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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

This seems weird and premature. We will probably need a "Space Corps" eventually, but doing it now when the technology is still in its infancy, instead of being able to leverage the manpower of an existing service, seems unhelpful. Making the Air Force its own thing, instead of part of the Army, was a good decision in 1945 but would've been dumb in 1912 too.

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I thought we had signed an international treaty against militarizing space and other celestial bodies. In fact, here is the text:

http://www.nti.org/learn/treaties-and-regimes/treaty-princip...

Simple Prisoner's Dilemma - you know that the other nations have signed a treaty against militarizing space, but why would you take anyone else at their word?

The answer is, you don't - you try as hard to militarize the hell out of space before anyone else, because you assume everyone else is doing the same.

The other answer is like the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty and START I,II. Intrusive verification by international bodies with penalties for non-compliance. It hasn't been perfect, but so far the world hasn't ended.

Sorry by START II, I meant New Start. START II was cancelled before it went into effect in retaliation for George W. Bush cancelling the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty.

Yes! This is a huge step backwards. War and space do not mix.

Actually, I think they should go the opposite way: they should eliminate the Air Force, and make it part of the Army again. The AF was split off because of the Cold War, and is just a relic of that time. No other modern military force has a separate "air force", because having it separate only complicates things when conducting a conventional ground war. For a while the Air Force even thought they were going to make the Navy obsolete, because they wanted to rely on ICBMs and long-range bombers for everything.

> No other modern military force has a separate "air force", because having it separate only complicates things when conducting a conventional ground war.

Besides the US: Turkey, Syria, Russia, Israel all off the top of my head have air force and ground army (along with, at least, a navy) separate under one "Armed Forces" command.

What modern air forces operate as part of the army, rather than separately (as most navies do)?

The big one is China, where all the services are technically branches within the People's Liberation Army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Liberation_Army

That really doesn't sound any different than the US, it's just different naming. In the US, all four services are branches within the "Department of Defense". So US DOD = China PLA.

To properly compare, you need to look at whether the air force has the same level of autonomy from the ground army as the navy does. If it does, it's just like the US. If not, it's not.

But, from one perspective, that doesn't mean they don't have an Air Force as a top level service, it just means the PLA is the aggregate (like “Armed Forces” of many other countries) under which the top-level services exist.

> No other modern military force has a separate "air force"

The UK has the same high level structure as the US (A “Naval Service” including Navy and Marines, an Army, and an Air Force.)

It's a fairly common structure.

The Chinese PLA actually has more services (Ground Force, Air Force, Rocket Force, Navy, Strategic Support Force.)

There probably are modern militaries where one of the top-level divisions isn't something like an air Force, but they aren't dominant among modern, large-scale forces.

Most modern military forces have a separate "air force", can you list which countries don't ?

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