Soldiers in space? President Donald Trump said Tuesday that it’s not a bad idea.
“Space is a war-fighting domain just like the land, air and sea,” Trump said during a speech at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego on Tuesday afternoon. “We may even have a space force.”
“I was saying it the other day, because we’re doing a tremendous amount of work in space, I said, maybe we need a new force, we’ll call it the space force. And I was not really serious, and then I said what a great idea, maybe we’ll have to do that,” Trump said.
Pres. Trump says U.S. may soon have a “space force,” adding that he had not been serious when he first pitched the idea. “We have the Air Force, we’ll have the space force.” https://t.co/7t9dGZXwSH pic.twitter.com/ZoIoFhNU6p
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) March 13, 2018
The idea is not new, nor is it far-fetched. Last year, the House Armed Services Committee voted to create a new military branch, the “U.S. Space Corps,” under the umbrella of the Air Force, much like how the Marines are under the Navy.
That plan was scuttled and left out of the defense budget in November after opposition from the Pentagon and the White House,
But the issue is unlikely to go away, as space becomes even more strategic territory for nations such as the U.S., Russia and China.
Reps. Mike Rogers. R-Ala., and Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., said in a joint statement last year that: “We will not allow the United States national security space enterprise to continue to drift toward a space Pearl Harbor.”