WASHINGTON — It’s now official: There will be no admirals in the U.S. Space Force.
The Space Force on Jan. 29 revealed its new rank structure for officers and enlisted personnel. The service for the most part is adopting the U.S. Air Force ranks.
The only change the Space Force made is in four categories of Air Force enlisted ranks called “airman.” The equivalent ranks in the Space Force will be “specialist.” All the officers’ ranks stay the same as the Air Force, said the Jan. 29 memo. The new ranks are effective Feb. 1.
I guess the Space Force will have to muddle through without any input from the Navy or Army or Marines who have limited to no space background or technology at stake in space. As I recall, it took the Army and Werner von Braun to get the Air Force into space. They cleverly hid all that backbiting by creating the precursor to NASA and hiding the names of the guilty. When the USAF got desperate enough to finally build a real ballistic missile they got a Brigadier, gave him a budget and told him to head to the hills to make it happen without the internecine help from his helpmeets in the Pentagon and DC. They'd be well advised to stay the hell away from Huntsville though. MDA was run by an ignorant thug for too many years for it to be a one-off. I suspect that line of 'thought' still runs deep in Huntsville.
8 comments:
I think the Navy has a longer history of independent commands than the Air Force has.
I can't speak to the modern Navy, but the machinery space watchstanders had a degree of autonomy in decision making during emergencies that the other services never understood.
And you don't have to get very far from Earth before the light speed time delay means micro managing becomes impossible.
Autonomy in our Anglo world was the price of admiralty. The governments relied on far distant, far out of touch captains and station commanders to do their duty as they saw it and in accord as much as possible with what parliament and congress expected. This was long before the wireless age and by and large they were well served. The USAF and by extension the Army and Marines were the arms of the State and were always subject to it's mandates at large and small eruptions of micro-managing from the beginning of the Republic on to the current day.
As you say, in terms of what we expect of our E-4 and up is a magnitude above what the rest the services expect. I recall as EOOW in the #1Main Machinery Space my counterpart with an identical plant was my MM3 as topwatch aft where it was him in charge of the whole of #2MMS. It was the same as FCO. I could sit on just one of the 3 weapons consoles and the really important one wasn't even mine, albeit, he answered to me.
We live in the era of light speed communication and total micromanagement. We may, should we live long enough, see what our Martian expeditions bring. I did like Andy Weir's book though. That was truly excellent.
why do they wear cammie uniforms? Are there trees in space?
Why does the Navy, for that matter? Change at shirts and dungares were good enough for the Navy that won WWII!
For change at, read chambers.
Chambray.
young minds, new ideas, be tolerant...for the mechanically minded, the camo hides the stains of the toil amongst the melancholy recalcitrant machinery procured by politicians from the lowest bidders that built it. could they have spent another six bucks for a decent dynamic oil seal on a gearbox that pees like a sick horse? no. of course not. if it didn't leak oil, a guy would think it was out of oil...
I actually changed the uniform of NAVCENT in 1996. They all wore the khaki polysester shiite and yet, I had a full equipment set prepositioned there in the Banz Warehouse. I had to go over once a week, start both 30kw genators and drive the deuce and a halfs and 5 tonner trucks around the warehouse in order to keep them working. I wore my khami for that and since it was way way more comfortable than 100% polyester khaki, all the officers started to wear it too up to and including the VADM. Having gear on that wicked was nice, and smelled way better than skanky polyester.
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