Final frontiers

IN his first term in office, US President Donald Trump announced the creation of the Space Force, a new branch of the US military to add to the existing army, navy, air force, etc. Now, in 2026, not only has the US announced for the first time that it has actually put weapons in space, it has also released the uniforms designed for the Space Force. To no one’s surprise, they look identical to the uniforms of the Imperial Navy in Star Wars. In case you’ve been exiled to Alpha Centauri for the last century, those were the Bad Guys. Unfortunate Sith parallels aside, the US has not revealed the exact nature of the weaponry but US military leaders have previously spoken about the need for space-based military capabilities, purportedly to counter alleged Russian and Chinese capabilities.

In particular, the US has been looking at anti-satellite systems designed to disable or blind an adversary’s eye-in-the-sky capabilities. That capability has been quite irksome for the US during its disastrous war on Iran, with reports claiming that Chinese and Russian satellites provided information for Iranian drone and missile strikes, enabling pinpoint accuracy when it comes to targeting US assets in the region. And then, a few weeks ago, an orbiting Chinese satellite — Yaogan-50 — disintegrated into over 40 pieces. Was this a coincidence or a demonstration of America’s now-declared capabilities? We’ll likely never know. Development of space-based weapons continues. What we do know is that China — which has protested against the US announcement — has tried to develop anti-satellite capabilities of its own likely based on the philosophy that while space-based weapons are difficult to deploy and expensive, countermeasures against enemy satellites may be an easier way out, similar to the…