How do you hide your ambitions for space infantry? Hide it in a proposal so ludicrous and expensive that you can't imagine the Pentagon not carrying out the distraction mission.
The idea that we'd use a spaceship to move a small amount of supplies or troops around the planet in the blink of the eye seems ludicrous (via Instapundit):
"Rocket cargo point-to-point is not the reason we're building Starship," said SpaceX senior adviser Gary Henry. "We're building Starship to get to Mars." [But] "what we're finding is it's a system we're putting together that has profound impacts for national security, and one of them just happens to be rocket point-to-point."
The big driver of that is the potential the military could use the rocket to send supplies, and perhaps even troops in the future, to anywhere in the world in less than an hour. Defense department officials began looking at the idea two decades ago but only recently has it come closer to reality.
That is a "jumping the shark" moment for wasting defense dollars. It makes me cringe that we'd put money into that science fair project idea rather than into air and sea mobility assets to project and sustain real--not token--military power across wide oceans.
Unless the stated purpose for the ridiculous capability is a ruse for the real purpose:
I find the idea as stated ridiculous.
Still, aiming high is something we need to do to dominate space, the new high ground.
So given that the idea that we'd land a squad of highly trained troopers on the ground via space travel is asinine, does this idea have merit?
If the conference is just a ruse to cover the real purpose, yes. What if the plan isn't to land troops on Earth by 2030, but to gain the ability to reach into space and capture real estate rather than just destroy objects in Earth orbit? A squad of Marines would be a drop in the bucket on Earth, but in space in 20 years, 13 Marines would be a decisive ground force capable of entering and capturing anything any nation would put into orbit in this time frame.
In which case I say start (secretly) working on the SMOD unit patches now!
NOTE: The image was made from DALL-E.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
