All joking about camo uniforms aside, the new military service has an important mission. By Ken Krantz
https://thebulwark.com/the-stylish-space-force/Last weekend, the Twitter account of the newly established United States Space Force (USSF) featured two newsworthy items. One involved the successful test of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon launch-abort rescue system. The other involved the acquisition of a small uniform modification. Guess which one trended most strongly on social media?
Here’s a hint: In a serious nation, the impressive engineering feat that may save the lives of future astronauts would have generated a lot of interest. But we are not a serious nation . . .
. . . [N]o one is going to be “fighting in space†in that or any other uniform for the foreseeable future. Space is a vitally important theater of military operations, and in recognition of that the U.S. Space Command (USSPACECOM) was established in 1985, before most of the troops currently assigned to it were born. Those troops all work on the planet’s surface and none of them wields a phaser or a lightsaber. And most of the time on the job they wear—wait for it—camouflage combat and working uniforms . . .
. . . [T]he Space Force is a new sixth branch of the armed forces, after the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and Air Force. The Space Force, founded on December 20, 2019, is only the second new military branch established in the last 200 years, so there is not a lot of precedent for the organizational structure . . . The new branch is a separate service within the Department of the Air Force, analogous to the status of the Marine Corps within the Department of the Navy . . .
. . . Reasonable people can disagree on whether the new organizational structure is the best one for accomplishing the mission the Space Force has been given. But the mission isn’t going away, and the highly skilled and dedicated people who perform it will, at least in the immediate future, be wearing the same uniforms that they did before the new service was established.
Forget the internet chatter about “new uniforms†and “fighting in space.†The personnel of the Space Force will boldly go where lots of people have gone before, and will do so in uniforms most of them already own . . .
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This is one that President Tweety actually got right.---EA.
