers did mean that for every kill meant that 4 less missiles could be launched at the fleet.  

With lasers I think given time and the current trend for miniature electronics with high power outputs it may well become a possibility, but as you say it is still some considerable time off yet.

 

[HachiRoku]

2 minutes ago, Sir Lancelot Holland said:

I think the concept was sound, in practice however despite the radar/missile/platform working well, it was far from being cost effective, to work it required salvo firing from 200 miles with no guarantee of a sufficient number of hits, although the small reduction of enemy aircraft numbers did mean that for every kill meant that 4 less missiles could be launched at the fleet.  

With lasers I think given time and the current trend for miniature electronics with high power outputs it may well become a possibility, but as you say it is still some considerable time off yet.

 

the only thing that missile might have hit is a 747. There is no way it would hit a fighter. 

[Captain Jean-Luc Picard]

Sorry, one more thing:

If you have ever traveled a fair bit you might have noticed that a lot of people have a profound dislike for the united states. While acknowledging and respecting the ideals of the states, a lot of countries have simply had terrible experiences with the states, or shall we say bloody experiences. In the name of its ideals, the states have a lot of blood on their hands. It is without a doubt a military nation, but also a nation actively using its military. I might be grateful for some things, critical of others, but that doesn't change the facts.

If the united states do develop a military space force, i can totally see it being used to shed blood. Of course for good reasons, who doesn't have a good reason to do whatever it is they are doing.

This is not a political opinion, just a thought and opinion on the likely eventual use of a space force if it comes to existence.

Also the militarization of space will become fun when other countries will follow/imitate the states. You, know the states talk of threats it needs defending against, and creates a unique threat towards other countries which for obvious reasons of national security now need to defend against the threat presented by the united states. One can cite russia, china or whomever as threats, but how will they see such a move? Will they sit back and applaud?

Edited August 18, 2018 by Captain Jean-Luc Picard

[Norfolk nChance]

Being an Englishman I’ve no room to talk. Now more of a well-trained bespoke Armed Force, we are more commercially active with BAe Systems.

https://www.satellitetoday.com/government-military/2018/06/01/uk-to-debut-first-defense-space-strategy-this-summer/

I just hope we don’t roll out the Royal Space Force post Brexit

 

Norfolk.