It’s tempting to say “it’s a combination of all three,” but, well, that wouldn’t make any sense. Here’s the deal: Eric Lipton writes in today’s Times
Hours after the news broke on Wednesday that the United States had picked up worrisome intelligence about Russia’s capacity to strike American satellites, the Pentagon sent a missile-tracking system into orbit, part of a vast new effort to bolster the military’s growing presence in space.
The timing was coincidental.
Yeah, sure it was, Eric. The Pentagon was hungry, as usual, for a funding boost, and, just like that, a uuuge threat to American security popped up on the horizon, out of fucking nowhere. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
I mean, it makes you think about canceling your subscription to the New York Times.
Afterwords
Eric goes on to ruminate that
Officials in Washington have increasingly realized in recent years that one of the first moves the United States would likely face in any major war with China or Russia would be an attempt to disable United States telecommunications, geolocation and surveillance systems in space.
No, Eric, the first and only move the U.S. would face in a major war with China or Russia would be hundreds or thousands of ICBMs equipped with thermonuclear warheads hurtling through the sky at 18,000 miles an hour and then pounding all of America’s major population centers (aka “markets”, in capitalist lingo) into radioactive dust. Eric, please stop rewriting Pentagon press releases and calling that “journalism”.
ADDENDUM
“Addendum” as in, “Alan Vanneman missed the story”. As both, yes, Ross Douthat and Politico’s Ryan Lizza suggest, the real reason for the talk of “worrisome” intelligence regarded Russian perfidy was to light a fire under support for aid to Ukraine (which I am okay with) and reauthorization for “Section 702” of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008,1 which, as it stands, basically lets the federal government put a camera up your ass for as long as it likes, which I am definitely not okay with.
For me, what is most “worrisome” is the endless efforts of the military intellectual/industrial/political complex, which has massive tentacles in both parties, to reinvent the Cold War, to endlessly bloat our already grotesquely bloated defense budget, and endlessly pursue ever more aggressive policies overseas, supposedly “necessary” to maintain our “credibility” but in fact undertaken as a way of avoiding the admission that our past policies have been abject failures that have made the world more unstable and less safe, each failure used to justify more aggression and bullying rather than less. Because you can never be too safe!
As for the “special” case of Ukraine, which is one place where I do support continued involvement, Ross Douthat wrong foots me by proposing a sensible approach in his column linked to above. So listen to Ross on this one!
1. My link here is to a post by Reason’s J.D. Tuccille. The “head” for J.D.’s article calls 702 “controversial”, which is perhaps putting it mildly. The federal government’s own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found plenty to worry about, as J.D. explains.
