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After a long, sad period of stagnation, the American space program finally entered a Renaissance. Private spaceflight companies were, for the first time, picking up where NASA left off. SpaceX and its competitors (but, let’s face it, mostly SpaceX) were wowing Americans once again with all the possibilities of the final frontier.
Space was having a moment. And then, because he simply cannot resist taking credit for anything popular including the concept of defending American assets in space, Donald Trump signed into law a bill which established the United States Space Force in 2019 (don’t worry, he made sure to include a bunch of QAnon dog whistles about the coming storm when he announced the creation of the first new military service branch since the creation of the Air Force in 1947).
What immediately struck everyone about the Space Force was how dumb its name sounded. Did “Air Force” sound dumb in 1947 and we’ve all just gotten used to it? Probably not, since “Air Force” had already been in use as part of what was previously known as the “Army Air Forces.” At any rate, the U.S. Space Command, which was scrapped in 2002 before being re-established in 2019 as a precursor to the gift to all of us that is the Space Force, has a way cooler name and can be sharply acronymized as SPACECOM.
Hollywood seemingly agreed with the internet as to the hilarity of the new branch’s name and immediately launched a comedy series called “Space Force” as a Steve Carell vehicle. Unfortunately, the fact that a branch of the armed services was funnily named was not enough of a premise upon which to base an entire television show, and “Space Force” folded after only two seasons.
Not content with just the branch as a whole having a bad name, the Space Force went ahead and decided to call its personnel “Guardians.” This decision was supposedly made “after a yearlong process that produced hundreds of submissions and research involving space professionals and members of the general public.” I guess they were going more for “silly” than “strikes fear into the hearts of our enemies.” Also, they ripped off the “Star Trek” delta insignia.
“See, it’s ‘Space Force’ because we’ll be doing stuff in outer space,” I can picture some clean-shaven dork with too many chevrons on his jacket saying to a conference room stuffed with his doppelgangers. “And the soldiers themselves, well, they’ll be ‘Guardians’ because they guard people and things! In space!”
Orbital Division; Extra-Atmospheric Command; Planetary Defense (NASA already has that one, but the military could have stolen it): space terms that actually sound cool almost write themselves. How about “Zero-Gravity Marines”? Or instead of reinventing the wheel, think “War Astronauts” — something along those lines. We could have done better.
Perhaps “Air Force” made sense in 1947 (I was not around back then to make the case for “Aeronautic Corps”), and it’s a military branch we’ve all since learned to love. But it was never supposed to start a trend of naming military branches after whatever physical medium their vehicles travel across or through followed by the word “force,” lest we someday rename the Army “Ground Force” and the Navy “Sea Force.”
Look, the heavily armed AC-130 gunship has already long since taken flight when it comes to “Air Force,” but it’s not too late to do something about “Space Force.” The Space Force hasn’t really even done anything yet: the first Guardian isn’t set to go into space until this summer at the earliest (an Air Force veteran who subsequently transferred to the Space Force was in space, but I’m not counting that).
Sigh. I supposed I’m just bitter. A hereditary defect kept me out of both the Ground Force and the Air Force as a young man when I was into such things. Not all war fighters need fully functional eyes though. Perhaps some of those physical standards could be relaxed for those of us who would settle for serving America in the JAG Corps, or by being the heavily bespectacled guy who gently prevents his genetically gifted peers who never got made fun of for their childhood deformities from making creative decisions.
Hokey, generic, watered down so as to be so inoffensive that it is robbed of all meaning: this is “Space Force!” Guardian, I salute thee: without a doubt, whatever work you are doing is orders of magnitude more important than the tenor of these recent military naming conventions would suggest.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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