On Thursday, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, the husband of former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, appeared on MSNBC’s Velshi & Ruhle to discuss the Trump administration’s plan for a new branch of the military, the now-legendary “Space Force.”
With today’s news of a logo-choosing contest for Trump supporters, who apparently will be rewarded for the contributions to Trump’s reelection campaign with a vote on the imaging of a new military branch, the Space Force is all over the airwaves. And although the massive new government expenditure will still have to be approved by Congress, it seems likely that if he could get it approved before the midterms, this crop of Republicans — who have resisted Trump on almost nothing since his election — would hand him another “accomplishment” to notch on a bedpost in the Lincoln bedroom.
But nobody who knows anything about space, forces, space forces, the military, budgets, or literally anything having to do with the new program seems to like it, least of all the kind of folks who would end up taking leadership roles in such an agency.
That is, of course, unless Trump followed suit with the rest of his appointments and selects people who know literally nothing about the jobs they’re being selected to do, Ã la Rick Perry, Betsy DeVos, or any of the rest of the top contributors Trump chose to stock his swamp with.
But for the iconic astronaut, who spent a lot of time in space, the new military branch is “wasteful and redundant.”
The Air Force Space Command already does this. It’s at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, they do this with about 20,000 people. [That] might sound like a lot, but compared to the size of the other branches of the military, it’s relatively small … There is a threat out there — but it’s being handled by the US Air Force today, it doesn’t make sense to build a whole nother level of bureaucracy in an incredibly bureaucratic DOD.”
Watch Kelly’s amazing response to Trump’s hare-brained Space Force here:
Featured image via screen capture
