The Bunker: Arming the Heavens
This week in The Bunker: the Pentagon’s fledgling U.S. Space Force issues its marching orders on how to plan for war in space; the Defense Department backs tiny nuclear reactors to power its U.S. bases; the Pentagon declares victory in its battle to eradicate efforts to embrace diversity; and more.
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This week in The Bunker: the Pentagon’s fledgling U.S. Space Force issues its marching orders on how to plan for war in space; the Defense Department backs tiny nuclear reactors to power its U.S. bases; the Pentagon declares victory in its battle to eradicate efforts to embrace diversity; and more.
STARRY, STARRY FIGHT
Pentagon stops being coy about space war
The U.S. Space Force has issued a blueprint (PDF) detailing just what “space warfighting” will mean for the U.S. military battling for the ultimate high ground far above our heads. The 22-page “landmark document underscores the critical importance” for “space superiority,” the command said April 17. More importantly, five years after the creation of the Space Force (during President Trump’s first term), its top brass no longer dance around the touchy issue of waging war on high. Instead of gauzy words like “protecting” and “defending” space, they’re making clear they’re getting ready to attack and destroy up there.
“We have a new administration that has us very focused on this,” Space Force’s Lieutenant General Shawn Bratton said. “We’ve got a secretary of defense who’s very interested in warfighting ethos and lethality, and we naturally progress to the point where we’re moving past ‘protect and defend’ and yeah, we’re going to talk about offensive capabilities in space.” (Back in the 1980s, The Bunker recalls the U.S. military sprinkling the radar-eluding “stealth” label like procurement pixie dust on its new wonder weapons. It has been replaced in the Trump administration by “lethal,” which dates back to when a caveman first clubbed his neighbor.)
Space war could be a spending supernova for defense contractors. This new “framework for planners” calls for developing offensive “orbital strike” weapons to obliterate enemy satellites, “space link interdiction” to degrade their communications, and “terrestrial strike” to destroy an enemy’s ground-based control centers and launch sites. Defensive desires include “escort” missions, “suppression of adversary counterspace targeting,” and “counterattack” (The Bunker has never had the smarts to separate offensive “attack” missions from defensive “counterattack” missions, which is why he doesn’t own a nice boat in Annapolis).
Think of all this hardware as manna for heaven.
It’s important for a fledgling war-fighting command to cram as many buzzwords as possible into press releases explaining why its latest notion is key to the future of the U.S. That will help with already underway intramural Pentagon turfs wars, and sure-to-follow Capitol Hill funding fights. The Space Force pushed all those buttons in summing up its new owner’s manual for space: “Space Warfighting marks a significant step forward in solidifying the Space Force as a warfighting service and integral part of the Joint and Combined Force, highlighting the essential role of space superiority for national security.”
Sounds like the best thing since sliced dread.
“BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED”
Pentagon seeks nuclear microreactors for U.S. bases
Speaking of buzzwords, the Air Force has gotten a lot of PR mileage — if not smart and efficient weapons — by replacing its long-standing quest for “air superiority” (PDF) with one seeking “air dominance.” So why shouldn’t Pentagon technocrats concerned with powering military bases insist on “energy dominance,” too?
On April 10, the Pentagon declared eight companies eligible to demonstrate their “nuclear microreactors” for possible use on stateside bases. (The term “microreactor” is undefined, and the solicitation is no longer publicly available.) “Projecting power abroad demands ensuring power at home and this program aims to deliver that, ensuring that our defense leaders can remain focused on lethality [there’s that word again!],” Andrew Higier of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit said. “Microreactors on installations are a critical first step in delivering energy dominance to the force.” This is a pretty dubious notion. If the electrical grid powering the nation, and the U.S. military bases inside it, goes offline, independently electrified military bases won’t help much. Critics say the scheme is too costly and dangerous.
Just like fighting wars in space, harnessing nuclear power on the ground for military bases is part of a peculiar U.S. military obsession that confuses risk with reality. The recent disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq highlight an inability to win despite the world’s most sophisticated military technology. We would do well to recall the Battle of Lexington and Concord, 250 years ago this past weekend. That’s where the highly regarded British Redcoats were vanquished by a ragtag colonial militia. Today’s U.S. armed forces could learn something from their forebears.
D.E.I. D.E.A.D. at D.O.D
A foe the U.S. military can beat
The Pentagon, which tried and failed for 20 years to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, was able to kill all of its diversity, equity, and inclusion jobs less than 100 days into President Trump’s second term. Of course, most of that work had already been done by Congress, which restricted Defense Department DEI efforts in its 2024 defense authorization bill.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth created (PDF) a task force in January that he said was vital to creating a “lethal” military focused on “lethality” (a two-fer!) by halting efforts to diversify its ranks. It reported March 1 “that the military services, the Joint Staff, and the other DOD components conducted evaluations and certified that there is no use of gender, race, or ethnicity-based goals for organizational composition, academic admissions, or career fields,” the Government Accountability Office said in an April 17 letter (PDF) to Congress. “Further, the report identified key actions the military services and DOD components took to ensure that no boards, councils, and working groups promote DEI and other related concepts.”
Given the Trump administration’s anti-DEI fetish — and the time, focus, and words they have dedicated to wiping it out — you’re forgiven if you think Pentagon hallways are now strewn with victims of this purge.
But under that 2024 law, the GAO reported (PDF) that only 32 DEI positions were eliminated among the Pentagon’s 950,000 civilian workers. The Defense Department has restricted 115 other jobs “to reduce or eliminate the positions’ DEI duties,” it added, also under that legislation. And the Pentagon, it noted, “did not widely use contractors to develop and implement DEI activities.”
So how many additional DEI slots did Trump’s January edict barring them from the Pentagon end up cutting?
Forty-one, including both civilian and military personnel. All those positions, the GAO said, have since been “abolished or restructured” to avoid DEI cooties.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is a frontrunner to build Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield, Reuters’ Mike Stone and Marisa Taylor reported April 17.
The current zany state of the U.S. government should drive its allies to create a weapons-production conglomerate capable of developing and producing modern arms without the U.S., veteran Brit-born aerospace journalist Bill Sweetman wrote April 15 in The Strategist.
The April 16 explosion that destroyed a Northrop solid-rocket motor building in Utah won’t affect the over-budget and delayed Sentinel ICBM the company is building for the Pentagon’s nuclear triad, John Tirpak of Air & Space Forces Magazine reported April 17.
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Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Thompson has been covering the Pentagon for more than 45 years.
