RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trumps-ridiculers-havent-learned-their-lesson/

The impulse to mock every word out of Trump’s mouth sometimes exposes his critics as the ignorant ones, as with recent reactions to his space-defense proposal.

Donald Trump has once again said something about space. And according to the former president’s reflexive critics, it is positively hilarious.

“One of my proudest achievements in my first term was to create Space Force, the first new branch of the armed forces in over 70 years; it’s a big deal,” Trump said in a Monday address to the National Guard Association conference in Detroit. With that legacy achievement in his pocket, Trump announced a plan to build on it. “I agree that the time has come to create a Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the U.S. Space Force,” he said. In addition, “We’re going to build a great Iron Dome for missile defense around our nation.”

Trump’s skeptics are enjoying a hearty guffaw over the former president’s latest proposal. “Trump’s campaign has earthly problems,” read Politico’s gratuitously impish headline, “but he’s focusing on outer space.” Trump “promises to waste BILLIONS of tax dollars,” the super PAC American Bridge remarked. Indeed, the former president backed the creation of a sixth branch of the armed forces devoted to low-earth orbit only “because he thought it sounded cool,” MSNBC’s Steve Benen posited. And what’s with the Iron Dome talk? “I have a hunch it’s because he likes the words ‘iron’ and ‘dome,’” he speculated.

This fits a pattern, but by now, Trump’s hecklers should have trained themselves out of exhibiting it. It was obvious from the moment it was proposed that a new branch of the armed forces devoted to exo-atmospheric operations was necessary, if only because space had already become a theater of war. Likewise, creating a “a Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the U.S. Space Force,” as Trump proposed, is a remedy to an unworkable proposal offered by Joe Biden.

The president had proposed shifting thousands of Air National Guard members to Space Force — a proposal to which 48 state governors objected because the Biden plan “reduces governors’ authority within their states and territories, and undermines longstanding partnerships, precedence, military readiness, and operational efficacy.” A stand-alone National Guard reserve for Space Force might be more expensive, but it does not risk “disconnecting” Guard members from their specialties.

As always, there are turf wars between the service branches at work here and political divisions in Congress over the efficacy of the Trump proposal. But it was not some flight of fancy that sprang from Trump’s lips absent any consideration. He certainly didn’t settle on the proposal because it sounded “cool.”

There is much to be said for the equivalent of a domestic missile-defense system, but not in the manner Trump said it. I am sympathetic to those who cringe when Trump’s allies try to translate his semi-coherent ramblings into a decipherable thought. But Trump is not precisely advocating an Israeli-style short-range interceptor system — which would not make any sense given that the U.S. is not threatened (yet) by short-range rockets or artillery fire from Mexico or Canada. Rather, what Trump said was that “Ronald Reagan wanted this many years ago, but we didn’t have the technology at that point.” Since Reagan was not himself concerned by the threat posed by Canadian Katyushas, we can reasonably deduce that Trump is unnerved by the threat posed by multi-stage ballistic missiles.

He should be. America’s short-range ballistic missile defense systems are largely forward-positioned closer to the locus of threats abroad, as are most of America’s Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems. Intercepting an incoming missile at “boost” phase on takeoff is easier than taking it out in “midcourse,” when a warhead travels in space without the heat signature produced by rocket thrusters. And they’re both easier than intercepting a warhead as it descends on its target at seven kilometers per second. The U.S. homeland is not entirely defenseless, but, for now, America’s primary protection against a preemptive strike is the promise of retaliation.

Critics insist that intercepting incoming threats either with inert “kill vehicles” or high-powered lasers is technologically unfeasible at the moment. But it won’t be forever. Creating the “dome,” a network of orbital infrared and radio sensors that can detect incoming ballistic missiles before they reach terminal stage, provides U.S. planners with options they do not presently have in the event of an attack. At minimum, telegraphing to U.S. adversaries and rogue states that a small volley of nuclear warheads can be disabled disabuses them of the notion that the U.S. can be “self-deterred” by the prospect of losing its population centers in a second strike.

In sum, neither a space national guard nor an “iron dome” (metaphorically, at least) is the dumbest idea Trump has ever promoted. But his critics, just as they did in 2018, expose their own ignorance when they indulge their impulse to mock his every word.