Space?

You can find the latest edition of the Grounded argument over at Medium: War is Boring:

And so, in effect, we argue that the conflation of air and space is wrong; when properly conceived of as a commons, space is more like the sea than like the air. Military culture structures how an organization envisions its role, and its relationship with other organizations, and the cooperative, commerce oriented framework in which the Navy conceives of the commons makes more sense in application to space than the Air Force’s militaristic “dominance” approach.

Moving from the abstract to the concrete, the organizational assets that currently find a home in the Air Force can easily be shifted to the Navy. We won’t miss the Air Force; indeed, our space policy may improve in its absence.

Essentially, the argument combines the work of Alex Vacca with some of the more interesting stuff on maintenance of the commons. While space has effectively defaulted to the Air Force (one of the first questions I get is “What about space?”), when we think about how the services approach the commons, it turns out that the Navy’s way of thinking makes more sense than the USAF’s approach. My co-author (Max Lord, a student of mine), put the argument together in a term paper at the end of last year; this is the distillation of the case.

See also an argument that we should create a “Coast Guard” for space, and this account of the role played by the escort carrier USS Croatan in space exploration.