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Anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters face off against far-right militias and white pride organizations in Stone Mountain, Georgia on Aug. 15.Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images

David Frenchs Divided We Fall, which warns that the U.S. is at risk of a literal breakup if current trends in political polarization continue, is one of those books thats almost too timely. Its long-range predictions already feel out of date.

French imagined California splitting from the United States, presumably before Gov. Gavin Newsom declared California a nation-state in response to federal failures to combat the coronavirus. French puts forth a scenario where roadblocks are set up on state borders. During the early days of the pandemic, that happened. French foresees Democrats trying to pack the Supreme Court in order to protect abortion rights well, you get the picture. The problem with Frenchs nightmare scenarios isnt that they seem implausibleits that, as of now, they seem like wishful thinking.

French has more credibility than most when it comes to decrying blind partisanship. Hes a veteran of the culture wars: a Christian evangelical attorney who used to be best known for suing American universities on religious liberty grounds and writing for National Review. But since 2016, hes become better known as a leading conservative critic of Donald Trump, in the process enduring a torrent of abuse from right-wing trolls including disgusting racist attacks directed at his adopted Black daughter. Today, he describes himself as a man without a party and acts as an all-purpose defender of free speechsomeone willing to go to bat for both James Damore and Colin Kaepernick.

The first part of Divided We Fall is a very familiar overview of current trends in partisan polarization: Americans have become much less likely to associate with people with whom they disagree in politics, and increasingly live in overwhelmingly blue or red communities. Politics overwhelm every other form of social, cultural, and religious identification, and people become more extreme as they tailor their views to those of their peers. Partisans dont want to just defeat one another in argument; they want to destroy one another.

An even more familiar litany of alleged perpetratorsFox News, overly woke college activists, the NRA, antifaare trotted out as French decries the vitriol and winner-takes-all spirit that have taken over our democracy. Given the party identification of the White Houses current occupant, and which side is perpetrating the vast majority of political violence in the country today, it seems to me that French is reaching a bit to make both sides seem equally responsible for this state of affairs. Then again, according to his schema, I would think that, so its worth just conceding the point to get to the more provocative part of the book, which imagines the end result of these trends.

If the best argument for the continued existence of the United States is the security of Estonia and Taiwan, maybe it really is time to pack itin.

Putting on his speculative fiction hat, French imagines two scenarios for the breakup of the United States, one representing fears of the left, the other the right. In the first, California bans private gun ownership in the wake of a horrific school shooting, setting up a constitutional showdown that leads the states on the West Coast to conclude that the union is no longer worth preserving. In the second, Southern states ban abortion, setting a similar scenario in motion. In both cases, a subsequent act of accidental violence prompts the final crackup.

Whats odd about Frenchs scenarios is that its a little hard to tell why he thinks theyre a bad thing. After 244 yearsmuch older than most currently existing constitutional regimesif weve really become completely incapable of existing as one cohesive political community, then why, other than a sentimental attachment to the Stars and Stripes, should red and blue Americans continue to share a country? At the end of the Calexit scenario, he even writes that Americans mainly felt relief after it was all over.

Instead, he thinks the worst consequences will be international. After the split-up of the United States, he writes, the peace that had been maintained through the overwhelming military and economic might of the United States would not hold. This is an accelerated version of the argument Robert Kagan and others have made about Americas ongoing disengagement from the world. Without the U.S. security guarantee, French imagines a return to great power conflict, with China and Russia moving to invade their smaller neighbors. With all due respect to these countries, if the best argument for the continued existence of the United States is the security of Estonia and Taiwan, maybe it really is time to pack it in.

The completely unsentimental reason to be worried about the breakup of the United States is that its unlikely to be as tidy as Frenchs scenarios suggest. Peaceful national divorces are few and far between in world history. Examples like Czechoslovakias velvet divorce are far less common than nightmare scenarios like the Partition of India or the splintering of Yugoslavia. The Soviet Unions fragmentation did not lead to the Yugoslavia with nukes that many U.S. officials feared at the time, but it did spark decades of brutal war in the Caucasus. Russian resentment over the stranding of ethnic Russians across international bordersby what Vladimir Putin called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th centuryculminated in Russias annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing violence in eastern Ukraine.

The problem with drawing new borders, whether its Europe after World War I, the former Soviet Union today, or the U.S. in Frenchs imagined future, is always minorities. People dont usually live together in fully homogenous divisible units. Wherever you draw a new line, someone is going to be on the wrong side of it.

One of the main reasons that French thinks the U.S. is ripe for secession is that, as in the years prior to the American Civil War, red and blue states tend to be geographically clustered with Democrats in control of the Pacific Coast and the Upper East Coast and Republicans dominating the states of the Southeastern Conference.

But while these red and blue clusters are apparent on a state-by-state election map, things look very different when you break it down further. A district-by-district map shows America as a sea of red interspersed with tiny but densely populated splotches of blue. There is a geographical divide in the U.S. today, but North vs. South and coasts vs. heartland are often less relevant than urban vs. rural. Breaking the country up into chunks would leave a lot of stranded citizens. For this reason, I dont think secession is very likely, and if it did happen, it would involve more violence, border conflicts, and massive population exchanges than French is anticipating.

Frenchs solution to the problem is essentially more federalism: devolving more political power from Washington to the state level. If we just let California be California and Tennessee be Tennessee, the argument goes, every presidential election and every Supreme Court vacancy wont feel like a life-or-death blood struggle.

French says that his awakening about the dangers of American factionalism came after he witnessed sectarian violence in Iraq, where he was deployed as a reserve JAG officer. So, theres some irony in the fact that his solution to Americas cultural conflicts has some similarities to Joe Bidens much-derided 2006 plan for a soft partition of Iraq into semi-autonomous Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish zones.

The argument is appealing in many ways. But minorities are also why the soft partition strategy seems unlikely to address many of the problems French is concerned about. Would a gun-owning, anti-abortion resident of Allegany County, New York, which went 68 percent for Trump in 2016, really be more accepting of laws they view as illegitimate and immoral if they were being written in Albany rather than Washington? What about a Latino Democrat in Starr County, Texas79 percent for Clinton? More state-level federalism seems likely to accelerate the big sort (the geographical clustering of like-minded voters) and to move life-or-death political struggles down to 50 separate capitals. Perhaps we could go farther and devolve everything down to the local or community level, but then youre getting pretty close to anarchist theory, and it doesnt seem like French is heading in that direction.

Its on the question of civil rights where Frenchs otherwise scrupulous neutrality starts to break down. He acknowledges that for many Americans, the notion of states rights brings to mind Southern senators filibustering civil rights laws, but he seems to find these concerns outdated and feels that the Bill of Rights will prevent outright discrimination. He quotes a thoughtful progressive friend saying, Its hard to give up on the notion that embracing federalism doesnt also mean abandoning African Americans in Mississippi, to which he responds, What kind of place do you think modern Mississippi is? His friend could have pointed to the racial makeup of Mississippis prison population or its absurdly restrictive election laws, but French doesnt give him the chance.

French sees the Obama administrations suit to block Arizonas draconian 2010 immigration law as executive overreach (to be fair, he also opposes the Trump administrations efforts to stamp out Californias sanctuary cities) without acknowledging that many Americans viewed that law as a violation of undocumented immigrants human rights, not just a matter of local preference.

Many contentious issues also cross state lines. Gun laws meant to keep firearms off the streets of Chicago wont be very effective if you can buy them 30 miles away in Gary, Indiana. French notes that conservative Americans feel disrespected by a popular culture dominated by secular liberals. But even if power is returned to the states, theyre still going to be seeing NFL players kneeling on Sunday, and their kids will still be streaming WAP.

Likewise, French doesnt acknowledge environmental issues at all except to sneer at plastic straw bans. Climate change is the textbook example of a borderless problem. Blue states can pass all the emissions caps they want, but if North Dakota continues fracking, emissions will keep increasing. Conversely, the reason the Trump administration is suing California over its auto emissions standards isnt because Republicans are intolerant of Berkeley lefties environmentalist lifestyles. Its because, given Californias size, the state can effectively mandate standards for the entire country.

Some of these are just fights were going to have to have out, and given the stakes, it will have to get heated.

An alternative view of a politically riven future America is provided in the 2019 novel Fall by cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson. In Stephensons future, Americans consume social media at all times via goggles. Liberal urbanites pay editors to curate the information they receive and put out, and zip from liberal enclave to liberal enclave via self-driving electeic cars. They rarely if ever turn off the interstate into Ameristan, where residents have been Facebooked out of reality by misinformation and QAnon-like conspiracy theories, and where armed militias and religious extremists dominate. Algorithms keep the two sides from talking to each other, and they have little interest in doing so anyway.

Stephensons vision often feels like a snobbish, blue-state fever dream, and hes far less respectful than French of those with whom he disagrees politically. But what Stephenson does pick up on is that while Americans are too entangled at this point for either formal secession or Frenchs federalist soft partition, its very possible for us to share the same physical space while increasingly living in very different countries.

By David French. St. Martins Press.

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Originally posted here:
David Frenchs New Book Arguing That the U.S. Will Break Apart Is Too Optimistic - Slate

Donald Trumps astonishing suggestion at a campaign rally last weekend that the US president will deploy government lawyers to try to hit the brakes on the counting of ballots on election night relies on the complicity of one federal official more than any other.

That official is the attorney general, William Barr, who, as the leader of the justice department, directs the army of government lawyers who would sue to halt the counting of votes.

Conveniently for Trumps stated plan, Barr appears not only ready to acquiesce, he seems eager to bring the lawsuits, having laid groundwork for challenging the election with weeks of misleading statements about the integrity of mail-in voting.

To some observers, the attorney general appears to have also laid the groundwork for a further alarming step, one that would answer the question of what action the Trump administration is prepared to take if a contested election in November gives rise to large new protests.

In order for Trump to steal the election and then quell mass demonstrations for that is the nature of the nightmare scenario now up for open discussion among current and former officials, academics, thinktankers and a lot of other people Trump must be able to manipulate both the levers of the law and its physical enforcement.

In Barr, Trump not only gets all of that, critics say, but he also enjoys the partnership of a man whose sense of biblical stakes around the election imbues him with a deep sense of mission about re-electing Trump.

In a break with the relative reticence of his first 18 month in office, Barr has laid out his own thinking with a series of recent speeches, interviews and internal discussions. Even routine critics of Barr have been struck by the Barr that has now revealed himself.

The erstwhile mild-mannered Washington lawyer has been spouting attacks on election integrity and hostility toward street protests while describing, in explicitly religious terms, an epochal showdown between the forces of moral discipline and virtue which he believes he represents and individual rapacity manifesting as social chaos, embodied by leftwing protesters among others.

His abuses have only escalated as we have gotten closer and closer to the election, and as the president has felt more and more politically vulnerable, said Donald K Sherman, the deputy director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington watchdog group, which has called for Barrs impeachment.

I cant put it more plainly than this: the attorney general is a threat to American citizens having free and fair access to the vote, and is a threat to American having their votes counted.

In recent weeks, Barr has reportedly asked prosecutors to weigh charging protesters under sedition laws, meant to punish conspiracies to overthrow the government, and to weigh criminal charges against the Seattle mayor for allowing residents to establish a small police-free protest zone. He has designated New York City, Portland and Seattle as anarchy zones that he says have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract criminal activities, threatening federal funding.

Such designations cleanly feed Trumps re-election narrative of public safety under threat. They also reflect a constitutionally questionable, and normally non-conservative, eagerness on Barrs part to reach the arm of federal government into local law enforcement.

Barr has demonstrated this tendency before. In June, he took the highly unusual step, as attorney general, of personally directing federal officers to use crowd suppression tactics to eject peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square near the White House.

Barr later denied giving any direct orders, but the White House stated flatly: It was AG Barr who made the decision.

Meanwhile Barr has competed with Trump to erode faith in the upcoming election, peddling baseless conspiracy theories about foreign nations printing counterfeit ballots, spreading tales about mass mail-in ballot fraud in a lie that was later retracted by the justice department and expressing frustration that the United States uses mail-in voting and multi-day voting, which are common measures to accommodate voters going back decades.

Were losing the whole idea of what an election is, Barr complained in an appearance earlier this month at Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under Bill Clinton, said that Barrs solicitousness for Trumps political wellbeing was historic.

I think this attorney general is demonstrably more committed to the political success of the president, and the presidents political agenda than any attorney general in history I can think of, Kinkopf said.

What drives Barr? For political observers familiar with Barrs long Washington career, which included an earlier stint as the attorney general under George HW Bush, the notion that he could help lead American democracy off a cliff might provoke some cognitive dissonance. Like other powerful Republicans and everyday voters who have enabled Trump, Barr does not appear to be motivated by personal loyalty to Trump per se, but by a sense of Trumps role in a greater plan.

Before his appointment by Trump, many insiders saw Barr as a committed institutionalist who would protect the independence of the justice department from Trumps most damaging tendencies, though Barr clearly was a strong believer in a muscular presidency.

But others saw Barr coming. They include Kinkopf, who testified against Barr before the Senate at Barrs January 2019 confirmation hearing. In his testimony, Kinkopf warned about Barrs subscription to so-called unitary executive theory, which lays out an alarming and dangerously mistaken view of an executive power of breathtaking scope, subject to negligible limits, Kinkopf said.

The attorney general sees himself clearly as fighting culture wars that are to him moral and religious

It appears that, if confirmed, William Barr will establish precedents that adopt an enduring vision of presidential power; one that in future administrations can be deployed to justify the exercise of power for very different ends, Kinkopf warned at the time.

But today even Kinkopf says he is deeply surprised by the extent to which Barr has surpassed that warning.

When I testified against him, I recognized how dangerous the unitary executive theory is, Kinkopf said. But what I didnt appreciate, and I dont think anybody appreciated, was just how fully he would deploy that theory in advance not of rule-of law values, but in order to advance both the presidents political agenda, and I think more deeply for Barr, his own social and religious commitments.

Those commitments, in turn, are a matter of public record, including in a speech Barr delivered at Notre Dame University about one year ago. In the speech, Barr described a political philosophy driven by the need to counter an individual rapacity in humans that quickly produces licentiousness and the destruction of healthy community life if not restrained. The only possible restraint, in Barrs view, are moral values [that] must rest on authority independent of mens will they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.

In short, Barr argued, as he has elsewhere, that the inevitable result of secularism is moral decay and social chaos.

It appears that it is just such chaos that Barr sees in the current street protests driven by the ant-racism Black Lives Matter movement. He has denounced the protesters in his Michigan speech as these so-called Black Lives Matter people and claiming they were not interested in black lives. Theyre interested in [using] props a small number of blacks who are killed by police to achieve a much broader political agenda.

If Barr gives shockingly short shrift to the motivations of protesters haunted by the recurring specter of police killings of people of color, he holds his own motivations in high esteem.

Barr appears to see himself locked in a historic struggle against literal evil, and he appears to regard the upcoming election as the climactic battle. A Trump loss, Barr recently told a Chicago Tribune columnist, would mean the United States was irrevocably committed to the socialist path. He called the election a clear fork in the road.

The attorney general sees himself clearly as fighting culture wars that are to him moral and religious, Kinkopf said. And those are deeper I think commitments for him than the commitment to federalism. And so to the extent that the balance of federal and state power gets in the way of achieving what he wants to achieve in the culture wars, hes willing to cast that aside.

So if there werent a culture war angle on it, I think he would take the position that states and local governments should be left to police their own communities, and the federal government should keep its nose out. But because he sees something at stake in the current protests that jeopardizes what he feels as being the proper order of society, hes not troubled about using federal power to pursue what he views as being the right results.

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'His abuses have escalated': Barr's kinship with Trump fuels election fears - The Guardian

It's no secret that our county, and our congressional district (Virginia's 5th), lean to the right. But this year's Fifth District candidates offer such a stark contrast that even conservatives should give the race a second look.

On one hand, there's Dr. Cameron Webb. A physician (who also holds a law degree), Dr. Webb served presidents from both parties -- Obama and Trump -- as a White House health care policy advisor. He now teaches at UVA's School of Medicine. A centrist, Dr. Webb would bring desperately needed real-world competence to Congress as it tries to fix our dysfunctional health-insurance system.

On the other hand, there is Bob Good. Mr. Good, a former banker best known as an athletics booster for Liberty University, has centered his campaign on re-litigating the culture wars. He declared the U.S. Supreme Court "lawless" for recognizing same-sex marriage, and his campaign has focused on attacking the Virginia Values Act, a state law (over which a congressman would have no power) that protects LGBT Virginians from housing and employment discrimination.

The "issues page" on Mr. Good's own website focuses on bathroom laws but makes no mention of health care, job creation, fighting COVID-19, or plans to help rural communities -- all issues Dr. Webb discusses in depth.

The choice is clear: One candidate is a pragmatic doctor with national leadership experience and real policy chops. The other is an avowed culture-war partisan. Even in our moderately right-leaning district, Dr. Webb is the obvious choice.

Adam Gerchick

Delaplane

See the original post here:
Letter: Dr. Cameron Webb is the obvious choice for the 5th District - Fauquier Times

We interrupt your latest binge of breaking political news, fear-provoking campaign commercials and angry posts from your favorite pundit to report that politics can be stressful.

That stress can be bad for your health. But some good news here you can take steps to manage it.

If the election has your heart racing and stomach churning, you have company. According to the American Psychological Associations Stress in America survey for July, 77% of Democrats and 62% of Republicans said the political climate was a significant source of stress.

A study published last September in the journal PLoS ONE hinted at the toll such stress can take: Roughly a fifth or more of 800 respondents reported losing sleep, being fatigued or suffering depression because of politics. More than 11% said politics had hurt their physical health at least a little.

Thats a lot of stress-sick people, said the studys lead author, Kevin B. Smith, the Leland J. and Dorothy H. Olson Chair of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Youre talking about tens of millions of people who say, Im losing sleep because of politics. Ive lost a friend because of politics, Smith said.

Melissa DeJonckheere, an assistant professor in the department of family medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, had similar findings in a smaller survey that questioned 14- to 24-year-olds about the 2016 presidential election. Before the election, 86% reported issues such as anxiety, fear or the feeling that things were out of their control. About a fifth reported physical problems not being able to sleep, and even nausea.

It was a nonpartisan problem, she said. Even people who said that they dont follow politics, or theyre explicitly not interested in any of the candidates, were still having negative emotional responses to the election.

That research, published in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health in 2018, noted that stress in youth has been linked to cardiovascular disease, depression, substance abuse, behavioral problems and more in adolescents, plus problems in adulthood.

Smith, who has done extensive work on the biology of political behavior, said the question of whether political stress affects us differently than other types of stress hasnt been answered. But he suspects a few modern factors might be making things worse.

We have an incredibly polarized political environment right now, he said. And thanks to smartphones and computers, were constantly soaking in it. Its just omnipresent in our lives, he said. He contrasted it to the stress that comes from, say, being a football fan. He is one, and every year, I produce a lot of stomach acid over the Dallas Cowboys playoff chances. But the football season ends, and that stress goes away.

The political season never ends.

The anxiety is not always accidental. Campaigns can feed off of fear, said Dr. Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. After all, theyre trying to make voters choose sides.

Couple that with the divisions that have been fanned about how to respond to the coronavirus, he said, and our bodies are much more in chronic fight-or-flight mode than they probably were before the pandemic.

To cope, Waldinger who is also a Zen priest recommends regulating your exposure to the constant stream of scary political news.

One of my meditation teachers has a quote that I really like. She said, Your mind is like tofu; it tastes like whatever you marinate it in, he said. He stays informed by reading the newspaper in the morning, later listens to a little radio, but avoids TV entirely. And I try my best to stay away from the news feed on my phone.

However you choose to get news, be careful and be deliberate, Waldinger said. And dont do it late in the day as youre wanting to settle down and sleep.

DeJonckheere said unpublished findings suggest that her young participants found relief by becoming more civically engaged.

The youth in our study talked about taking on activist roles, volunteering, taking more classes to learn about how politics affects them, she said. She thought that could be particularly important for people who are too young to vote, because it could give them a sense of control and purpose, which can help reduce stress and improve mental health.

Finding common ground with neighbors is a good idea, Waldinger said. Im not going to change the minds of my neighbors who are on the other side of the divide. But theyre still my neighbors. Connecting around a cause such as a walk to end hunger could benefit everybody.

And dont let political dramas divide you from family, he said. I would say, see the culture wars as the enemy, the thing to be fended off.

Because, he said, This moment is going to pass. We dont know what its going to morph into, but its not going to stay the same.

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Surviving the election: How to protect yourself from the stress of politics - Steuben Courier

American defense is dancing with its old nemesis. No, it is not an adversary per se, but the reemergence of questions on organization, enabled by the creation of the Space Force. This new service has attracted the ire of scholars, politicians, and even one of Starfleets most famous captains. It has also been subjected to no shortage of parody. The creation of the Space Force nestled under the Department of the Air Force has ignited debate and rivalries not dissimilar to those which nearly crippled American defense in the post-World War II decade.

The post-war defense unification debates were centered on the shape and scope of the roles and missions of the military services. Those who sought to referee the interservice rivalries found themselves searching for procedural panaceas that would lead to an organizational utopia. Questions pertaining to the role and function of each of the military services were not resolved with the abolition of the free-standing military departments. This led to compromises in the 1940s and 1950s, which focused on the unity of efforts towards workable strategy and defense policy. Although significant differences remained, it was agreed upon that if another service was ever created, combined experience and unity should emerge as its guiding ethos. Congress rejected the possibility that the American military would be held hostage to a system where one military department could alone control thought and theory, particularly where new frontiers of military activity occurred such as space. This is seemingly forgotten with the creation of the Space Force.

Congress, as the final arbiter on defense, increasingly fought service cultures and rivalries as the unification debates distracted decision-makers. This distraction made time an ally for the communist threat. Central to these debates were bitter divisions between the Navy and Air Force. The pitting of experience and new concepts against one another resulted in the rejection of limitations placed upon developing a coherent national doctrine where any single approach rooted in ideology became prominent. At the time, the near loss of the war on the Korean Peninsula exposed the perils of relying upon a single philosophy, doctrine, or weapon delivery system. The unification debates and global events resulted in pressure on Congress. They pushed for access to a broad pallet of concepts, experience and historical analysis from the strategic thinking community, because it was crucial to American defense. The newly formed Department of Defense was encouraged to not suppress free debate and thought. As a result, the Department of Defense faced the challenge of how to balance limits on emotive arguments and ideological dominance against being able to use and encourage open debate effectively. The challenge led to decades of the use and abuse of jointness. The experience of unification which highlighted that limiting breadth and depth of debate only served to hinder addressing strategic realities and the development of sound strategic thought. This was starkly apparent when reorganization related to changes to existing services or the prospect of the creation of a new service came to the fore.

The Perfect Solution That Never Was

The creation of Space Force was accompanied by debates that have demonstrated well-travelled and familiar divisions, which are rooted in rivalry, prejudices, and false narratives of the past. Arguments over space resonate with the rivalries of old, which were driven by loyal air power theorists. These theorists have viewed the creation of the Space Force as final vindication to not only the dominance of their theories but also misguidedly that space is an Air Force and air power domain alone. However, these debates which vary on a range of topics related to the Space Force and spacepower frame questions over the foundations, efficiency, and effectiveness of unified defense, and ask if rivalry and service culture reigns supreme against strategy-making.

Within months of the creation of the Space Force, air power advocates quickly turned to their prophet, Army aviator Billy Mitchell, who was the protagonist for an independent Air Force in the 1920s. His ghost deployed to define the culture of Space Force. The Air Force and their supporters attempts to expand their dominance are to service their cultural paranoia and perpetual insecurity over the question of the air forces existence since the 1920s. They sometimes add capabilities to their portfolio to prop up arguments for their existence rather than questioning if it serves their best interest or the interests of the Department of Defense. Notably, the Space Force underwent less scrutiny than the U.S. Navy or Marine Corps had undergone in the 1940s, when bitter conflicts between the Navy and Air Force mission were at their peak and the very existence of the Navy was in question. Suggestions and concerns raised across the defense community about the future of the Space Force were placated with offers of jointness. This ignored the fact that that organizational culture defines the environment in which thought can occur and that jointness should not be used to placate constructive criticism and feedback, nor manipulated to further single service agendas. Often, suggestions by naval thinkers were rejected and argued under the auspices that the Space Force needs a blank slate. Blank slates rarely exist or become possible when they are set within an existing organization that has already rejected ideas and set bounds and limits. Those who promote blank slates for the Space Force will presumably be the first to support removing the Space Force from the Department of the Air Force, enhancing the spacepower doctrine by protecting it from developing an ideological service bias.

Building a Strategic Space Community

Debates such as these echoed similar unification debates of the twentieth century. Unification debates fractured relationships, divided opinions and attempted to dismiss long-established experience while pushing new boundaries on civil-military relations, political oversight and fiscal control. The process of military unification failed to resolve anxieties of many of the services and culturally embedded concern of how easy it was to squander hard-earned experiences while demonstrating the perils associated with attempting to create something new. This was foremost in the mind of U.S. Navy Adm. Arleigh Burke. In the late 1950s, he observed other services rejecting changes to military funding of space and the creation of NASA. He realized that space would be a battleground for policy and warfare which would awaken old and long-held divisions, as he attempted to explain why space was best viewed in a maritime context but not bound to any specific doctrine, yet iterated space was still the best opportunity for all service participation. The negative response driven by interservice rivalries convinced Burke that the U.S. Navy would support the creation of NASA. Support for space through a different organization came with little surprise considering that navies had long been involved with exploration and working in conjunction with explorers, who often inherently militarized new frontiers space was no exception. Although hopes that space would be a frontier in which humanity would escape some of the trappings of its bloody past, the space race of the 1950s and 1960s was as much about beating the Soviets as it was about the challenge of a new frontier.

It can be no surprise that maritime thinkers and air power theorists debate space. A maritime strategic view of space is evidenced against the ideologies of warfighting and air power doctrine. Space warfare thinkers have lined up their complex assumptions, attempting to mold air power doctrine to space like it is a square peg in a round hole. The maritime-minded use Sir Julian Corbetts Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, identifying that similarly to the sea, space influences events on earth in support of military activity. Some of these concepts have started developing a spacepower doctrine. However, strategic space policy needs to be understood beyond military power instead, like maritime policy, where a broad spectrum of inter-relationships cross-ranging from science to trade, and from foreign relations to communications, amongst others. This is a reminder that organizations view mediums in different manners strategically, tactically and operationally. These are determined by how organizations view the art and theory of war, which reflects individual service specialties and preferences.

Those building a new strategic community to best serve strategic space theory and spacepower policy only have to look to NASA for inspiration on how to build a community of talented intellectuals. NASA avoided any particular culture, shaping its community by drawing on a diverse range of talent. The Space Forces substantial draw from the Air Force could undermine the rationale to its existence by pursuing a policy of cultural eliteness. This may be useful in limited circumstances but may be out of step with the Space Force mission such as special warfare. By contrast, Space Command has demonstrated the value of having a range of talent by being a joint operational command. Although intense scrutiny by Congress is vital, diversifying transfers would provide a crucial first step to enhance longer-term aspirations and funding for space within defense. At the present, hopes that space would avoid the fierce rivalry akin to the past have increasingly disappeared and have been accelerated by the creation of the Space Force. This acceleration has been further enhanced by the singlemindedness of some who view space more in a warfighting air power model than a domain in which to address strategic concepts first. The optics of an Air Force takeover of space aggravated deep wounds and concerns in the culture of each service. Understandably, military services facing great power competition and the cost from the exhaustion of decades in the Middle East approached the political mandate to create the Space Force with skepticism. They could ill afford to risk service or broader defense budgets by fiscally maintaining yet another service and potentially jeopardizing already struggling modernization programs.

Leave Behind the Eulogies

Todays vision for the Space Force, presented by the Air Force, hopes for a lean and agile organization with redirected Air Force funds within the Department of the Air Force. This was justified to reduce bureaucracy, costs and rivalry. Yet, it will have to be seen if it materializes as this has been elusive to planners across defense since 1947. The rise of the more is better philosophy demonstrates a lack of thoughtful reasoning and a requirement for an economy to support it. During the late 1940s, the Air Force criticized retaining the U.S. Marine Corps within the Department of the Navy, as according to them, it was an excuse to further justify the existence of the Navy. With Space Force increasingly within Air Forces control it could be argued that it presents similar optics. Depending upon the budget requirements to operationalize the Space Force, the military branches, primarily the Air Force, may face difficult choices or turn to Capitol Hill to face voices who already doubt space forces funding. If they are to retain strategic readiness across defense, revisiting long term planning may be the only option. If funding is not forthcoming, it could impact the broader defense budget, potentially deepening rivalry, where other service advocates reject funding changes that could impact their services.

Service loyalties become useless if they betray the development of sound thought and if minds are closed to being challenged by new, alternative and classic theories. Although jointness remains operationally essential, it should not hinder challenges that jolt thought patterns from comfortable paths of thinking. Challenges present the opportunity to hone and refine doctrine, policy and strategic models. Air forces around the world have pursued continental air force space models similar to the U.S. Air Force. Their own national air power dominance doctrines have also resulted in them promoting airpower and space as one, inflaming rivalry and doing little to advance thought and theory. For example, advocates for the British Royal Air Force openly declared that air force ownership of space forces and space operations is about the justification for an RAF, its funding and role in British defense. They promoted this role using outdated and distorted myths, such as the Battle of Britain in 1940. This demonstrates how space could be misused by advocates in the defense debate for alternative agendas. This undermines urgent calls to build a broad constructive forward-looking strategic space community, which is not disconnected from the wider strategic community behind a singular or departmental perspective.

Unification and Strategy: An Ancient and Troubled Relationship

The creation of the Space Force provides a warning marker that lessons identified in unification period had been lost: the dangers and damage of rivalry, the potency of old arguments, and the embrace of technicism over experience and outdated models. These are all emboldened by tightening resources. This may force fundamental questions buried wishfully or otherwise from the past to the fore. Strategic space strategy and space warfare will continue to grow in importance because of all-service usage of spaces resources and concerns in space itself with competitors, while retaining first and foremost its classic ability to influence events on Earth. The creation of new organizations presents the opportune moment for strategists to think again by utilizing past knowledge and experience while not being held back by it. Space forces should be looked at as an opportunity, rejecting dogmatic often-schizophrenic compromises where departmental oversight and agenda automatically defines culture and thought, displacing strategic realities. Furthermore, outdated land analogies place unnecessary cultural boundaries to the space community developing new concepts. Those interested in the affairs of other domains should be scrutinizing space forces due to the potential of division over resources, which renews old problems. Air power theorists demand that debate, thought and theory remain exclusively their own domains should be consigned to history, as an outdated and a negative force. Building a community that focuses on advancing strategic space theory through engagement between strategists, researchers and defense practitioners should be free from the culture wars. Retaining the development of defense space strategy, space theory and space warfare concepts within the cultural ideology of one service will hinder progress, giving new impetus to explore questions long avoided: How many services are needed, what are their roles, how are they funded, and how does this all work together to form a national defense strategy?

Americas space force has been brought to the forefront, showing that many of the hallmarks of a system that unification was meant to be superior to have been renewed and replaced in a new monolithic organization. Defense and service departments are temporary constructs, reflecting national choices that are therefore worthy of continual examination as they often lose sight of their beginnings. Considering all the promises of abolitionists of military services and the free-standing service departments, many should be reminded, at the creation of a new service, that many questions and problems remain unsolved by unification. The first U.S. Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, stated in 1947: Defense organization is driven by emotion, not by intelligence. He could have added that sentimentality worshipping prophets and false narratives when creating an organization defines its culture and hinders its ability to find wisdom from the repository of experience while thinking of how to address and respond to genuine questions and challenges. Adversaries are unlikely to share such sympathy and sentimentality over their organizations as they develop and execute their strategies.

James W.E. Smith is a final year Ph.D. researcher in the School of Security Studies and Department of War Studies at Kings College London. His Ph.D. research focuses on British and American defense unification and its relationship with the development of strategic thought and theory. He was awarded grants to explore a variety of threads related to defense unification; one focuses on the relationship between maritime strategy theory and strategic space theory.

Image: U.S. Space Force

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Space Force Creation Warrants Revisiting Defense Unification - War on the Rocks