The Promise of the Space Force for Long Term Human Abundance and Security w/ Peter Garretson #21

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite podcast series. We are connected to the Project Moon Hut Foundation. And our objective, our desired outcome is to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moonhot, to the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem. And then to use those paradigm shifting thinking and innovations we create, and turn them back on earth to change how we live on earth for all species.

And today, we have an, an amazing topic. The the topic is the promise of the Space Force for long term human abundance and security. And we have Peter Gerritsen on the line. How are you, Peter? I'm doing great, David. Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. I've I've got to share that you and I met at the National Space Society event. I believe it was in California. And you were on stage representing at that time the US Air Force, and I remember watching you.

You were you were very military. Your answers were very military for all sorts of reasons, and your answers were cool. They were interesting. So when you threw this topic out to me, the promise of Space Force for long term human abundance and security, had to say to myself, oh, wow. Should we? Should we not? And here we are. So I again, this is gonna be fun. So for everybody, Peter has, been part of the air force. He is no longer. He's doing strategy work.

He while he was in the air force, he ran the Air University Space Horizons Task Force, the, the America's think tank for space. And he's got, ideas that I think would be enjoyable or interesting, depending on how you look at it, to explore. So Peter, you have an outline or bullet points for us? I do. You wanna give them to me? Alright. So the first bullet point is humanity and life have a bright future if the second one Wait. Wait. Humanity? Humanity and life have a bright future if okay.

Dot. Dot. Second? Yep. The second is the Space Force will be an accelerant for prosperity. Okay. You you had to make long ones, didn't you? They're they're much longer than that. I'm giving you the short one. Space force for accelerant for humanity? Prosperity. Prosperity. Yep. So I'm gonna just shorten these so that we can, you you the writing is a little bit easier. Okay? So then we'll call the second one, Accelerant of Prosperity 2. Yep. Number 3. Then we'll talk about long term security.

Long term security. Yep. And we'll talk security of liberty. Security of liberty. Okay. Then then I'll make the case that the Space Force will be a force for liberty. Okay. Next. Then I'll talk about the ultimate green force. Alright. And the next? Finally, militaries do more than fight wars. Alright. Fight wars. Interesting way to end. So I'm excited. I let's start with the first one. Humanity and life have a bright future if okay. Where are you taking me?

So, you know, I think I'd probably start from very similar concerns that that motivated you toward project Moon Hut. You know, it seems to me like at our current level, there's a diversity of threats to our our habitat, to our fellow species, to, you know, us, as a polity, that's cohesive and gives the kind of freedom for development that people should have and enjoy, and the level of prosperity that many citizens of the world do not enjoy.

And it certainly seems that upon decades now of inspection, that space really offers the solution, not not necessarily the ultimate solution to all our problems, but certainly approximate solution to almost all of the truly compelling, resource and scarcity problems and habitat problems on planet Earth. And so, you know, if we are able to survive against nature, because nature has a tremendous array of threats that they can throw at not just humanity, but our biosphere.

And if we are able to make use of the vast infinite wealth and resources of space, then we face this incredible possibility, this this prosperity, and when I say prosperity, I mean in the not in the narrow acquisitive sense, but in the quality of life sense that enables a true diversity and flourishing and an even grander destiny, which is to be the carriers of life to dead worlds, to expand where life is so that it's not just on one planet, to expand where intelligence is, so that there is greater experience, rare way by which the universe can experience itself.

So so the I guess, maybe you I know you, but I don't know that well. You said that it offers the solution almost all resource and scarcity on earth. Can you tell me what what do you when you say that sentence, or as you said it, what did you see out there? Alright.

So, you know, like you, I've been privileged to, you know, grow up in a country that offered me a great deal of individual liberty and freedom, but have the ability to, and the opportunity to travel and live in other cultures and spaces. And, you know, one of one of the things that taught me early on was that the United States really had some secret sauce. Now later on, I realized that everybody else had figured out and was using that secret sauce.

But the other thing, you know, as I traveled to more and more places, you realize that not everybody enjoys the the standard of living, that that makes, you know, that removes from your consideration extremely basic constraints on who you can be. And, you know, I mean, honestly, I'm very contempt right now. I I live in a climate controlled space where I have enough resources to get what I want, you know, the energy to have to see to my sustenance of my health.

And those are things that I would like to see every human being have. Plenty of energy, clean water, enough access to, you know, healthy calories and and food. No need to fight over the basics of existence. And when you say, what did I see out there?

The first thing that you see is that the the Earth is not and has never been a a closed system, that we, you know, freely take in energy from the sun, and that there is a vast ability to directly harness, solar power in space, beam it as 24 hour power on a scale that scales to all global civilization. Yeah. And if you have abundant power, you can scale, you know, global domestic product scales directly with energy usage.

And if you have clean power, green power, then you're then that doesn't come at the expense, of harming the atmospheric gas compositions and climate that a combustion economy, brings with it. And if you've got abundant power, it's easy to, to convert or, to either suck water from the sky or to convert it from salt water. And if you've got abundant power and water, then agriculture, you know, is easy.

Transportation need not be polluting, and so, you know, that future of an entire, you know, 55 terawatt global green energy system is clearly within our technological, you know, reach if we want it to be. So, it's interesting your answer because I actually love it. You I jumped, and it's my fault.

I jumped that you saw, Muth being Moon being terraformed or Mars being terraformed and and that millions of people are living, which I've heard all these stories and we still don't have clean water in certain countries in the world. So do are when you think in your own mind's eye, when we're talking, are you thinking about in near when I say near earth, it could be moon closeness, not 2 years away flying. Are you thinking that that's the space in which we should live?

Is that's the way you see it? Or is it is it a bigger picture? Is it a different picture? At least in the, let's say, the next 50 years. Well, let me answer that question first, and then I'll scope it back to your time scale. I mean, in in my view, we do not know, we, in fact, we have no, hopeful evidence that life exists anywhere else other than on this single pale blue dot. I agree. Right? Now, probably that seems incredible, absolutely incredible, right?

But as long as that appears to be the evidence we have, then this is the one place that all of life and all of intelligence can be extinguished if it is not adequately managed and grown. The destiny of of life and intelligence that exists here on planet Earth is to fill the entire galaxy, every star, to make every dead world alive, and to fill the entire lighted universe with life. Where, where will, where could we get in 50 years?

You know, in 50 years, although I think, you know, settlement and expansion of life habitat is basically the the the largest commission for earth life. Mhmm. You know, the the first thing you've got to do is to lock in the long term security and full warranty of planet Earth. So so it's taking care of your home first. You've gotta take care of your home first, but you can't really take care of your home at the scale that you want to in the way you want to if you can't utilize space resources.

So And I I completely agree. The reason I asked that was the the way in which you were giving humanity and life. You you had some broad statements in there. And I you and I haven't had this conversation, so I wanted to know what was your framework because you could have gone anywhere with that. And I like your answers because we use it's the 50 year anniversary of, the Apollo. And 50 years from now, if we use the same timeline, we might not even be at a low Earth orbit.

So the I I like that it to me, in my opinion, that it was more realistic expectation than sometimes I hear other people delivering. So I just wanted to get a a context, so I know I kinda threw you off a little bit here with such a strong question. And then there was one other that you said that, the Nature at Over Biosphere, the Gradular Destiny, Deadwoods. Some of them will probably hit on otherwise, so that's that's good.

This helps me a lot because now I know your mindset, which helps me to be able to understand what you're saying. So you can continue on, Asaria, with Humanity, Life, A Bright Future, if Right. So I mean, you've we've got to protect, you know, the root, the home world, even as we attempt to spread, you know, the children of earth to, you know, to other places, such that if something were to happen to the earth, life and intelligence and our, and the seeds of our culture would still continue.

And so that makes, you know, the, you know, the overall dreams of people, you know, like Elon Musk important, you know, not in the sense that, you know, it's not a safety valve even for those people, right? It's a, it's a safety for the project of life, such that, you know, if one of us, either one was to suffer a catastrophe, there would be another center of life to continue. And today there is. But It's an amazing cons construct that you just created.

And at the same time, we can't get people to put on a mask in certain parts of the world. So we wanna save we wanna save the children of earth to another part to to to go to other planets. You use the word intelligence and oh, yeah. No. It's it's not real. It's not real. This is COVID won't do anything. So I it's an interesting, I don't know what the word is, but it's an interesting thought as you're saying it.

Okay. Yeah. I agree that the it would be a nice construct to have to be able to to say that the the human species or other species that are brought along with us can survive and propagate throughout the universe, and maybe the klinga what is it? Klingons or the it's not the Klingons. It's the Spock was a Vulcan. Vulcan. The Vulcans will go by CS 2 warp speed, and then they will come down and help us. So I think that's the way it was in Star Trek. We we can hope.

The other possibility is that, you know, they're too much like us, and I think there were civilizations in South America that, you know, would have benefited a lot if they'd had, you know, some some early expansionist thinking to build ships and go explore rather than just wait to be wait to encounter an advanced culture. Okay. So, humanity and life, anything else in terms of our bright future? Right. So, you know, humanity is pretty awfully young, you know, as a species.

We haven't been around anywhere near close to the lifespan of the dinosaurs, and, you know, Earth probably has some, you know, certainly 100 of millions, maybe a 1000000000 years left on its warranty.

But in order for us to make use of that, you know, in a habitat that's friendly to us, you know, we've got to, first of all, you know, fix our energy system so that it is as minimally negatively interacting, you know, with with our system as possible, and secondly, we've got to make sure that the Earth is not going to get hit by an asteroid or comet strike that is going to, you know, force it to reset or extinguish the possibilities of expansion for good, and those those both have to be done from space.

Okay. I would agree. So that I I think that's it on my first point. Okay. So let's go on to 2, which was Space Force will be an accelerant for prosperity. Right. So, you know, the Space Force has a couple of different ways in which it will be an accelerant to that brighter future.

And the first way is that it will be an accelerant by being a a provider of security, and a provider of security for other activities, for commerce, you know, for all the different innovation space that you, you know, you would want. So let let's just let's just step back for a minute. The Space Force is the US's division that has been spun off from the Air Force to become a separate agency, I guess, is that the word? To Service.

Yep. Service to be able to facilitate the United States' position in the world in a variety of different ways. But I would also say, and tell me if I'm wrong, the Space Force has actually been around for quite some time. The United States Air Force has been running the same type of programs just under the Air Force's auspices. Is that somewhat correct?

That's one way of looking at it, but that would kind of be like if you as an entrepreneur did a takeover of another, of the assets of another organization, and gave it a different and broader mission or ambit. So Okay. You were right. I mean, and that actually should have been one of my talking points, which is that the United States has a Space Force. So, you know, at present, it has a tremendous amount of continuity with what the air force was doing under air force space command.

And, and I would say right now, there's a tremendously active debate happening about, you know, what exactly the Space Force is meant to be, where it's meant to go, and I am a, you know, heavy partisan in that debate for a for a broader vision of it. But the but the Space Force is a military service.

It currently it it was originally conceptualized to be a its own department, but, you know, at the moment, it is still a an equal service in stature to the Air Force, but within the Department of the Air Force. And it has basically taken over all rules that facilitate, US interests in in the space. Okay. So I I actually haven't followed it. I I've known about it, and I think it there are many people who use the term space force over the past decade few decades.

So this was just the the rubber not the rubber stamping, that's a bad way to say it. This is the unofficial statement that this would now have and determine their own destiny, their own plans, their own directives over time, so it would be an equal branch of the military. So, you know, what you say is insightful. You know, this comes did not come out of the blue. It did not, you know, just emerge from this administration.

This has been a, you know, more than a 20 year active debate, and, you know, it certainly organizations have some ability to shape their own destiny, and what this provides is an equality of standing, you know, before the bodies of decision, you know, that matter in the United States. So rather than being, you know, very much buried and not directly accessible either to, the White House or to Congress, you know, now the Space Force can be directly cross examined, directly legally addressed.

And and so I would say what's more important isn't that the Space Force can shape its own destiny, but rather that the American polity can directly shape its destiny as a strategic component of its overall approach to what's important. Interesting way to look at it. I had not considered the legalities and positioning of it from that perspective.

I had only looked at it as a another means by which a group of people could facilitate the initiatives that they'd like to institute, and I hadn't thought about it from that angle. Cool. Well, actually, an interesting sidebar here is that while, you know, people make the analogy to the Air Force. Well, the Air Force internally was very much pushing for its own independence.

The Space Force, or Space Force advocates, there were certainly some in the 2000 era pushing for independence, but they were sort of culturally wiped off the map when they lost that battle.

And this round of Space Force was actually fought by the space professionals who did not want their own service, and it was very much Congress and the president that said no, we have a larger strategic picture, we're not getting enough out of the current organizational construct, we're going to take the leadership to fix an organizational problem that the DOD just doesn't seem able to address. Now that you're out, what did you think?

Oh, I was wholly in favor of the need for US Space Force for a multitude of reasons. The the among the largest was that space while space was subordinated within the air force, People looked at it as a support to, terrestrial war fighting, and they did not look at the broader needs of space itself as a domain and its expansion and its economic expansion.

And and the bet that I made was that once space was liberated from that constraining context, a diversity of forces, commercial, congressional, would start to shape the space force to think about space much more like a navy thinks about the ocean. You'll have to you'll have to describe what that means. Alright. That's actually in my talking point. So we Okay. So we can go over it whenever you'd like. Yep. Or now, whatever.

It's just an interesting even just to say that because I have not looked at navy allows commerce to happen. That's a big part of it is whoever run the seas tends to be able to allow commerce to happen globally. They protect people who can't be protected, under their control or not. So there's a variety of yet it still seems to me when you think of the US Navy or the British Navy or the Chinese Navy or any of the navies that are out there that there's a large part of the military component.

So it's interesting, that angle. That's right. But, Ellen, let's just touch on this now because it this is a fair, you know, point. Right? So every military service has a particular way of looking at and approaching the world and a particular theory of conflict and victory, you know, that that determines basically everything about their organization and how they approach problems. And, you know, they're not the same.

They're they're distinct. Well, Air Force views of things are very much conditioned by the perspective, that an airplane gives you and the kind of operation that an airplane gives you. So it's downward looking, it's terrestrially focused, you know, it enjoys the ability to not have to deal with the difficulties of, you know, geography and terrain. It can fly above those. It has speed. It has this vantage point. Right?

And, you know, it it believes that it can, you know, go over obstacles to strike, you know, direct strategic targets. And it can and its primary way of relating to the world is through verticality. It thinks about higher and lower. And, you know, the Air Force took an early leadership in space because it was thinking vertically, and it wanted to get higher and higher to get a better and better vantage point. And, and it advanced an awful lot of important things in space that way.

But verticality is only one way to see space power. And if you look at navies, right, navies think much more horizontally. They think about the lines of commerce between things. So a space force need not be terrestrially focused or have a global consciousness. Right? It might have an inter global consciousness. It might see space as the sea. Air forces also don't stay resident in the air, right? There's actually nothing that I can think of that is of value. We don't have mines in the sky.

You know, we don't, you know, there aren't tourist resorts in the sky. You sortie to the domain, and you come back down, usually in a matter of hours. Yep. Whereas, you know, the Navy stays resident. Right? There are things of value on and in the sea. You are protecting commerce. Air forces don't really protect air commerce for the most part. You know, they we don't have convoys where fighters are escorting, you know, FedEx airplanes. Mhmm. So it conditions a different way of thinking.

Air power is very episodic, it's very theater based, it, you know, it's very, you know, sort of aggressive in the opening phases of the war, it's very direct in terms of, you know, striking or strategic bombing. None of those things necessarily translate as the most important ways of seeing space.

But naval power, you know, which sees the importance of, you know, overseas possessions, as centers of commerce, of of supporting and supplying commerce, of setting up, you know, important basing for commerce, of, you know, rescuing people in need of counter piracy. This is a much broader conception, and really the navy's primary value is, you know, in providing that security and presence in peacetime.

You know, it does it does it can play roles in war, but I don't think most people would think that the primary value of the US Navy is in warfare. It it has persistent daily effects that enable commerce and wealth for everybody. It's my take would have I think I even started by saying it allows commerce to happen. You've you expanded it and interestingly to what I would have tossed under some of those roles, and I and I've been on the in the in the helicopters and things.

I'm trying to think what's Coast Guard? Coast Guard. Yes. I was down at the base in Florida, and, I forgot to know where it was in Florida. But, yes, the coast guard, they go out and they actually can take over a naval ship if it's involved in rescue and controls, and and very, very synergistic way of working together to be able to safeguard the oceans. And in fact, this is, you know, this is an active ideological struggle at the moment.

So many of us, you know, and and you might identify us as what's called the the blue water school of space power, you know, which is an analogy to navies. So you have brown water theories of naval power, which basically assume that the primary role of the navy is to transport the army along the coast, and they're primarily concerned with coastal.

And then you have blue water theories of of, you know, meaning the deep blue sea, where you have these ocean capable vessels that secure commerce and open and expand, the realm of commerce.

Well, most blue water thinkers on space power also think that the space force really should look in a lot of ways like the coast guard, not in the sense that this is our coast, but in the sense that coast guards have important roles in safety of navigation, which by the way, so does the Army Corps of Engineers, but they have important roles in safety of navigation, which the Space Force already does through GPS, important, and in avoiding traffic collisions.

They have important roles in law enforcement, of American vessels in safety navigation, sorry, safety of vessels, such as, you know, making sure that cruise ships are seaworthy. They, you know, do counter contraband operations, counter piracy operations, you know, search and rescue. So there are this they they maintain navigational aids.

And in particular, like their legal authorities to, you know, regulate and ensure compliance with, you know, maritime control, are things that probably make a lot of sense to have in a space force that is conceived of in this manner. Now, other thinkers, you know, the Brownwater thinkers, want to push away anything that is not core war fighting, and trying to give that to to somebody else, so that they can focus on a on a much more narrow set of space control issues.

But, you know, if we wanted that, we would not have pushed to have a independent space force. We would have just kept things as they were, you know, as a niche capability within the air force. It's a it's an interesting. I've never thought about it this way, and you're making my whole this is great because I'm thinking about space differently. I don't know.

Bill Baumgartner was a he ran the commander of the 7th, what is it, 7th fleet, 7th, coast guard district, which is one of the largest, I think, in the world. He gave me some insight also, and you you tapped on to all of them. The law enforcement safety of vessels, count contraband, tourists, fleet the the vessels being safe, the in insurance of compliance across the board.

So its role was very surprising to me that the coast guard had so many, because maybe the word is humanistic, activities under their belt, where it was almost as if the navy had outsourced it. We're gonna be the navy, and we're gonna give all of these things that really are of extreme value to humanity, we're gonna make sure we have a unit of that too. And saving people out at sea when there's a boat that tips over.

Those are things that I would have thought the navy would have done, but it's interesting that there's a split. And now if I look at space and I look at it at this deep blue and the possibilities of being lost in space, I hate to use a movie title, but being lost in space or stranded or or hurt or a vessel is not prepared, those are things that we would, as humans, most likely would like to see out there in in our space environment.

Yep. And that brings me to another point in terms of likelihood. Right? There are philosophical reasons why a person might prefer to house those capabilities in a civilian agency. But, those are usually dangerous things. They put people at risk. Anything where you put people at risk, typically we put in a uniform service.

And in terms of resourcing, right, if you're going to be spending money on a Space Force anyway, you know, and it's gonna have agile spacecraft that can do things, manipulate things, right, why would you want that asset just wasted in space doing nothing during, you know, the 99.999999% of the time when they're not fighting a war.

You know, you would want to be able to employ those things, and why would you want to have to build those things again in the Department of Commerce, you know, or in a separate space guard. And especially because we I think it's worth surfing with the biases in human nature.

And one of the biases we have is we may profess to love science, but when it comes to actual spending, the total civilian science budget across the entire United States, government is 70,000,000,000, while our defense budget is 700,000,000,000, 10 times that. So the the ability to sort of leverage and make use of our natural propensity to spend money on our, you know, fear of the other, fear of defense, ends up giving us a much more capable, capacity.

It flexes to much more common contingencies and is very enduring in terms of human infrastructure. So can can answer just because it's in my head, and I wanna make sure I hit on it. I have 2. 1, the Chinese spend about $240,000,000,000 on military annually right now. So are is there any correlation between the way they perceive it and your purse you're saying that? And the second is the sciences. Does DARPA fall under military or under sciences? Okay. So, DARPA falls under military.

And depending on how you break out the total spending on science, you could include military research and DARPA or not. The figure that I gave did not include military research or DARPA. And, I think DARPA is somewhere around 3,000,000,000 of which, like, 80% is discretionary while they pursue amazing things. And they weren't they were always part of the Department of Defense. They weren't always called DARPA.

They, were at various points, and I think they started life as ARPA, as the Advanced Research Projects Agency. And they were also a child of Smutnik in order to, you know, their mandate is never let that kind of strategic surprise happen to the United States. You know, always be ahead in figuring out, you know, what could be coming and and stay ahead and then get out of it. So, you know, they have a very specific mandate. I loved my time at DARPA. What a phenomenal organization.

The it's a and I'll let you get to China in a moment. The DARPA component, I worked with NASEC, National Air and Space Intelligence Center, and I worked with them, and I was surprised at how much research they're doing. It's in the book, in the Paid to Thank. I think you've gotten a copy of it. I actually talk about the fact that in the military, there's tons of work done on research on and development in different units.

So there's new products constantly being created, and DARPA is an amazing, facility just for innovation around the for all sorts of different techs. Yes. And, you know, DARPA had a Tansin, you know, a number of things that ended up being of immense value to all of us, you know, in terms of just basic rockets, in terms of the first satellites.

I was gonna get to this point later on, but, you know, actually, the first satellite image that we had of Earth as a ground ball, you know, was not the 1972 Big Blue Marble. It it was, you know, full decade plus earlier in I think it was TIROS TIROS 1, I think, which was a military weather satellite, which DARPA had had a role in.

Of course, DARPA had immense roles in microprocessors, in the Internet itself, and GPS, so, you know, the footprints of DARPA, you know, reached so far beyond, you know, the military application to these incredibly broad and enabling technologies that enhance our our our life. And I think, you know, the and the DARPA will be is already a, a partner with the Space Force, and I think, you know, the Space Force is just it's gonna accelerate them. Were you under Regina, what's your name? Regina?

No good. Dugan. Yes. I had just left. I was under Tony Tether. Okay. I just thought she'd be a great person to get on the program, so I'm sorry I jumped ahead. What about China? The 260, and I and I I clarify this. When I use that number 260, the Chinese government spends just as much as the US military does on surveillance internally in the country as the America spends on the outside. So there's not it's not just 260,000,000,000.

That's 260,000,000,000 that we know that goes directly to military, but internal surveillance throughout China is one of the most advanced in the world. So how do you look at the the Chinese when you look at being this number 2 in the world in terms of spending?

Well, in my view, you know, the the, you know, China was really the basic driver, you know, that has led to Space Force, you know, as long as the US was, you know, was unchallenged in space, it could afford to basically let space be about water of US strategy. You know, it could allow it to be under resourced. It it could build its systems to be fat, dumb, and happy and, you know, optimized for performance and not have to worry about it as a threat.

It didn't have, you know, the the strongest compelling reason to, you know, do ambitious, projects in space, you know, that capture its energies. But, you know, the United States, it's a pugnacious competitor. You know, if there's nobody to compete with, you know, it gets lazy like a bear and hibernates, you know, but eventually, you know, the United States wakes up and when it perceives that there's, you know, a real competition, it it can really get its head in the game and reinvent itself.

So so That's actually amazing. I had never tied that together, but the the far side of the moon having the plant, the seed germinate or not germinate on the far side of the moon by China probably got people up in an uproar. The shooting of the satellite, I believe they destroyed a satellite. I think those things get people to be concerned. It really, really did. Right? And it and it energized America's concerns on a broad diversity of levels. Right?

The ASAT test, the multiple ASAT tests, you know, the moving the ASAT into operational status, the development of their space doctrine, the development of their own strategic support force, their dedicated space force, you know, all those were prompts to pay more attention to the war fighting component of military space.

The Chinese military controls their entire space program, you know, even the civilian so called civilian facing parts, and those efforts, you know, to, you know, to do traditional sort of NASA like exploration missions energized an entirely, you know, different set of people who were concerned about what that signals for global leadership and what that means if China applies its same behavior as in the South China Sea, the same sort of exclusionary infrastructure aggression, you know, type of behavior, you know, it it energized concerns that we might need to, you know, be present in order to help shape, you know, the domain and and not put ourselves in a position of weakness from where, you know, the those who are sort of on the side of, more political liberty might be excluded.

Mhmm. So, you know, China China because they still have a, you know, their cost of labor is so much more advantageous than ours right now that their dollars go a lot farther. And they're candidly just very, very, you know, good at hierarchical organization.

They're very good about setting timelines and meeting them, and they are really, really, really a serious competitor for the United States in a way that we've never seen in terms of the size of their economy, the size of their talent, in my view, their ability to innovate, their commitment, you know, and their their drive and commitment and clarity of their strategic goals to eclipse the United States as a space power by 2045.

So almost all of the major initiatives that you see the United States taking now, while they make sense, you know, even without China are more or less motivated and accelerated by the the feeling like we need to compete with China on the civil, on the commercial, and in the military space.

And I would add to that, right, that oh, that for the larger set of things that we're talking about, you know, which is prosperity, you know, access to resources, security of the earth from nature, you know, moving our, you know, the seeds of earth life out.

This competition is going to be fantastic for planet Earth and our problems, right, because a race brings out the best energy, we want to one up each other, it it causes us to invest more in the air in in this amazing, you know, area of space where we can find so many solutions. So overall, this is gonna be a very good thing.

Now it's an even better thing, in my view, if at the end of that long, you know, race and exertion, if the United States, you know, comes out in the stronger position because I because it's my view or my prejudice that this whole ecosystem, you know, of, of infinite resources will be better if it also includes political liberty.

And I think that we have very strong indications about how the United States behaves when it's in a position of power that that should give us heart that a United States that prevails as the preeminent power in space will be more inclusive, and and provide a better space for human liberty, than if we are not the power that wins.

And I won't touch on the there's a the underlying political environment today, because we have to look at space as a continuum of multiple leaders through a period of time, And the pendulum swinging in the United States or in, I would not say America is not a complete completely free society just as any of the other democracies in the world are not. Yet over time, if we looked at America or England or any of the others around the world, but there's there's a balance.

And I think what you I'm trying to clarify here. I think you're trying to say to me that given historical references and and the the certain beliefs that you've experienced over your lifetime, my lifetime, is that you believe that the future will bring these liberties to everybody else given the trajectory that history history has given us. Is that kind of a way to say it? Kind of it. I I wouldn't make such a strong assertion. Right?

I think that what if anything, we've seen how incredibly persistent and resistant hypocrisy and tyranny, you know, can be, in limited bastions. But what power enables, you know, if you have power, you are able to write the rules, and if you happen to be a democratic society that values human liberty, you're gonna write the rules in a way that favors that liberty for participants.

Yep. So if the United States had not won World War 2, there might still be some number of democracies, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as many as today. Wouldn't wouldn't be safe, they couldn't all persist as well as with the the umbrella provided by a major democracy. And if an autocracy wins, you know, it is the way of the world that people try to please the master and try to look like them.

So, you know, I would expect that, you know, if China were to win, most of the other states participating in their economic sphere would try in in in in many ways to try to mirror their system, and that would likely, you know, mean constraints.

And that's the the reason so I think we're agreeing, and I was trying to take the apolitical coronavirus, the situation that's happening in the United States, situation that's happening in UK, and say those are those are blips and changes of belief structure. But the reality is that because America has positioned itself, because the west has positioned itself, it has allowed freedoms to expand. Now we are seeing, we are seeing authoritarian rule expand at this time in our history.

But if China wins, they will mirror, and they will follow suit of the person who writes the new rules. So I agree with you on what you're saying. Absolutely. So so I know we're only on 3 or it's more forward to 2. Let's keep on going. Alright. Long long term security, I know we've been touching on them. So is there anything with 23 that you think we've kinda missed?

You know, so, I mean, the big thing that I just wanted to say in 2 was, look, you have doubled the institutional focus of the of the largest economy, the United States, on space, and that, you know, no we talked about how military research usually transitions to enable greater life, and how it's a much deeper fiscal well. You know, the other point I would just make is that merchants and commerce on frontiers have always needed protection, and generally, we think navies are a good thing.

And and then the last point under the first one is that by creating this new force, this new professional thing, right, militaries have often been a way to attract talented individuals who come from less privileged backgrounds. So here, you know, we finally have a dedicated military service that can attract prosocial, idealistic, talented people to pursue STEM, and give them an amazing outlet for their energies. That's a neat way to look at it.

I I actually I admire that that one statement there. And, yes, throughout history, it has given opportunities for people who are less likely to have risen up because they had, anywhere in the world, they have been drafted. They've been brought in or they volunteered for the service, and they gave got opportunities they might not have gotten otherwise.

So on the third point, you know, Space Force is gonna be an accelerant to prosperity because of necessity, it will need to be a buyer and consumer of space services. So it you know, because it has to operate in this difficult environment, it's gonna have to become the anchor tenant or the lighthouse investor for cutting edge products, and that investment is gonna both mature the technology and attract others to use those products and services, you know, after their maturity.

It also is gonna create a market for spaceships, you know, people who make spaceships, people who want to sell lunar propellant. You know, they will look to the government as an initial, you know, as initial, you know, anchor tenant or provider to ionize their costs.

And in the same way that historically, the US government used airmail contracts to help fledgling airlines develop before passenger transport was commercially viable, contracts that the Space Force puts forward are likely to give birth to additional industries that will blossom, you know, far beyond their their basic contract.

Mhmm. And in and, you know, similar in the same way that military supported contracts enabled, Pan Am to build the 1st truly global transoceanic flight structure with its own nav aids and radios and airports, you know, the the activities of the space force are likely to lay down similar sorts of infrastructure and provide similar sorts of opportunities for companies to create more lasting infrastructure as part of this economy that leads to prosperity. Great way to say it. Yes. I agree. Alright.

So we're now finally on the, you know, the space force will be critical for security, for the security of our liberty. Okay. So, we talked a bit, you know, that the that that bright future of life and security, you know, is better if it's liberty, and that the US Space Force, you know, is likely to be that guarantor of liberty in space.

And, you know, what I the point I wanna make here is, like, when we go to space, much as some people would like to think we're gonna change, we're we're not leaving our humanity behind. And part of our nature is opportunistic self help. If there's no sheriff in town, people want to become a law unto themselves.

And so like a navy, a space force is able, just through presence, to deter that kind of self help and mischief, encourage dispute resolution, and and through that, they create the stability that enables commerce as well as all the other things we talked about where they can rescue folks. And I and I think that works even if there are multiple sheriffs. Right? Even if the Chinese has their own space navy, you know, protecting their own commerce, for the most part, navies get along very well.

They you know, it's it's a very rare thing that navies actually go to war. Most of the time, even adversarial navies cooperate in terms of facilitating commerce, preventing piracy, you know, preventing illegal shipment of goods. I think and, yes, the it's I'm trying to go back in my mind to historical references. The the British Navy was the, the one the most powerful navy at one point. The Americans have the most powerful navy.

The one of the Chinese just launched their 2nd aircraft carrier, and they have 2, I think, 2 or 1 nuclear submarine that they just launched. The yet you're telling me throughout history, they have gotten along from all walks of life wherever there was a military, or did they draw borders and say, I will take it from here, you take it from there, or I don't see how of course, I believe conflict had to have happened. It's all of the above, right? Conflict certainly happens.

You know, and the most dangerous time that conflict happens is usually when there's a disagreement at the top about who is actually the top dog and the more powerful, right? And that's usually when you see, you know, some type of decision through military force at the systemic level.

But in other times, right, you know, yes, navies will corral off areas, and in fact, you know, this this is one of the areas that the United States has been, you know well, all global hegemons to date, you know, whether it be the Dutch or the or the British or ourselves who have favored open trading systems. Right? They do get into fights when somebody tries to create a closed economic empire. Right?

So the a lot of people don't even know that the United States Navy, you know, we we didn't create it, you know, to assist in in fighting wars, you know, or to protect our coasts.

It was the threat of the Barbary pirates who were capturing our merchantmen, you know, in the Mediterranean, holding people hostage, embarrassing us, and exacting huge amounts of money, like 10% of our, you know, of our, you know, national treasury that prompted the creation of our initially 6th frigate navy to go and, you know, show the flag and prevent this sort of predation by the Barbary States. Who was the was her famous commander? You know, I, I should know that.

Seriously Tony. Yeah. Seriously enough. But but worst employment You're giving me a tremendous amount of information. You missed one. I'm sorry. Yeah. I am. I'm sorry. Well, you know, I mean, it was interesting, you know, Washington was president when we authorized the Oh, really? Okay. And, and the ship that first engaged the Barbary pirates was none other than the US Enterprise. Really? Yes. Wow. That's kinda cool. That's very cool. Okay. So the Space Force and I I love your angle.

I I I'm really glad that I'm talking to you about this because you've you've come at this topic so far in a very humanistic, global, I've used the term Mearth. I'm thinking of Mearth, moon, and earth, which I think you heard about in the video. I look at this as saying, okay, if we have a Mearth ecosystem and we are between Earth, moon, Earth, space, space and space, and space and moon, how will that be managed? How that how will we protect?

And I I can now see even just this example of the Barbary pirates and their need to have safety for commerce. Yeah. That's, it makes sense. It does. Really does. You know, this is a a good time to make another point that I think is is sort of key. So when we talk about protecting commerce, you know, protecting ships at sea, it's important to realize that the navy doesn't sit there as a babysitter next to every ship that goes by and, like, take a missile, you know, for them. Right?

I mean, the navy literally can't, you know, prevent It's not a it's not a what do you call it? It would be a chaperone or whatever. They're not fair. They just people know they'll become. The you know, the Navy is not a bulletproof jacket for shipping. Right? What they are are the they are a big they are a bigger, badder bully that can punish somebody who, you know, would have the temerity to to to bother. Right? They're the sheepdog that attacks the wolves that attack the sheep.

And, you know, the the, you know, navies do this because they have offensive weapons that can punish, and most of the time, they don't do that. And it'll be the same in space. It isn't that we're going to, like, armor up all our satellites or have, you know, space force, you know, you know, spaceships right next to, you know, civilian satellites.

It is the knowledge, the certain knowledge that if you attack, you know, our civilian infrastructure, our critical infrastructure, we can hurt you back. Right? That's where the protection comes from, the same as on the oceans. Yes. It's it's what governance is about. It's the these are our policies to I'm not saying governance is all about this.

I'm gonna make a statement that governance and the laws, policies, procedures, standards, customs, all of those are rolled up in into a group of individuals or groups of forces, whether they be a sheriff, they be a police, they be law enforcement or invest investigators, military, to say if in fact you screw up, in fact you don't play our game that we believe is a fair game, doesn't have to be fair, but fair according to that culture, then we will make sure that some way, shape or form we will find you, hunt you down, make sure you pay for it.

Right. And and, you know, the the failure of you to have a level of force to back up your, you know, values just means that whoever is there with force, you know, has the determining vote. Right? So China certainly is building, you know, their own space force, and in many ways, you know, I give them credit for having a much better articulated vision of where they're going, which in many ways is very very similar, in terms of the global things they want to address. You know?

But if we if we fail to provide our guarantor of our interests and values, then, you know, we will be at the mercy, of the space force that is there, and and decides to say these are the rules, take it or leave it. So and it might this might tie into your next point, the ultimate dream force. So, it's it's interesting that when I circle the globe in my mind, I Russia doesn't seem to have that their presence.

When I circle the my the world and I India's doing their space activities, the Japanese are doing their space activities. There are different activities happening all over. I still always go I'm coming back to China because of you just mentioned that their plan, their attack, but they've also have a plan of attack of the China dream. They've picked out I think it's 12 different industries that they would like to be superior on the in the world in their economy.

So they're giving them legal, financial, clearance for patents or technology to be able to accelerate that. They have the 1 belt, 1 road. The belt and road to avoid using the seas going for the number one trading partner to the China is not the United States. It's a misnomer. It's believed that China is. United States is the big player, but there are 400 and x 430,450,000,000 people in Europe, and their number one trading partner is Europe. So they do have plans, and I I do respect that.

And you just said it in a different light away, so I'm kinda tying it back. Do you see the space force with plans that are articulated enough that I could say, I get it? Alright. So that's a complex answer. Well, it's a good then that's a good question. You know, the Space Force is brand new. You know, I've I've written pieces and spoken before that I think there's an ongoing battle for the soul of the Space Force.

And frankly, I think probably everyone who's a listener, whether they're, you know, US or not US, have an interest in how that plays out. I have not yet heard from the Space Force leadership itself the talking points that I want to hear. But on the other hand, I had, you know, multiple classes of students headed for leadership positions of whom I have absolute confidence that they understand exactly the game and have articulated very well, you know, what needs to be the plan moving forward.

So, you know, the the the space force may, may on its own start spouting the broader vision it may be directed to by the White House or by Congress who, I think, share this broader vision. But even if none of those happen generationally, as people move up, you know, they, I'm confident that they will move things in the right direction.

The question is, like, the longer you let a particular method of doing things persist unchallenged, It becomes instituted and there's more inertia, it's more difficult to change. So right now is the sensitive period when any and everyone who wants this broader space economy and prosperity, you know, future, they need to be loud about what sort of space force they want.

And in my view, you know, while these are implied in the legal, the legal missions given to the Space Force already, and, you know, if my team, you know, is in charge, they would certainly interpret it that way, I still think that there are a couple things that would be really good to have, you know, explicit in legislation, and one is that a role of the Space Force is to, you know, support the extension and and protection of commerce, and secondly, that the that the the Space Force will organize, train, and equip in order to, prevent, asteroid and comet strikes.

Those, I think, are kind of really essential specified missions. Were you and and I've never asked you this. Were you at, the Pioneering National Space Summit in Washington DC with Tomlinson back in the year that I started in the space journey? I don't know if were you there in Washington?

I I was not, but I was so happy with the output of that consensus position, and have cited it, you know, multiple times, and Rick is a very, very in fact, in some ways, Rick is a, you know, one of the spiritual gurus of where space should be.

You know, I I sort of received the gospel from Rick, you know, when I was a young officer, and it was just him and, and the other folks from the Space Frontier Foundation in particular, you know, Charles Miller, you know, once I heard their perspective, I was just like, wow, you know, we've been doing this all wrong. This is really, you know, the obvious right way to do things.

And so I you know, Rick's the the goal of that consensus position that the United States fundamental goal should be settlement is so critical, and we still have not got that right in law. I was that was my second event in the space industry. So think about it. I was at a racetrack in my first time going to a racetrack, and I was in the center island because some friends brought me to b next to their car.

And I won't go into the long story of it, but I was in a pace car on my first day ever at a racetrack screeching around to get the, the cars running. And my first event was in Hawaii at the Great Giant Leap, which included Buzz Aldrin and Aldi and and the person from France who put the the rover on the comet. And my second event was the Pioneering National Space Summit. So there were things. It was a very challenging meeting. It was very interesting, but I haven't seen much come out of it.

And that's why I you're quoting it, which is interesting because I was there, and it was it wasn't exactly what you're saying. There was not a some people wrote up a plan, but while we were there, there wasn't as much of a consensus. And so it's interesting that these 2, the Protection of Commerce and Train equipped for comet comet strikes, there's a paper that I'll send you afterwards that I have that might be able to be useful in this context.

But that's an interesting so is that what you would say would be the ultimate dream force? Is this, I mean, these would be the foundational pillars? Well, you know, I I think that we, you know, we we all carry multiple identities. Right?

And I think it's worth thinking about what kind of space force should the world want, what kind of space force should the United States want, and what kind of space force advances US power, but not, you know, as an end in itself, but because of the values that we hope it can bring about. Mhmm. And, you know, why would we have a space defense organization that doesn't actually defend planet Earth? To me, that seems crazy. You know?

You're talking about trying to defend against comparatively minor problems, like, you know, anti satellite combat and war, but you're not gonna pay attention to something that could wipe out, you know, the entire species or a city, you know, or mistakenly set off a nuclear war because of a bolide strike over the long place.

And you know, what is, you know, it's a national security organization, but what is national security if it is not, you know, prosperity, if it is not, you know, security for your habitat? And what does it mean to be, you know, preeminent or to have, you know, leadership in the world if you're not leading the world toward any better place? Right? If you're if you're not extending the prosperity for for everybody, you are, you know, what legitimacy do you have, you know, to to be the the leader?

So and legitimacy is important because it, you know, facilitates, it lowers resistance to, you know, so many other things you would want. So I, you know, I can't imagine, you know, I mean, I can imagine I just would not want, you know, a more limited view of US power that is not trying to advance itself as legitimate, you know, as a legitimate leader, you know, fixing global problems and enabling, you know, a broader uplift. I I I love I I'm smiling the whole time you're saying it.

I love the your your I don't know. Maybe I feel it through the medium. I love your energy, your the way in which you deliver that. It it is very, centric around the beliefs that, as an American growing up in America, is very centric around those beliefs. And I do question, because this this is a global dialogue, that how many people would feel that though these values that you just articulated are not the values that they would like to see, and that that not everybody needs liberty.

Maybe there's something for tyranny, or maybe there's something for an elite class. Maybe there are other alternative forms of governance that would be for superior because people are do believe that. And yet I I loved what you had said. So it's a it's a I I'm sorry. My my my history is also showing through in the way in which I'm accepting this. Well, look, I mean, I, you know, I I tend to, you know, see the world through different lenses. Right?

I mean, at one level, you know, I am playing for, you know, team Earth, team Earth life, you know. It isn't it isn't even about the human species. Right? I wanna carry it all, you know, bacteria, plants, animals, you know All spea this magic moon on all all species on earth. Right. Everybody. Every every species. Right.

And, you know, on the smaller level, you know, of course, you know, I was nurtured and fed by by this nation, and I think it still has an important mission in the world and a, you know, and a mission to be worthy of, and I don't think you would find most American strategists that don't think that we have fallen down and, you know, not that, you know, we we have not fallen short of the mark in important ways, and, you know, people around the world should be, you know, are always skeptical of the power, you know, what that power means, you know, to them and, you know, I I don't begrudge, you know, you know, other cultures that, you know, have different values, but that's not gonna silence me from arguing, you know, my viewpoint And

I'm not I'm not I'm not just I'm just all I'm I think it was well articulated. I think you beautifully said it. I could feel you giving everything you had and what you said. So so you don't have to defend it. I just thought it was beautiful how how it came from you. And if you were coming from another country, I would say the same thing because it was your belief that you articulating. So let me take a quick jump and maybe you can follow me with this.

Do you believe the space force could eventually be the earth or Mearth force and that the countries of and the and the civilizations of earth create one inclusive force? Well, you know, let's talk about what in inclusive means. I mean, in in many ways, the United States has already enabled that. Right? So I have a wonderful opportunity to be a, a UN, you know, peacekeeping staff in in Mali. And you really see the diversity of militaries cooperating.

You know, we we had China there, you know, we had, you know, former Soviet states, you know, there. You know, we had nations from across Europe and Africa. Right? So there will always be areas in which we can all cooperate. And, you know, candidly, you know, the the US military is a big dog in this because it mentors, you know, many, many, other nations in standard operating procedures, in doctrine that allows a common base of of, you know, support.

There are, you know, you know, coalitions, you know, within that broader, whether it be NATO or others. And but, you know, we have there are different visions of what humanity could become. Right? Even in the Star Trek future, right, where everybody is on the bridge. Right? All kinds of people from all different nations, you know, aliens are on the bridge, aliens that were past, you know, enemies are on the bridge. You know, they're all part of, you know, that common venture.

And certainly, I think that the space force will it's already providing, you know, ways in the in our space operations center. We already have a number of different, allies, you know, right next to us on the floor sharing, you know, things.

So so like so like the films that we see, the movies where there's someone who's watching who might be from one country and another from another country are all in the same command and control center working together to simultaneously be able to to stop threats or to facilitate things happening. Right. But I but I think that there are there are limits to this. Right? Even in the Star Trek world, you know, there there are factions that gotta call and do diplomatic stuff.

Sometimes they're firing their phasers. You know, sometimes they're, you know, making nice with the Klingons. Other times they're going to war with them. So, you know, we all polities have, you know, degrees of shared interests and competing interests, And and we all have, you know, places where our where core values and interests diverge. And, you know, where we can pursue mutual and absolute gains, we we tend to do that.

And where we can't, you know, we we don't necessarily always fight, but we at least like to preserve our autonomy.

And so, you know, you you know, the space force itself probably, you know, would not become a global force, but it might be a component, you know, it might be a contributor to a, you know, a global force operation, you know, for instance, if we had some really massive need to expend all of our global energies to prevent a an impending asteroid strike that was beyond the capabilities of of just one nation, you know, that would be possible.

Or if we were, you know, if there were ever some encounter, you know, with another civilization, we probably would prefer, you know, to meet that as a united, you know, front. You know, though they're not that's not certain. Right? I mean, we saw in, in the history of, you know, colonization that, you know, some internal factions would play off and try to get, you know, the, you know, get on the side of the invader.

But, you know, I I think there what it will do, David, is it will catalyze the ability of us to cooperate on things that collectively matter, and those would include things like space traffic management, space degree removal, planetary defense against asteroids and comets. You know, it it will accelerate the need to talk about rules and norms. It probably by itself will accelerate, you know, talks about, you know, how you adjudicate, you know, property claims.

We will know who to talk to, like we had a very vibrant conversation, you know, mediated by US strategic command was the Russians, you know, and their nuclear capabilities. So, you know, I would expect that, you know, the Space Force in many ways will advance international cooperation, and it will advance it on a lot of the things that you would like, you know, in sort of a star cracky kind of way, you know, to to move forward on. So what else do in your dream force would you like to see?

How do you what does this look like? I should caution you, right, that my that my bullet was the ultimate green force. Oh, green, not green? Green. Right? So, you know, when when people think about Space Force, you know, they they probably have some, you know, some ideas about space combat. But, you know, let's talk about what the Space Force actually does today.

If I told you that there was a single technology that could reduce global transportation fuel burning by 15 to 20%, and cut those, you know, carbon emissions 15 to 20%, that'd be a pretty amazing technology, right? Mhmm. Well, that's exactly what GPS does. So the Space Force operates the GPS constellation, and GPS guided, transport reduces the overall fuel burning 15 to 20% across the board. Right?

So, you know, as a technology of global impact, GPS is probably the number 1, and in terms of actually delivering the goods to mitigate climate change as a military, the Space Force, you know, is already the leader. Secondly, you know, as we talked about before, right, we would not even have an environmental movement.

We would not have knowledge of climate change had it not been for early incarnations of military research to be able to crack the weather, to know what the effects of nuclear explosive blasts are. The whole ability of us to even sustain a conversation on climate, you know, was birthed out of military space research.

And lastly, right now it is the US Space Force that is taking leadership on developing a brand new global utility that is and will be the ultimate green energy source, which is space solar power. And I touched on this in the beginning, but I'll touch on it again. Right?

The the if you had in your hands, it were within your grasp, a technology that could scale to all global demand, that was baseload, urban appropriate, 24 hours, not intermittent, required no additional storage, and could be scaled, you know, not only to meet global demand, not only to, you know, meet global demand at the end of the century, meeting all the millennium goals, but to do that 7 times over. Right? That's the scale we're talking about.

You know, we can build these very large, you know, satellite solar farms in space, beam the energy down to the point of need, you know, just bypass all that expensive infrastructure for power cables and cooling water, you know, and allow development, you know, at a much, you know, greater scale.

Well, today, right on Saturday, the Air Force is launching on its X 37 spaceplane the first ever custom piece of solar power satellite hardware, which is a subcomponent that, you know, gathers solar energy on one side of the panel, and on the other side, you know, converts it to, to radio frequency for wireless power transmission, you know, that that's the Space Force taking leadership on that, and they've got additional funding through Air Force Research Laboratory to develop the technology, you know, even further.

And this is technology that's been bypassed by NASA, bypassed by the DOE for whatever cultural reasons. But, you know, right now, you know, for greens who care about planet Earth, right, who's delivering the goods for you? It's the space force. Yeah, I, I I I love that And, Jim, Jim Strickland did a podcast with us, and he went over his the conceptual side of solar power space solar power, space solar satellites, and he's been talking about for years.

Then he went over the technology behind a lot of these types of tech, these types of initiatives. The I also like the idea, and then we'll go on to the last one. What is the ultimate dream force for you? What is the ultimate? Like, how would it operate if you had to build it? So I'm gonna go back to Dreamforce. Well, I think it would be one that started from, you know, the the same broad vision of, you know, what is the strategy that makes the US worthy of the title, you know, global leader?

You know, how does that, you know, how do we make that happen in a way that's interactive and supportive of the expansion of human activity, you know, into space, of economic activity into space that benefits the globe, and and because it's delivering global benefits, keeps the United States, you know, as the legitimate leader and allows the United States to to, you know, prosper as a result of that.

You know, and it's one that looks directly at the private sector as a as a partner in creating this ecosystem, you know, not just as a as a resource, you know, to you know, for purely military. You know, I I wanna I would like a space force that's running away that questions every investment with regard to its externalities for creating long term sustainable and and scalable commerce. Would you, leadership wise, do it differently?

The you know, leadership is is a function of what people who are given that opportunity choose to do. Right? You know, we we certainly had people with that very broad vision that were, you know, championing the Space Force early and, you know, and would have been, you know, I think very powerful advocates, you know, of the sort of Space Force, you know, that I'm talking about. But for whatever reason, they were, you know, they were not selected, you know, for that position.

So, you know, it, it's a, you know, at this point it's a question of, you know, growing into the shoes, right? Growing out of the, you know, the shoes of, you know, of, you know, what the Space Force started as, and realizing, you know, it's kinda like this. Right? You know, you're you also mentioned that, hey. The Space Force starts, you know, with this great continuity with the air force.

But in many ways, that would be kind of like, you know, if if after I created NASA to beat the Russians to the moon, and I asked somebody, well, what's NASA all about? And you said, well, these are the activities that NACA does. Right? There's a lot of continuity with NACA, and this is what what NACA is doing currently, right? What's important about the Space Force to me isn't what it's doing, it's what it's going to do.

You know, the reason to create a Space Force wasn't to continue doing what we've always been doing. It is to enable doing a huge number of things that we have never done. I I do agree it's about the future that we're we're looking to create. The I think and this is a a lesson that I learned the hard way many times in NASA for well, let me stop. I think that the organizations such as one such as NASA have had their hands tied in many respects where, for example, NASA cannot market.

They they're not allowed to market by their doctrine. They cannot say they've built, they've grown, they've developed, they deliver. And a bad word, the world or humanity doesn't understand some of the contributions that the participation of Global Society or NASA or Collaborative Ventures have delivered. So they can't say, well, with with the Russians, we did this amazing thing, and you should hear about it.

Should the Space Force be less constricted also to show the other side of what the Space Force is supposed to be delivering? Because without this conversation, without you and I sitting down you and me sitting down today, I would not have thought of it in this way at all. You know, I I don't remember coming up against a problem where we were externally limited from telling our story, it could be that I'm just not, you know, aware of it.

But, you know, to me, the problem was always internal, that for whatever reason, you know, organizational incentives had made, in my view, military leadership too timid to speak about anything but the most mundane things that were in their lane. And I think that the reason why that happened because it wasn't always that way. You know, we used to have this very, very vibrant, you know, debate, with these fiery generals, you know, who, you know, disagreed on things.

And part of it, I think, was that, first of all, the army and the navy were separate departments that were in competition, and they were not unified under a, you know, a common department of defense that could keep them in line, and enforce group think. The second thing was that when the air force was young, you know, this hadn't really solidified yet, and it was scrappy, and it really wanted its independence, and it wanted it was ambitious about mission space. It was ambitious about resources.

And in fact, it it ended up getting the lion's share of the resources. And, you know, under Eisenhower, you know, he would play favorites, so the services had to really compete.

Well, what seems to have happened, you know, is that as the as we formed this unified department of defense, in order to kind of, maintain itself against the the broader civilian control in the in the Department of Defense, such as McNamara, the generals all banded together in this, you know, cooperate, you know, get along, collegial manner.

And so this extremely vibrant and useful diversity of views that we had before jointness, you know, has been, you know, replaced by, you know, a much more collegial, you stay in your lane, I'll stay in my lane. And so, you know, Arnold, when he was the first chief of staff of the air force, he he he felt at liberty to speak about, you know, the the larger air faring needs, you know, what civilian stuff would do. This is pre FAA. You know?

So there was a very strong hand by the military in, you know, shaping, you know, US policy and foreign policy with regard to aviation. And, you know, now, you know, it really feels as if if it isn't commenting on something operational or a military system, you know, and, you know, it there is a timidity to provide best military advice on grander designs and strategy in any kind of public forum, which I think is unfortunate, you know, for the for the nation.

And I and the other problem is that because that doesn't happen in public, it similarly conditions all the younger officers to be to think that that's not their job in their lane to to think larger and broader. So there's a you know, it it it was a constant frustration for me, you know, initially when I would be educating, you know, students, because I was an instructor of of joint warfare, was that, you know, hey. You know, it isn't just about, you know, planning for fighting.

You know, there's planning for shaping. There's planning for force structure. There's planning for industrial base. You know, the, you know, there's competitive economic planning, and, you know, I would get this sort of deer in the headlights look of, like, you know, what are you what are you talking about? You know, that's not my job, that's not my lane. I signed up for the military. I didn't sign up for all this other garbage. Well, it isn't so much No.

I I don't think it is garbage, but in their head, it's like that I'm not in business. I'm in the military. And what you're doing is you just you expanded their vision very quickly that there's more to the more to the purpose of the role of the air force or military, which I think is brilliant.

So, you know, anyway, the we have we have some interesting internal institutional problems to to fight to get back, you know, what I think, you know, a colleague of mine talks about sort of the the tyranny of the joint vision. There is a lot of goodness in terms of establishing the Department of Defense and a common system and going after the ability of forces that weren't built to inter interoperate to to interoperate. Right?

But this same, you know, it's created a monoculture that, you know, I think is problematic. You know, I once heard a senior civilian tell me, you know, that he felt like they were in a very uncomfortable position, that the that what he wanted was a bunch of military folk that were, you know, like aggressive dogs on leashes that he had to hold back and say, no. No. No. That's not a good idea. We shouldn't do that. Right?

But what he found was that, you know, he felt like he was, as the civilian, always having to kind of push them from behind to, you know, to to come up with aggressive ideas. And that that I don't think is a healthy, I I had that I had that same thing working with the military. I was so surprised at how cordial, how the the the mistaken guy that their their true north was was that everybody had to get along in the room.

And ideas come from sometimes conflict, pushing the limits, And I've often said to legal in even commerce or nonmilitary, I've had to say to people who are legally oriented or people who are HR oriented, no one in the room is going to do what we're saying. What they're doing is they're flexing their muscle to see opportunities, and then we bring it back, and we find out where there are those opportunities that work.

And I was very surprised in my work with the military, How I had to push them more than they were able to have me say, wow, hadn't thought about that. You know, I would say that that I I had that experience a lot. And, you know, I I had the experience of coming across civilian consultants that were way more creative and hawkish, you know, in the room many, many times, you know, when I was the chief of future technology for the Air Force, the and sort of the chief futurist.

The you know, the it's interesting, but, like, right now, and in particular, the air force is extremely collegial. And, I mean, you can see this collegial nature. Like, there was just one of the Space Force leaders were talking, you know, very, very recently saying that, you know, well, you know, in terms of, like, moving over stuff to the Space Force, we we don't wanna break the Army, we don't wanna break the Navy, we don't wanna break the Air Force. You know?

And on one level, you know, I I I think that's a sane and and reasonable thing to say, but on another level, absolutely you do. You know, you want to break everything and agglomerate those resources into what you and your ideology believes is the optimal organization for the nation, you know, and and the others and their problems, you know, are are theirs to solve. You know? And And if we don't have that level of aggressiveness, right, where you get a lot of things from good atmospherics, right?

That's true. But at the same time, you benefit so much from competition and conflict and inter service competition and conflict. And and I I wouldn't want my Space Force to take a timid position. Right? I would want them to be arguing to the American public that they deserve a much larger share of the budget and it should be taken from the other services because they can't do as much for the nation.

And I wanna hear the same thing from the navy and from the air force, and then we'll let, you know, the adults, you know, above their level decide. And, yes, I agree. And that's where I was kind of pushing towards this dream force because if I was going to sit down at the head of the table, if this was my role to take over the Space Force, I would sit down, I would have a full fledged plan of what I planned on creating. I would also in my head, I would ask everybody where they think it would go.

I'd fill up whiteboards around an entire room for days days, if not months, and then pick the optimum position and say, this is what we're going to build. This is the future dream force, Space Force. And our role is to build it and to let the air force do the same for them. They've got new guidelines. They're no longer the Space Force. That is not their that that's not their destiny. So let them build the optimum position that they should hold within is it the 5? Their 5 forces?

Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Space Force. So I would say that would be the role. That's why I was asking what is your optimum dream for us? Was it By the way, I love your methodology because that's essentially exactly what we did over 3 years of Space Horizons.

Lots of whiteboards, lots of blue sky thinking, lots of interaction, you know, with brilliant people from the private sector and others and, you know, mapping out different scenarios and, you know, what happens here, what happens there. And, you know, at the end of it, you know, we had a complete political agenda, you know, long before this became on, you know, the president or chairman Rogers', you know, agenda. Right?

We we had it in our mind, you know, what it should look like, you know, enormous number of things. Right? What the legislation should look like. But it will take a while for that I mean, one of the things, you know, David, that I would say that, you know, you've probably come across the distinctions between, you know, formal authority and and leadership that is, you know, based on authority, and then leadership that, you know, is sort of emergent. Right?

Mhmm. And, you know, and thought leadership. And what I've noticed about leadership and strategy in general, right, Is that and and this would be, you know, if there if there's any young people in any bureaucracy, whether it be corporate or, you know, the government or the military, here's some advice that I would share. I'm sure you know this very well. We'll say. Strategy happens where it happens. It's like bubbles that happen in a beer mug.

And you have to be delighted, and you have to shape and facilitate and work, you know, with that at whatever level you are. But if you think, if you were a cog in the machine, and you assume that somebody above you is smarter, wiser, more perceptive, and you just need to wait for them to give you guidance for what you already see is required, right, you are fooling yourselves. You have to, at whatever level you're at, if you've got the insight and strategy, you have to push that uphill.

The system's not designed to take that. It does not like that. It will resist that. But don't believe that just because people are higher in the hierarchy, that they have some magical vantage viewpoint that you don't. It is a duty incumbent upon people at every level to share strategic insight. The yeah. And I I completely agree. It's, we could have a full hour or 2 on this alone.

How do you get an individual to have the other tools that are necessary for them to be able to to politically, to be psychologically, to deliver the sales message, to articulate the story so that there is buy in. And too often, the lack of skills being taught are how to defend their position, how to be able to understand what no means and what yes means. And it's when I worked with the military, I remember one scenario. I think I wrote about it in the book.

I said, this one guy came to me, and he said and he was in innovation. That was his department. He was in product development. And he said, we don't have enough man hours to be able to do all the projects we've been getting. We are inundated. We cannot keep up. We do not have the the the means to be able to facilitate them. And I looked at him and I said, how are you changing this? Well, we're doing this. And the answers were very, they were on quicksand. So I said, why don't you try this?

Call in your commander. Flatter him. Say, you are one of the people I respect more than anybody in the military, and I would like to learn from you. I've got projects, and I wanna know how you would address prioritizing them so I can understand how to prioritize them, because you've obviously done this before. But you do it in in a professional way. And I say professional meaning in a way that someone else will buy it, not that it has to be professional like you're standing at at attention.

And I said, I'm gonna guarantee you what's gonna happen. He's gonna look at you and say, sure. Because he's gonna be impressed that you came to him, and you're going to lay out what's going on. And he's gonna say, oh my god, get rid of this. We're not doing this. We're not doing this. Cut this out. Put the priority here. Move this here. Move this there. And I said, 25% of your projects will disappear before you know it. Because they don't even know you're working on them.

And he said, well, I'll try it. Let me see. Like, a week later, he called me back. He said, oh my god. He ripped to shreds half the things we're working on because they had been forgotten. They were no longer a priority. There were sequences. And when he was done, he took the mantle, he took the the sword and said, I'll take care of this. You just do your job. Do what needs to be done. But those things aren't taught.

And this this conversation, and I'm assuming because we've touched on a lot of militaries do more than fight wars, we've touched on a lot. So there's probably something there you wanna add. I think what we've done here, at least in my mind's eye, for me, anybody listening to, but for me, is you've given me an expansive view of something that I thought I had a good handle on. And there were many points that you brought up that I was saying to myself, okay.

First of all, you articulated it extremely well. And second, the way in which you delivered it allowed me to explore, And I loved it. I mean, I I've I've, it was 2017 you and I met. And I think I asked you not long after that to be on the program. And I'm glad you reached out to me saying you're ready now. It's just, like, what? Where did this come from? You should if you saw my face, you'd be surprised how how I reacted. It was like, oh my god. And this was fantastic.

This is not where I expected it to go. And I I and I'll share with the people listening just for the sake of them understanding. I never see the outline. I never see what the top the the components are. I only see a title that we come up with. So I'm often walking into murky water. I have a direction that I feel, but I'm not right most of the time.

And in this case, this was absolutely phenomenal to expand that thinking of the purposes of the dimensionality of the the complexity of a military, a military, not a US military, a military in its role within the constructs of, more than what we see. It's probably the easiest way for me to say. So I this is fabulous. Fabulous. Do you have anything to add, by the way? I'm not gonna say do you have anything to add more of militaries to more than fight wars?

Yeah. Yeah. I'll I'll I'll I wanted to respond to, you know, your your earlier, you know. So I completely agree with you. So, you know, when in terms of, like, providing people with the tools, you know, this was something that became, you know, apparent to me that, you know, particularly in the military, I imagine this is probably the same in most bureaucracies. Right?

You start off at this lower level where you are encouraged to learn the rules and to follow the rules, and and the world really does look like a hierarchy. You know, you've got a boss, he's got a boss, everything, you know, but as you move up, you get to a certain level where most of what you do is not directly and easily resolvable hierarchically. Even if it could be, the bandwidth isn't there, so everything you do becomes much more political.

And by political, I mean the sense that people have different values, you know, for how they want to harness the the collective resources, and that and there's no adjudication function other than, you know, consensus agreement or some level of coercion and force. And and that requires an entirely different skill set. Mhmm. You know, that that hasn't been taught in any way at the lower levels, and, you know, it it requires, you know, networking and influencing skill sets.

Yeah. And that was something I really enjoyed. But one of the things that has always been apparent to me is the self similarity of problems or, that exist at, like, all levels. So, you know, one of the things is like strategy, like, strategy exists at every single level that, you know, you could be at. And this notion, you know, that that you said, like, what are you doing to change the situation? What are you doing to change the rules under which you're operating? Right?

Is really one of the most fundamental things that we we don't teach people, or we don't start. People tend to want or have been socialized to be comfortable with well structured problems, and so it doesn't occur to them that, you know, if I don't like this game I can just extend and build the chess set this way, you know, or I can alter the rules, or maybe I'll just go over and carve myself another queen.

So, you know, the idea that you can structure reality, and there's a really interesting underutilized term by a scholar whose last name was Riker called 'hairsthetics.' And 'hairsthetics' I think he defined, you know, I'm paraphrasing slightly, is structuring the system to win and continue winning.

And when we talk about the context of the Space Force and what's globally, or you know, what's happening between the U. S. And China, right, it's a heresthetic problem, where each side is trying to structure the fundamental rules and position of the system to give them strategic advantage to continue winning, and space forces are just one tool that allows that structuring of the environment in the system.

Completely agree, and I I go back to captain Kirk in Star Trek and changing the computer game simulation so that Exactly. When. And continually winning was also he continually won because he became the captain of the enterprise. So he had the ability to continually do what he was looking to accomplish. So, yeah, I I wish they had used that word, hair aesthetics, in the program. It would have helped a lot. So I mean, I'm along that line. Right?

I mean, this is this is something for I think, you know, I I would you know, it's important to empower, you know, people. You're talking about, you know, empowering this this individual who is frustrated. Well, you know, you can't start from the the strategist doesn't start from the position that these are my pieces, and those are the other guy's pieces, and that's the board. The strategist starts from there. He looks at it, and he says, I own all the pieces.

I can manipulate the other guys' pieces, I can structure the underlying, you know, rule set. So, you know, when I encountered problems for what I wanted to do, you know, I kept bumping up against the fact that I didn't have a Space Force. So I just decided it was time to to, you know, create the political constituency and get one. And it's the same thing, right? I'm frustrated by the fact that we don't have settlement yet in law. You know, I'm working to change that.

I wanted to see us have property rights, you know, enshrined, worked on that, and I want to see certain things reflected in the Space Force mission. And I'm working to change all those rules. And, you know, I started doing that from a very low level.

So I really think that it's just important for it's an important insight that your power in a system really isn't conditioned on your job title or position, that there are routes to influence and routes to change the, you know, the game, you know, that are available to people who, you know, want to put in the extra effort. I'll add not only the extra effort, but the ability to circumvent that effort. Maybe do it in 1 tenth at a time by leveraging something.

Something in their in in their space that allows that to happen. You can you could talk to 10 people and try to get everybody to agree, or you could talk to the boss. That's right. So much Then then everything else disappears. And I actually had that in the military. I had one guy for 2 years trying to get everybody to agree, having separate meetings, having this and that. And I said, how can we get this done in a day? And he looked at me. He said, what do you mean?

I said, you've been talking to people for 2 years. I want it done in a day. And he looked at me, and I said he he said it. He said, well, I could talk to the commander. I said, why don't you just do that? Exactly. You know, sometimes though, it's not you that has to talk to the commander. You know, sometimes it's his peer that needs to talk to What what I meant was we his boss. We had to get the right person to make the move, and I use a different terminology. Wasn't gonna go into it all right.

Yes. I agree. Somehow, you have to influence that one person to make that decision so all 10 of them disappear. The dominoes would have fallen. And that's a great analogy because bureaucracies are built like domino, you know, trains. You know, they're they're we're like many, many cogs that turn from a single master cog, you know, at the top, or like a puppeteer, right?

Yeah. To command a bureaucracy, you have to capture what's at the top, and there are many, you know, strategies that are available to actors that that want to do that, but they have to be taught, and and in many times, you have to overcome, you know, cultural inhibitions that people have to doing that, because they think, oh, that's not legitimate. I can't or shouldn't do that. And it usually takes some education to show that everybody else who's successful is playing that game, you know.

Not easy not easy for people to see. Not easy for people to see. I I I've had these conversations and going this is all to me and space and every and space, the project Moon Hut. I've had these conversations recently and a woman today said she is in the legal side, we're talking about space and she was talking about making change and I said, let me ask you a simple question, how long are you married? She said, yes, 25 years. I said, have you changed him?

And she kinda got it, and I said, well, let's make it a little easier for you. You're a woman. How many times in your life, how you talk to men, and have you said to them, you will never understand until you're a woman. Meaning, inside of you, you're saying there's hormonal, there's shape, there's body, there's all periods, there's all sorts of things, and you will never understand me unless you are me. And I said, so you have to come to the conclusion, was my summary to her.

Well, I gave her a few other examples, but my summary to her was that it's not that everybody doesn't want to see. It's that it takes time, effort, and energy. It takes a lot to sometimes move that individual to at least accept, perceive, or value that decision, and that's your role. It doesn't just happen. You cannot expect everybody to come to your side. That's the role when you're paid to think. That's your job. And, she got it.

So I've gotta say, Peter, this, this was fan this is was fantastic. I I feel that I got to know a lot about you in the way in which you framed certain components, and I and I love the angle in which you took many of the thoughts that I was thinking about before I got there. It is I'm not trying to come up with a question to kinda end the podcast. I'm my mind says, is there something that you wish you had told me that you hadn't shared with me yet?

No. I mean, this is a good place, I think, to end and and, you know, my last point, you know, most of it's already been covered, but, you know, the the the key point I would say is that military is due to a lot more than fight wars. They're this deep reserve of societal strength that, you know, flexes in response to a number of contingencies.

Conflicts rare and episodic, but catastrophes happen all the time, and that's when you need this organized exertion of, communication, transportation, energy, and physical transformation.

And so the militaries are composed of people, they don't like to risk their lives you know, unnecessarily, so they want to take a broader view, they enjoy helping others in humanitarian operations, so you are going to see military airlifts helping earthquakes, you know, the Army helping with, Army Corps of Engineers with flood relief, you know, you see military professionals helping with Ebola and now COVID nineteen.

I think when we met, I was talking about a colleague's idea to, a military colleague's idea to put a doomsday seed vault on the moon. Mhmm. And of course, you know, many of us, you know, the military has been the chief proponent of space solar power for more than a decade.

So because, you know, militaries have to worry about these highly stressing cases of transportation, communication, energy manufacturing, those technological contributions like GPS, Internet, rail, jet engines, steamships, right, they're very far reaching.

And so, you know, space is exceptionally challenging as an environment, and to have a dedicated military space force that is going to try to advance those things is going to end up having a profound and profoundly positive impact, you know, on the quality of life for probably every citizen of the planet. Well, fantastic. That said, I'm going to say for everybody who's taking the time out to listen to this podcast to listen in. I thank you.

I do hope that you learned something today that will make a especially that it will make a difference in your life, the lives of others, the way you perceive and move your life forward. The age of infinite, infinite possibilities, infinite resources, our podcast is part of the Project Moon HUT Foundation's initiative to change how we live on Earth for all species.

And I'm hoping that today's episode, which was eye opening to me, was just as eye opening to you so that we can achieve these desired outcomes. Peter, is there a single best way to connect with you? LinkedIn is probably the best place. I've got a profile, and it's easy to contact me there. So it's Peter g a r r e t s o n. That's correct. And for me, David Goldsmith, I would love to connect with you also. You can reach me at [email protected]. Instagram, I'm at mister David Goldsmith.

We've got connect on Twitter at at project moonhot or at goldsmith. We have a YouTube channel we just put up. It's Project Moon Hut. You can see our logo, our our image there. So you could see there's just 2 videos at the present time. We just move them over. And that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite podcast series. We are connected to the Project Moon Hut Foundation.

And our objective, our desired outcome is to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moonhot, to the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem. And then to use those paradigm shifting thinking and innovations we create, and turn them back on earth to change how we live on earth for all species. And today, we have an, an amazing topic. The the topic is the promise of the Space Force for long term human abundance and security.

And we have Peter Gerritsen on the line. How are you, Peter? I'm doing great, David. Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. I've I've got to share that you and I met at the National Space Society event. I believe it was in California. And you were on stage representing at that time the US Air Force, and I remember watching you. You were you were very military. Your answers were very military for all sorts of reasons, and your answers were cool. They were interesting.

So when you threw this topic out to me, the promise of Space Force for long term human abundance and security, had to say to myself, oh, wow. Should we? Should we not? And here we are. So I again, this is gonna be fun. So for everybody, Peter has, been part of the air force. He is no longer. He's doing strategy work. He while he was in the air force, he ran the Air University Space Horizons Task Force, the, the America's think tank for space.

And he's got, ideas that I think would be enjoyable or interesting, depending on how you look at it, to explore. So Peter, you have an outline or bullet points for us? I do. You wanna give them to me? Alright. So the first bullet point is humanity and life have a bright future if the second one Wait. Wait. Humanity? Humanity and life have a bright future if okay. Dot. Dot. Second? Yep. The second is the Space Force will be an accelerant for prosperity.

Okay. You you had to make long ones, didn't you? They're they're much longer than that. I'm giving you the short one. Space force for accelerant for humanity? Prosperity. Prosperity. Yep. So I'm gonna just shorten these so that we can, you you the writing is a little bit easier. Okay? So then we'll call the second one, Accelerant of Prosperity 2. Yep. Number 3. Then we'll talk about long term security. Long term security. Yep. And we'll talk security of liberty. Security of liberty.

Okay. Then then I'll make the case that the Space Force will be a force for liberty. Okay. Next. Then I'll talk about the ultimate green force. Alright. And the next? Finally, militaries do more than fight wars. Alright. Fight wars. Interesting way to end. So I'm excited. I let's start with the first one. Humanity and life have a bright future if okay. Where are you taking me? So, you know, I think I'd probably start from very similar concerns that that motivated you toward project Moon Hut.

You know, it seems to me like at our current level, there's a diversity of threats to our our habitat, to our fellow species, to, you know, us, as a polity, that's cohesive and gives the kind of freedom for development that people should have and enjoy, and the level of prosperity that many citizens of the world do not enjoy.

And it certainly seems that upon decades now of inspection, that space really offers the solution, not not necessarily the ultimate solution to all our problems, but certainly approximate solution to almost all of the truly compelling, resource and scarcity problems and habitat problems on planet Earth. And so, you know, if we are able to survive against nature, because nature has a tremendous array of threats that they can throw at not just humanity, but our biosphere.

And if we are able to make use of the vast infinite wealth and resources of space, then we face this incredible possibility, this this prosperity, and when I say prosperity, I mean in the not in the narrow acquisitive sense, but in the quality of life sense that enables a true diversity and flourishing and an even grander destiny, which is to be the carriers of life to dead worlds, to expand where life is so that it's not just on one planet, to expand where intelligence is, so that there is greater experience, rare way by which the universe can experience itself.

So so the I guess, maybe you I know you, but I don't know that well. You said that it offers the solution almost all resource and scarcity on earth. Can you tell me what what do you when you say that sentence, or as you said it, what did you see out there? Alright.

So, you know, like you, I've been privileged to, you know, grow up in a country that offered me a great deal of individual liberty and freedom, but have the ability to, and the opportunity to travel and live in other cultures and spaces. And, you know, one of one of the things that taught me early on was that the United States really had some secret sauce. Now later on, I realized that everybody else had figured out and was using that secret sauce.

But the other thing, you know, as I traveled to more and more places, you realize that not everybody enjoys the the standard of living, that that makes, you know, that removes from your consideration extremely basic constraints on who you can be. And, you know, I mean, honestly, I'm very contempt right now. I I live in a climate controlled space where I have enough resources to get what I want, you know, the energy to have to see to my sustenance of my health.

And those are things that I would like to see every human being have. Plenty of energy, clean water, enough access to, you know, healthy calories and and food. No need to fight over the basics of existence. And when you say, what did I see out there?

The first thing that you see is that the the Earth is not and has never been a a closed system, that we, you know, freely take in energy from the sun, and that there is a vast ability to directly harness, solar power in space, beam it as 24 hour power on a scale that scales to all global civilization. Yeah. And if you have abundant power, you can scale, you know, global domestic product scales directly with energy usage.

And if you have clean power, green power, then you're then that doesn't come at the expense, of harming the atmospheric gas compositions and climate that a combustion economy, brings with it. And if you've got abundant power, it's easy to, to convert or, to either suck water from the sky or to convert it from salt water. And if you've got abundant power and water, then agriculture, you know, is easy.

Transportation need not be polluting, and so, you know, that future of an entire, you know, 55 terawatt global green energy system is clearly within our technological, you know, reach if we want it to be. So, it's interesting your answer because I actually love it. You I jumped, and it's my fault.

I jumped that you saw, Muth being Moon being terraformed or Mars being terraformed and and that millions of people are living, which I've heard all these stories and we still don't have clean water in certain countries in the world. So do are when you think in your own mind's eye, when we're talking, are you thinking about in near when I say near earth, it could be moon closeness, not 2 years away flying. Are you thinking that that's the space in which we should live?

Is that's the way you see it? Or is it is it a bigger picture? Is it a different picture? At least in the, let's say, the next 50 years. Well, let me answer that question first, and then I'll scope it back to your time scale. I mean, in in my view, we do not know, we, in fact, we have no, hopeful evidence that life exists anywhere else other than on this single pale blue dot. I agree. Right? Now, probably that seems incredible, absolutely incredible, right?

But as long as that appears to be the evidence we have, then this is the one place that all of life and all of intelligence can be extinguished if it is not adequately managed and grown. The destiny of of life and intelligence that exists here on planet Earth is to fill the entire galaxy, every star, to make every dead world alive, and to fill the entire lighted universe with life. Where, where will, where could we get in 50 years?

You know, in 50 years, although I think, you know, settlement and expansion of life habitat is basically the the the largest commission for earth life. Mhmm. You know, the the first thing you've got to do is to lock in the long term security and full warranty of planet Earth. So so it's taking care of your home first. You've gotta take care of your home first, but you can't really take care of your home at the scale that you want to in the way you want to if you can't utilize space resources.

So And I I completely agree. The reason I asked that was the the way in which you were giving humanity and life. You you had some broad statements in there. And I you and I haven't had this conversation, so I wanted to know what was your framework because you could have gone anywhere with that. And I like your answers because we use it's the 50 year anniversary of, the Apollo. And 50 years from now, if we use the same timeline, we might not even be at a low Earth orbit.

So the I I like that it to me, in my opinion, that it was more realistic expectation than sometimes I hear other people delivering. So I just wanted to get a a context, so I know I kinda threw you off a little bit here with such a strong question. And then there was one other that you said that, the Nature at Over Biosphere, the Gradular Destiny, Deadwoods. Some of them will probably hit on otherwise, so that's that's good.

This helps me a lot because now I know your mindset, which helps me to be able to understand what you're saying. So you can continue on, Asaria, with Humanity, Life, A Bright Future, if Right. So I mean, you've we've got to protect, you know, the root, the home world, even as we attempt to spread, you know, the children of earth to, you know, to other places, such that if something were to happen to the earth, life and intelligence and our, and the seeds of our culture would still continue.

And so that makes, you know, the, you know, the overall dreams of people, you know, like Elon Musk important, you know, not in the sense that, you know, it's not a safety valve even for those people, right? It's a, it's a safety for the project of life, such that, you know, if one of us, either one was to suffer a catastrophe, there would be another center of life to continue. And today there is. But It's an amazing cons construct that you just created.

And at the same time, we can't get people to put on a mask in certain parts of the world. So we wanna save we wanna save the children of earth to another part to to to go to other planets. You use the word intelligence and oh, yeah. No. It's it's not real. It's not real. This is COVID won't do anything. So I it's an interesting, I don't know what the word is, but it's an interesting thought as you're saying it.

Okay. Yeah. I agree that the it would be a nice construct to have to be able to to say that the the human species or other species that are brought along with us can survive and propagate throughout the universe, and maybe the klinga what is it? Klingons or the it's not the Klingons. It's the Spock was a Vulcan. Vulcan. The Vulcans will go by CS 2 warp speed, and then they will come down and help us. So I think that's the way it was in Star Trek. We we can hope.

The other possibility is that, you know, they're too much like us, and I think there were civilizations in South America that, you know, would have benefited a lot if they'd had, you know, some some early expansionist thinking to build ships and go explore rather than just wait to be wait to encounter an advanced culture. Okay. So, humanity and life, anything else in terms of our bright future? Right. So, you know, humanity is pretty awfully young, you know, as a species.

We haven't been around anywhere near close to the lifespan of the dinosaurs, and, you know, Earth probably has some, you know, certainly 100 of millions, maybe a 1000000000 years left on its warranty.

But in order for us to make use of that, you know, in a habitat that's friendly to us, you know, we've got to, first of all, you know, fix our energy system so that it is as minimally negatively interacting, you know, with with our system as possible, and secondly, we've got to make sure that the Earth is not going to get hit by an asteroid or comet strike that is going to, you know, force it to reset or extinguish the possibilities of expansion for good, and those those both have to be done from space.

Okay. I would agree. So that I I think that's it on my first point. Okay. So let's go on to 2, which was Space Force will be an accelerant for prosperity. Right. So, you know, the Space Force has a couple of different ways in which it will be an accelerant to that brighter future.

And the first way is that it will be an accelerant by being a a provider of security, and a provider of security for other activities, for commerce, you know, for all the different innovation space that you, you know, you would want. So let let's just let's just step back for a minute. The Space Force is the US's division that has been spun off from the Air Force to become a separate agency, I guess, is that the word? To Service.

Yep. Service to be able to facilitate the United States' position in the world in a variety of different ways. But I would also say, and tell me if I'm wrong, the Space Force has actually been around for quite some time. The United States Air Force has been running the same type of programs just under the Air Force's auspices. Is that somewhat correct?

That's one way of looking at it, but that would kind of be like if you as an entrepreneur did a takeover of another, of the assets of another organization, and gave it a different and broader mission or ambit. So Okay. You were right. I mean, and that actually should have been one of my talking points, which is that the United States has a Space Force. So, you know, at present, it has a tremendous amount of continuity with what the air force was doing under air force space command.

And, and I would say right now, there's a tremendously active debate happening about, you know, what exactly the Space Force is meant to be, where it's meant to go, and I am a, you know, heavy partisan in that debate for a for a broader vision of it. But the but the Space Force is a military service.

It currently it it was originally conceptualized to be a its own department, but, you know, at the moment, it is still a an equal service in stature to the Air Force, but within the Department of the Air Force. And it has basically taken over all rules that facilitate, US interests in in the space. Okay. So I I actually haven't followed it. I I've known about it, and I think it there are many people who use the term space force over the past decade few decades.

So this was just the the rubber not the rubber stamping, that's a bad way to say it. This is the unofficial statement that this would now have and determine their own destiny, their own plans, their own directives over time, so it would be an equal branch of the military. So, you know, what you say is insightful. You know, this comes did not come out of the blue. It did not, you know, just emerge from this administration.

This has been a, you know, more than a 20 year active debate, and, you know, it certainly organizations have some ability to shape their own destiny, and what this provides is an equality of standing, you know, before the bodies of decision, you know, that matter in the United States. So rather than being, you know, very much buried and not directly accessible either to, the White House or to Congress, you know, now the Space Force can be directly cross examined, directly legally addressed.

And and so I would say what's more important isn't that the Space Force can shape its own destiny, but rather that the American polity can directly shape its destiny as a strategic component of its overall approach to what's important. Interesting way to look at it. I had not considered the legalities and positioning of it from that perspective.

I had only looked at it as a another means by which a group of people could facilitate the initiatives that they'd like to institute, and I hadn't thought about it from that angle. Cool. Well, actually, an interesting sidebar here is that while, you know, people make the analogy to the Air Force. Well, the Air Force internally was very much pushing for its own independence.

The Space Force, or Space Force advocates, there were certainly some in the 2000 era pushing for independence, but they were sort of culturally wiped off the map when they lost that battle.

And this round of Space Force was actually fought by the space professionals who did not want their own service, and it was very much Congress and the president that said no, we have a larger strategic picture, we're not getting enough out of the current organizational construct, we're going to take the leadership to fix an organizational problem that the DOD just doesn't seem able to address. Now that you're out, what did you think?

Oh, I was wholly in favor of the need for US Space Force for a multitude of reasons. The the among the largest was that space while space was subordinated within the air force, People looked at it as a support to, terrestrial war fighting, and they did not look at the broader needs of space itself as a domain and its expansion and its economic expansion.

And and the bet that I made was that once space was liberated from that constraining context, a diversity of forces, commercial, congressional, would start to shape the space force to think about space much more like a navy thinks about the ocean. You'll have to you'll have to describe what that means. Alright. That's actually in my talking point. So we Okay. So we can go over it whenever you'd like. Yep. Or now, whatever.

It's just an interesting even just to say that because I have not looked at navy allows commerce to happen. That's a big part of it is whoever run the seas tends to be able to allow commerce to happen globally. They protect people who can't be protected, under their control or not. So there's a variety of yet it still seems to me when you think of the US Navy or the British Navy or the Chinese Navy or any of the navies that are out there that there's a large part of the military component.

So it's interesting, that angle. That's right. But, Ellen, let's just touch on this now because it this is a fair, you know, point. Right? So every military service has a particular way of looking at and approaching the world and a particular theory of conflict and victory, you know, that that determines basically everything about their organization and how they approach problems. And, you know, they're not the same.

They're they're distinct. Well, Air Force views of things are very much conditioned by the perspective, that an airplane gives you and the kind of operation that an airplane gives you. So it's downward looking, it's terrestrially focused, you know, it enjoys the ability to not have to deal with the difficulties of, you know, geography and terrain. It can fly above those. It has speed. It has this vantage point. Right?

And, you know, it it believes that it can, you know, go over obstacles to strike, you know, direct strategic targets. And it can and its primary way of relating to the world is through verticality. It thinks about higher and lower. And, you know, the Air Force took an early leadership in space because it was thinking vertically, and it wanted to get higher and higher to get a better and better vantage point. And, and it advanced an awful lot of important things in space that way.

But verticality is only one way to see space power. And if you look at navies, right, navies think much more horizontally. They think about the lines of commerce between things. So a space force need not be terrestrially focused or have a global consciousness. Right? It might have an inter global consciousness. It might see space as the sea. Air forces also don't stay resident in the air, right? There's actually nothing that I can think of that is of value. We don't have mines in the sky.

You know, we don't, you know, there aren't tourist resorts in the sky. You sortie to the domain, and you come back down, usually in a matter of hours. Yep. Whereas, you know, the Navy stays resident. Right? There are things of value on and in the sea. You are protecting commerce. Air forces don't really protect air commerce for the most part. You know, they we don't have convoys where fighters are escorting, you know, FedEx airplanes. Mhmm. So it conditions a different way of thinking.

Air power is very episodic, it's very theater based, it, you know, it's very, you know, sort of aggressive in the opening phases of the war, it's very direct in terms of, you know, striking or strategic bombing. None of those things necessarily translate as the most important ways of seeing space.

But naval power, you know, which sees the importance of, you know, overseas possessions, as centers of commerce, of of supporting and supplying commerce, of setting up, you know, important basing for commerce, of, you know, rescuing people in need of counter piracy. This is a much broader conception, and really the navy's primary value is, you know, in providing that security and presence in peacetime.

You know, it does it does it can play roles in war, but I don't think most people would think that the primary value of the US Navy is in warfare. It it has persistent daily effects that enable commerce and wealth for everybody. It's my take would have I think I even started by saying it allows commerce to happen. You've you expanded it and interestingly to what I would have tossed under some of those roles, and I and I've been on the in the in the helicopters and things.

I'm trying to think what's Coast Guard? Coast Guard. Yes. I was down at the base in Florida, and, I forgot to know where it was in Florida. But, yes, the coast guard, they go out and they actually can take over a naval ship if it's involved in rescue and controls, and and very, very synergistic way of working together to be able to safeguard the oceans. And in fact, this is, you know, this is an active ideological struggle at the moment.

So many of us, you know, and and you might identify us as what's called the the blue water school of space power, you know, which is an analogy to navies. So you have brown water theories of naval power, which basically assume that the primary role of the navy is to transport the army along the coast, and they're primarily concerned with coastal.

And then you have blue water theories of of, you know, meaning the deep blue sea, where you have these ocean capable vessels that secure commerce and open and expand, the realm of commerce.

Well, most blue water thinkers on space power also think that the space force really should look in a lot of ways like the coast guard, not in the sense that this is our coast, but in the sense that coast guards have important roles in safety of navigation, which by the way, so does the Army Corps of Engineers, but they have important roles in safety of navigation, which the Space Force already does through GPS, important, and in avoiding traffic collisions.

They have important roles in law enforcement, of American vessels in safety navigation, sorry, safety of vessels, such as, you know, making sure that cruise ships are seaworthy. They, you know, do counter contraband operations, counter piracy operations, you know, search and rescue. So there are this they they maintain navigational aids.

And in particular, like their legal authorities to, you know, regulate and ensure compliance with, you know, maritime control, are things that probably make a lot of sense to have in a space force that is conceived of in this manner. Now, other thinkers, you know, the Brownwater thinkers, want to push away anything that is not core war fighting, and trying to give that to to somebody else, so that they can focus on a on a much more narrow set of space control issues.

But, you know, if we wanted that, we would not have pushed to have a independent space force. We would have just kept things as they were, you know, as a niche capability within the air force. It's a it's an interesting. I've never thought about it this way, and you're making my whole this is great because I'm thinking about space differently. I don't know.

Bill Baumgartner was a he ran the commander of the 7th, what is it, 7th fleet, 7th, coast guard district, which is one of the largest, I think, in the world. He gave me some insight also, and you you tapped on to all of them. The law enforcement safety of vessels, count contraband, tourists, fleet the the vessels being safe, the in insurance of compliance across the board.

So its role was very surprising to me that the coast guard had so many, because maybe the word is humanistic, activities under their belt, where it was almost as if the navy had outsourced it. We're gonna be the navy, and we're gonna give all of these things that really are of extreme value to humanity, we're gonna make sure we have a unit of that too. And saving people out at sea when there's a boat that tips over.

Those are things that I would have thought the navy would have done, but it's interesting that there's a split. And now if I look at space and I look at it at this deep blue and the possibilities of being lost in space, I hate to use a movie title, but being lost in space or stranded or or hurt or a vessel is not prepared, those are things that we would, as humans, most likely would like to see out there in in our space environment.

Yep. And that brings me to another point in terms of likelihood. Right? There are philosophical reasons why a person might prefer to house those capabilities in a civilian agency. But, those are usually dangerous things. They put people at risk. Anything where you put people at risk, typically we put in a uniform service.

And in terms of resourcing, right, if you're going to be spending money on a Space Force anyway, you know, and it's gonna have agile spacecraft that can do things, manipulate things, right, why would you want that asset just wasted in space doing nothing during, you know, the 99.999999% of the time when they're not fighting a war.

You know, you would want to be able to employ those things, and why would you want to have to build those things again in the Department of Commerce, you know, or in a separate space guard. And especially because we I think it's worth surfing with the biases in human nature.

And one of the biases we have is we may profess to love science, but when it comes to actual spending, the total civilian science budget across the entire United States, government is 70,000,000,000, while our defense budget is 700,000,000,000, 10 times that. So the the ability to sort of leverage and make use of our natural propensity to spend money on our, you know, fear of the other, fear of defense, ends up giving us a much more capable, capacity.

It flexes to much more common contingencies and is very enduring in terms of human infrastructure. So can can answer just because it's in my head, and I wanna make sure I hit on it. I have 2. 1, the Chinese spend about $240,000,000,000 on military annually right now. So are is there any correlation between the way they perceive it and your purse you're saying that? And the second is the sciences. Does DARPA fall under military or under sciences? Okay. So, DARPA falls under military.

And depending on how you break out the total spending on science, you could include military research and DARPA or not. The figure that I gave did not include military research or DARPA. And, I think DARPA is somewhere around 3,000,000,000 of which, like, 80% is discretionary while they pursue amazing things. And they weren't they were always part of the Department of Defense. They weren't always called DARPA.

They, were at various points, and I think they started life as ARPA, as the Advanced Research Projects Agency. And they were also a child of Smutnik in order to, you know, their mandate is never let that kind of strategic surprise happen to the United States. You know, always be ahead in figuring out, you know, what could be coming and and stay ahead and then get out of it. So, you know, they have a very specific mandate. I loved my time at DARPA. What a phenomenal organization.

The it's a and I'll let you get to China in a moment. The DARPA component, I worked with NASEC, National Air and Space Intelligence Center, and I worked with them, and I was surprised at how much research they're doing. It's in the book, in the Paid to Thank. I think you've gotten a copy of it. I actually talk about the fact that in the military, there's tons of work done on research on and development in different units.

So there's new products constantly being created, and DARPA is an amazing, facility just for innovation around the for all sorts of different techs. Yes. And, you know, DARPA had a Tansin, you know, a number of things that ended up being of immense value to all of us, you know, in terms of just basic rockets, in terms of the first satellites.

I was gonna get to this point later on, but, you know, actually, the first satellite image that we had of Earth as a ground ball, you know, was not the 1972 Big Blue Marble. It it was, you know, full decade plus earlier in I think it was TIROS TIROS 1, I think, which was a military weather satellite, which DARPA had had a role in.

Of course, DARPA had immense roles in microprocessors, in the Internet itself, and GPS, so, you know, the footprints of DARPA, you know, reached so far beyond, you know, the military application to these incredibly broad and enabling technologies that enhance our our our life. And I think, you know, the and the DARPA will be is already a, a partner with the Space Force, and I think, you know, the Space Force is just it's gonna accelerate them. Were you under Regina, what's your name? Regina?

No good. Dugan. Yes. I had just left. I was under Tony Tether. Okay. I just thought she'd be a great person to get on the program, so I'm sorry I jumped ahead. What about China? The 260, and I and I I clarify this. When I use that number 260, the Chinese government spends just as much as the US military does on surveillance internally in the country as the America spends on the outside. So there's not it's not just 260,000,000,000.

That's 260,000,000,000 that we know that goes directly to military, but internal surveillance throughout China is one of the most advanced in the world. So how do you look at the the Chinese when you look at being this number 2 in the world in terms of spending?

Well, in my view, you know, the the, you know, China was really the basic driver, you know, that has led to Space Force, you know, as long as the US was, you know, was unchallenged in space, it could afford to basically let space be about water of US strategy. You know, it could allow it to be under resourced. It it could build its systems to be fat, dumb, and happy and, you know, optimized for performance and not have to worry about it as a threat.

It didn't have, you know, the the strongest compelling reason to, you know, do ambitious, projects in space, you know, that capture its energies. But, you know, the United States, it's a pugnacious competitor. You know, if there's nobody to compete with, you know, it gets lazy like a bear and hibernates, you know, but eventually, you know, the United States wakes up and when it perceives that there's, you know, a real competition, it it can really get its head in the game and reinvent itself.

So so That's actually amazing. I had never tied that together, but the the far side of the moon having the plant, the seed germinate or not germinate on the far side of the moon by China probably got people up in an uproar. The shooting of the satellite, I believe they destroyed a satellite. I think those things get people to be concerned. It really, really did. Right? And it and it energized America's concerns on a broad diversity of levels. Right?

The ASAT test, the multiple ASAT tests, you know, the moving the ASAT into operational status, the development of their space doctrine, the development of their own strategic support force, their dedicated space force, you know, all those were prompts to pay more attention to the war fighting component of military space.

The Chinese military controls their entire space program, you know, even the civilian so called civilian facing parts, and those efforts, you know, to, you know, to do traditional sort of NASA like exploration missions energized an entirely, you know, different set of people who were concerned about what that signals for global leadership and what that means if China applies its same behavior as in the South China Sea, the same sort of exclusionary infrastructure aggression, you know, type of behavior, you know, it it energized concerns that we might need to, you know, be present in order to help shape, you know, the domain and and not put ourselves in a position of weakness from where, you know, the those who are sort of on the side of, more political liberty might be excluded.

Mhmm. So, you know, China China because they still have a, you know, their cost of labor is so much more advantageous than ours right now that their dollars go a lot farther. And they're candidly just very, very, you know, good at hierarchical organization.

They're very good about setting timelines and meeting them, and they are really, really, really a serious competitor for the United States in a way that we've never seen in terms of the size of their economy, the size of their talent, in my view, their ability to innovate, their commitment, you know, and their their drive and commitment and clarity of their strategic goals to eclipse the United States as a space power by 2045.

So almost all of the major initiatives that you see the United States taking now, while they make sense, you know, even without China are more or less motivated and accelerated by the the feeling like we need to compete with China on the civil, on the commercial, and in the military space.

And I would add to that, right, that oh, that for the larger set of things that we're talking about, you know, which is prosperity, you know, access to resources, security of the earth from nature, you know, moving our, you know, the seeds of earth life out.

This competition is going to be fantastic for planet Earth and our problems, right, because a race brings out the best energy, we want to one up each other, it it causes us to invest more in the air in in this amazing, you know, area of space where we can find so many solutions. So overall, this is gonna be a very good thing.

Now it's an even better thing, in my view, if at the end of that long, you know, race and exertion, if the United States, you know, comes out in the stronger position because I because it's my view or my prejudice that this whole ecosystem, you know, of, of infinite resources will be better if it also includes political liberty.

And I think that we have very strong indications about how the United States behaves when it's in a position of power that that should give us heart that a United States that prevails as the preeminent power in space will be more inclusive, and and provide a better space for human liberty, than if we are not the power that wins.

And I won't touch on the there's a the underlying political environment today, because we have to look at space as a continuum of multiple leaders through a period of time, And the pendulum swinging in the United States or in, I would not say America is not a complete completely free society just as any of the other democracies in the world are not. Yet over time, if we looked at America or England or any of the others around the world, but there's there's a balance.

And I think what you I'm trying to clarify here. I think you're trying to say to me that given historical references and and the the certain beliefs that you've experienced over your lifetime, my lifetime, is that you believe that the future will bring these liberties to everybody else given the trajectory that history history has given us. Is that kind of a way to say it? Kind of it. I I wouldn't make such a strong assertion. Right?

I think that what if anything, we've seen how incredibly persistent and resistant hypocrisy and tyranny, you know, can be, in limited bastions. But what power enables, you know, if you have power, you are able to write the rules, and if you happen to be a democratic society that values human liberty, you're gonna write the rules in a way that favors that liberty for participants.

Yep. So if the United States had not won World War 2, there might still be some number of democracies, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as many as today. Wouldn't wouldn't be safe, they couldn't all persist as well as with the the umbrella provided by a major democracy. And if an autocracy wins, you know, it is the way of the world that people try to please the master and try to look like them.

So, you know, I would expect that, you know, if China were to win, most of the other states participating in their economic sphere would try in in in in many ways to try to mirror their system, and that would likely, you know, mean constraints.

And that's the the reason so I think we're agreeing, and I was trying to take the apolitical coronavirus, the situation that's happening in the United States, situation that's happening in UK, and say those are those are blips and changes of belief structure. But the reality is that because America has positioned itself, because the west has positioned itself, it has allowed freedoms to expand. Now we are seeing, we are seeing authoritarian rule expand at this time in our history.

But if China wins, they will mirror, and they will follow suit of the person who writes the new rules. So I agree with you on what you're saying. Absolutely. So so I know we're only on 3 or it's more forward to 2. Let's keep on going. Alright. Long long term security, I know we've been touching on them. So is there anything with 23 that you think we've kinda missed?

You know, so, I mean, the big thing that I just wanted to say in 2 was, look, you have doubled the institutional focus of the of the largest economy, the United States, on space, and that, you know, no we talked about how military research usually transitions to enable greater life, and how it's a much deeper fiscal well. You know, the other point I would just make is that merchants and commerce on frontiers have always needed protection, and generally, we think navies are a good thing.

And and then the last point under the first one is that by creating this new force, this new professional thing, right, militaries have often been a way to attract talented individuals who come from less privileged backgrounds. So here, you know, we finally have a dedicated military service that can attract prosocial, idealistic, talented people to pursue STEM, and give them an amazing outlet for their energies. That's a neat way to look at it.

I I actually I admire that that one statement there. And, yes, throughout history, it has given opportunities for people who are less likely to have risen up because they had, anywhere in the world, they have been drafted. They've been brought in or they volunteered for the service, and they gave got opportunities they might not have gotten otherwise.

So on the third point, you know, Space Force is gonna be an accelerant to prosperity because of necessity, it will need to be a buyer and consumer of space services. So it you know, because it has to operate in this difficult environment, it's gonna have to become the anchor tenant or the lighthouse investor for cutting edge products, and that investment is gonna both mature the technology and attract others to use those products and services, you know, after their maturity.

It also is gonna create a market for spaceships, you know, people who make spaceships, people who want to sell lunar propellant. You know, they will look to the government as an initial, you know, as initial, you know, anchor tenant or provider to ionize their costs.

And in the same way that historically, the US government used airmail contracts to help fledgling airlines develop before passenger transport was commercially viable, contracts that the Space Force puts forward are likely to give birth to additional industries that will blossom, you know, far beyond their their basic contract.

Mhmm. And in and, you know, similar in the same way that military supported contracts enabled, Pan Am to build the 1st truly global transoceanic flight structure with its own nav aids and radios and airports, you know, the the activities of the space force are likely to lay down similar sorts of infrastructure and provide similar sorts of opportunities for companies to create more lasting infrastructure as part of this economy that leads to prosperity. Great way to say it. Yes. I agree. Alright.

So we're now finally on the, you know, the space force will be critical for security, for the security of our liberty. Okay. So, we talked a bit, you know, that the that that bright future of life and security, you know, is better if it's liberty, and that the US Space Force, you know, is likely to be that guarantor of liberty in space.

And, you know, what I the point I wanna make here is, like, when we go to space, much as some people would like to think we're gonna change, we're we're not leaving our humanity behind. And part of our nature is opportunistic self help. If there's no sheriff in town, people want to become a law unto themselves.

And so like a navy, a space force is able, just through presence, to deter that kind of self help and mischief, encourage dispute resolution, and and through that, they create the stability that enables commerce as well as all the other things we talked about where they can rescue folks. And I and I think that works even if there are multiple sheriffs. Right? Even if the Chinese has their own space navy, you know, protecting their own commerce, for the most part, navies get along very well.

They you know, it's it's a very rare thing that navies actually go to war. Most of the time, even adversarial navies cooperate in terms of facilitating commerce, preventing piracy, you know, preventing illegal shipment of goods. I think and, yes, the it's I'm trying to go back in my mind to historical references. The the British Navy was the, the one the most powerful navy at one point. The Americans have the most powerful navy.

The one of the Chinese just launched their 2nd aircraft carrier, and they have 2, I think, 2 or 1 nuclear submarine that they just launched. The yet you're telling me throughout history, they have gotten along from all walks of life wherever there was a military, or did they draw borders and say, I will take it from here, you take it from there, or I don't see how of course, I believe conflict had to have happened. It's all of the above, right? Conflict certainly happens.

You know, and the most dangerous time that conflict happens is usually when there's a disagreement at the top about who is actually the top dog and the more powerful, right? And that's usually when you see, you know, some type of decision through military force at the systemic level.

But in other times, right, you know, yes, navies will corral off areas, and in fact, you know, this this is one of the areas that the United States has been, you know well, all global hegemons to date, you know, whether it be the Dutch or the or the British or ourselves who have favored open trading systems. Right? They do get into fights when somebody tries to create a closed economic empire. Right?

So the a lot of people don't even know that the United States Navy, you know, we we didn't create it, you know, to assist in in fighting wars, you know, or to protect our coasts.

It was the threat of the Barbary pirates who were capturing our merchantmen, you know, in the Mediterranean, holding people hostage, embarrassing us, and exacting huge amounts of money, like 10% of our, you know, of our, you know, national treasury that prompted the creation of our initially 6th frigate navy to go and, you know, show the flag and prevent this sort of predation by the Barbary States. Who was the was her famous commander? You know, I, I should know that.

Seriously Tony. Yeah. Seriously enough. But but worst employment You're giving me a tremendous amount of information. You missed one. I'm sorry. Yeah. I am. I'm sorry. Well, you know, I mean, it was interesting, you know, Washington was president when we authorized the Oh, really? Okay. And, and the ship that first engaged the Barbary pirates was none other than the US Enterprise. Really? Yes. Wow. That's kinda cool. That's very cool. Okay. So the Space Force and I I love your angle.

I I I'm really glad that I'm talking to you about this because you've you've come at this topic so far in a very humanistic, global, I've used the term Mearth. I'm thinking of Mearth, moon, and earth, which I think you heard about in the video. I look at this as saying, okay, if we have a Mearth ecosystem and we are between Earth, moon, Earth, space, space and space, and space and moon, how will that be managed? How that how will we protect?

And I I can now see even just this example of the Barbary pirates and their need to have safety for commerce. Yeah. That's, it makes sense. It does. Really does. You know, this is a a good time to make another point that I think is is sort of key. So when we talk about protecting commerce, you know, protecting ships at sea, it's important to realize that the navy doesn't sit there as a babysitter next to every ship that goes by and, like, take a missile, you know, for them. Right?

I mean, the navy literally can't, you know, prevent It's not a it's not a what do you call it? It would be a chaperone or whatever. They're not fair. They just people know they'll become. The you know, the Navy is not a bulletproof jacket for shipping. Right? What they are are the they are a big they are a bigger, badder bully that can punish somebody who, you know, would have the temerity to to to bother. Right? They're the sheepdog that attacks the wolves that attack the sheep.

And, you know, the the, you know, navies do this because they have offensive weapons that can punish, and most of the time, they don't do that. And it'll be the same in space. It isn't that we're going to, like, armor up all our satellites or have, you know, space force, you know, you know, spaceships right next to, you know, civilian satellites.

It is the knowledge, the certain knowledge that if you attack, you know, our civilian infrastructure, our critical infrastructure, we can hurt you back. Right? That's where the protection comes from, the same as on the oceans. Yes. It's it's what governance is about. It's the these are our policies to I'm not saying governance is all about this.

I'm gonna make a statement that governance and the laws, policies, procedures, standards, customs, all of those are rolled up in into a group of individuals or groups of forces, whether they be a sheriff, they be a police, they be law enforcement or invest investigators, military, to say if in fact you screw up, in fact you don't play our game that we believe is a fair game, doesn't have to be fair, but fair according to that culture, then we will make sure that some way, shape or form we will find you, hunt you down, make sure you pay for it.

Right. And and, you know, the the failure of you to have a level of force to back up your, you know, values just means that whoever is there with force, you know, has the determining vote. Right? So China certainly is building, you know, their own space force, and in many ways, you know, I give them credit for having a much better articulated vision of where they're going, which in many ways is very very similar, in terms of the global things they want to address. You know?

But if we if we fail to provide our guarantor of our interests and values, then, you know, we will be at the mercy, of the space force that is there, and and decides to say these are the rules, take it or leave it. So and it might this might tie into your next point, the ultimate dream force. So, it's it's interesting that when I circle the globe in my mind, I Russia doesn't seem to have that their presence.

When I circle the my the world and I India's doing their space activities, the Japanese are doing their space activities. There are different activities happening all over. I still always go I'm coming back to China because of you just mentioned that their plan, their attack, but they've also have a plan of attack of the China dream. They've picked out I think it's 12 different industries that they would like to be superior on the in the world in their economy.

So they're giving them legal, financial, clearance for patents or technology to be able to accelerate that. They have the 1 belt, 1 road. The belt and road to avoid using the seas going for the number one trading partner to the China is not the United States. It's a misnomer. It's believed that China is. United States is the big player, but there are 400 and x 430,450,000,000 people in Europe, and their number one trading partner is Europe. So they do have plans, and I I do respect that.

And you just said it in a different light away, so I'm kinda tying it back. Do you see the space force with plans that are articulated enough that I could say, I get it? Alright. So that's a complex answer. Well, it's a good then that's a good question. You know, the Space Force is brand new. You know, I've I've written pieces and spoken before that I think there's an ongoing battle for the soul of the Space Force.

And frankly, I think probably everyone who's a listener, whether they're, you know, US or not US, have an interest in how that plays out. I have not yet heard from the Space Force leadership itself the talking points that I want to hear. But on the other hand, I had, you know, multiple classes of students headed for leadership positions of whom I have absolute confidence that they understand exactly the game and have articulated very well, you know, what needs to be the plan moving forward.

So, you know, the the the space force may, may on its own start spouting the broader vision it may be directed to by the White House or by Congress who, I think, share this broader vision. But even if none of those happen generationally, as people move up, you know, they, I'm confident that they will move things in the right direction.

The question is, like, the longer you let a particular method of doing things persist unchallenged, It becomes instituted and there's more inertia, it's more difficult to change. So right now is the sensitive period when any and everyone who wants this broader space economy and prosperity, you know, future, they need to be loud about what sort of space force they want.

And in my view, you know, while these are implied in the legal, the legal missions given to the Space Force already, and, you know, if my team, you know, is in charge, they would certainly interpret it that way, I still think that there are a couple things that would be really good to have, you know, explicit in legislation, and one is that a role of the Space Force is to, you know, support the extension and and protection of commerce, and secondly, that the that the the Space Force will organize, train, and equip in order to, prevent, asteroid and comet strikes.

Those, I think, are kind of really essential specified missions. Were you and and I've never asked you this. Were you at, the Pioneering National Space Summit in Washington DC with Tomlinson back in the year that I started in the space journey? I don't know if were you there in Washington?

I I was not, but I was so happy with the output of that consensus position, and have cited it, you know, multiple times, and Rick is a very, very in fact, in some ways, Rick is a, you know, one of the spiritual gurus of where space should be.

You know, I I sort of received the gospel from Rick, you know, when I was a young officer, and it was just him and, and the other folks from the Space Frontier Foundation in particular, you know, Charles Miller, you know, once I heard their perspective, I was just like, wow, you know, we've been doing this all wrong. This is really, you know, the obvious right way to do things.

And so I you know, Rick's the the goal of that consensus position that the United States fundamental goal should be settlement is so critical, and we still have not got that right in law. I was that was my second event in the space industry. So think about it. I was at a racetrack in my first time going to a racetrack, and I was in the center island because some friends brought me to b next to their car.

And I won't go into the long story of it, but I was in a pace car on my first day ever at a racetrack screeching around to get the, the cars running. And my first event was in Hawaii at the Great Giant Leap, which included Buzz Aldrin and Aldi and and the person from France who put the the rover on the comet. And my second event was the Pioneering National Space Summit. So there were things. It was a very challenging meeting. It was very interesting, but I haven't seen much come out of it.

And that's why I you're quoting it, which is interesting because I was there, and it was it wasn't exactly what you're saying. There was not a some people wrote up a plan, but while we were there, there wasn't as much of a consensus. And so it's interesting that these 2, the Protection of Commerce and Train equipped for comet comet strikes, there's a paper that I'll send you afterwards that I have that might be able to be useful in this context.

But that's an interesting so is that what you would say would be the ultimate dream force? Is this, I mean, these would be the foundational pillars? Well, you know, I I think that we, you know, we we all carry multiple identities. Right?

And I think it's worth thinking about what kind of space force should the world want, what kind of space force should the United States want, and what kind of space force advances US power, but not, you know, as an end in itself, but because of the values that we hope it can bring about. Mhmm. And, you know, why would we have a space defense organization that doesn't actually defend planet Earth? To me, that seems crazy. You know?

You're talking about trying to defend against comparatively minor problems, like, you know, anti satellite combat and war, but you're not gonna pay attention to something that could wipe out, you know, the entire species or a city, you know, or mistakenly set off a nuclear war because of a bolide strike over the long place.

And you know, what is, you know, it's a national security organization, but what is national security if it is not, you know, prosperity, if it is not, you know, security for your habitat? And what does it mean to be, you know, preeminent or to have, you know, leadership in the world if you're not leading the world toward any better place? Right? If you're if you're not extending the prosperity for for everybody, you are, you know, what legitimacy do you have, you know, to to be the the leader?

So and legitimacy is important because it, you know, facilitates, it lowers resistance to, you know, so many other things you would want. So I, you know, I can't imagine, you know, I mean, I can imagine I just would not want, you know, a more limited view of US power that is not trying to advance itself as legitimate, you know, as a legitimate leader, you know, fixing global problems and enabling, you know, a broader uplift. I I I love I I'm smiling the whole time you're saying it.

I love the your your I don't know. Maybe I feel it through the medium. I love your energy, your the way in which you deliver that. It it is very, centric around the beliefs that, as an American growing up in America, is very centric around those beliefs. And I do question, because this this is a global dialogue, that how many people would feel that though these values that you just articulated are not the values that they would like to see, and that that not everybody needs liberty.

Maybe there's something for tyranny, or maybe there's something for an elite class. Maybe there are other alternative forms of governance that would be for superior because people are do believe that. And yet I I loved what you had said. So it's a it's a I I'm sorry. My my my history is also showing through in the way in which I'm accepting this. Well, look, I mean, I, you know, I I tend to, you know, see the world through different lenses. Right?

I mean, at one level, you know, I am playing for, you know, team Earth, team Earth life, you know. It isn't it isn't even about the human species. Right? I wanna carry it all, you know, bacteria, plants, animals, you know All spea this magic moon on all all species on earth. Right. Everybody. Every every species. Right.

And, you know, on the smaller level, you know, of course, you know, I was nurtured and fed by by this nation, and I think it still has an important mission in the world and a, you know, and a mission to be worthy of, and I don't think you would find most American strategists that don't think that we have fallen down and, you know, not that, you know, we we have not fallen short of the mark in important ways, and, you know, people around the world should be, you know, are always skeptical of the power, you know, what that power means, you know, to them and, you know, I I don't begrudge, you know, you know, other cultures that, you know, have different values, but that's not gonna silence me from arguing, you know, my viewpoint And

I'm not I'm not I'm not just I'm just all I'm I think it was well articulated. I think you beautifully said it. I could feel you giving everything you had and what you said. So so you don't have to defend it. I just thought it was beautiful how how it came from you. And if you were coming from another country, I would say the same thing because it was your belief that you articulating. So let me take a quick jump and maybe you can follow me with this.

Do you believe the space force could eventually be the earth or Mearth force and that the countries of and the and the civilizations of earth create one inclusive force? Well, you know, let's talk about what in inclusive means. I mean, in in many ways, the United States has already enabled that. Right? So I have a wonderful opportunity to be a, a UN, you know, peacekeeping staff in in Mali. And you really see the diversity of militaries cooperating.

You know, we we had China there, you know, we had, you know, former Soviet states, you know, there. You know, we had nations from across Europe and Africa. Right? So there will always be areas in which we can all cooperate. And, you know, candidly, you know, the the US military is a big dog in this because it mentors, you know, many, many, other nations in standard operating procedures, in doctrine that allows a common base of of, you know, support.

There are, you know, you know, coalitions, you know, within that broader, whether it be NATO or others. And but, you know, we have there are different visions of what humanity could become. Right? Even in the Star Trek future, right, where everybody is on the bridge. Right? All kinds of people from all different nations, you know, aliens are on the bridge, aliens that were past, you know, enemies are on the bridge. You know, they're all part of, you know, that common venture.

And certainly, I think that the space force will it's already providing, you know, ways in the in our space operations center. We already have a number of different, allies, you know, right next to us on the floor sharing, you know, things.

So so like so like the films that we see, the movies where there's someone who's watching who might be from one country and another from another country are all in the same command and control center working together to simultaneously be able to to stop threats or to facilitate things happening. Right. But I but I think that there are there are limits to this. Right? Even in the Star Trek world, you know, there there are factions that gotta call and do diplomatic stuff.

Sometimes they're firing their phasers. You know, sometimes they're, you know, making nice with the Klingons. Other times they're going to war with them. So, you know, we all polities have, you know, degrees of shared interests and competing interests, And and we all have, you know, places where our where core values and interests diverge. And, you know, where we can pursue mutual and absolute gains, we we tend to do that.

And where we can't, you know, we we don't necessarily always fight, but we at least like to preserve our autonomy.

And so, you know, you you know, the space force itself probably, you know, would not become a global force, but it might be a component, you know, it might be a contributor to a, you know, a global force operation, you know, for instance, if we had some really massive need to expend all of our global energies to prevent a an impending asteroid strike that was beyond the capabilities of of just one nation, you know, that would be possible.

Or if we were, you know, if there were ever some encounter, you know, with another civilization, we probably would prefer, you know, to meet that as a united, you know, front. You know, though they're not that's not certain. Right? I mean, we saw in, in the history of, you know, colonization that, you know, some internal factions would play off and try to get, you know, the, you know, get on the side of the invader.

But, you know, I I think there what it will do, David, is it will catalyze the ability of us to cooperate on things that collectively matter, and those would include things like space traffic management, space degree removal, planetary defense against asteroids and comets. You know, it it will accelerate the need to talk about rules and norms. It probably by itself will accelerate, you know, talks about, you know, how you adjudicate, you know, property claims.

We will know who to talk to, like we had a very vibrant conversation, you know, mediated by US strategic command was the Russians, you know, and their nuclear capabilities. So, you know, I would expect that, you know, the Space Force in many ways will advance international cooperation, and it will advance it on a lot of the things that you would like, you know, in sort of a star cracky kind of way, you know, to to move forward on. So what else do in your dream force would you like to see?

How do you what does this look like? I should caution you, right, that my that my bullet was the ultimate green force. Oh, green, not green? Green. Right? So, you know, when when people think about Space Force, you know, they they probably have some, you know, some ideas about space combat. But, you know, let's talk about what the Space Force actually does today.

If I told you that there was a single technology that could reduce global transportation fuel burning by 15 to 20%, and cut those, you know, carbon emissions 15 to 20%, that'd be a pretty amazing technology, right? Mhmm. Well, that's exactly what GPS does. So the Space Force operates the GPS constellation, and GPS guided, transport reduces the overall fuel burning 15 to 20% across the board. Right?

So, you know, as a technology of global impact, GPS is probably the number 1, and in terms of actually delivering the goods to mitigate climate change as a military, the Space Force, you know, is already the leader. Secondly, you know, as we talked about before, right, we would not even have an environmental movement.

We would not have knowledge of climate change had it not been for early incarnations of military research to be able to crack the weather, to know what the effects of nuclear explosive blasts are. The whole ability of us to even sustain a conversation on climate, you know, was birthed out of military space research.

And lastly, right now it is the US Space Force that is taking leadership on developing a brand new global utility that is and will be the ultimate green energy source, which is space solar power. And I touched on this in the beginning, but I'll touch on it again. Right?

The the if you had in your hands, it were within your grasp, a technology that could scale to all global demand, that was baseload, urban appropriate, 24 hours, not intermittent, required no additional storage, and could be scaled, you know, not only to meet global demand, not only to, you know, meet global demand at the end of the century, meeting all the millennium goals, but to do that 7 times over. Right? That's the scale we're talking about.

You know, we can build these very large, you know, satellite solar farms in space, beam the energy down to the point of need, you know, just bypass all that expensive infrastructure for power cables and cooling water, you know, and allow development, you know, at a much, you know, greater scale.

Well, today, right on Saturday, the Air Force is launching on its X 37 spaceplane the first ever custom piece of solar power satellite hardware, which is a subcomponent that, you know, gathers solar energy on one side of the panel, and on the other side, you know, converts it to, to radio frequency for wireless power transmission, you know, that that's the Space Force taking leadership on that, and they've got additional funding through Air Force Research Laboratory to develop the technology, you know, even further.

And this is technology that's been bypassed by NASA, bypassed by the DOE for whatever cultural reasons. But, you know, right now, you know, for greens who care about planet Earth, right, who's delivering the goods for you? It's the space force. Yeah, I, I I I love that And, Jim, Jim Strickland did a podcast with us, and he went over his the conceptual side of solar power space solar power, space solar satellites, and he's been talking about for years.

Then he went over the technology behind a lot of these types of tech, these types of initiatives. The I also like the idea, and then we'll go on to the last one. What is the ultimate dream force for you? What is the ultimate? Like, how would it operate if you had to build it? So I'm gonna go back to Dreamforce. Well, I think it would be one that started from, you know, the the same broad vision of, you know, what is the strategy that makes the US worthy of the title, you know, global leader?

You know, how does that, you know, how do we make that happen in a way that's interactive and supportive of the expansion of human activity, you know, into space, of economic activity into space that benefits the globe, and and because it's delivering global benefits, keeps the United States, you know, as the legitimate leader and allows the United States to to, you know, prosper as a result of that.

You know, and it's one that looks directly at the private sector as a as a partner in creating this ecosystem, you know, not just as a as a resource, you know, to you know, for purely military. You know, I I wanna I would like a space force that's running away that questions every investment with regard to its externalities for creating long term sustainable and and scalable commerce. Would you, leadership wise, do it differently?

The you know, leadership is is a function of what people who are given that opportunity choose to do. Right? You know, we we certainly had people with that very broad vision that were, you know, championing the Space Force early and, you know, and would have been, you know, I think very powerful advocates, you know, of the sort of Space Force, you know, that I'm talking about. But for whatever reason, they were, you know, they were not selected, you know, for that position.

So, you know, it, it's a, you know, at this point it's a question of, you know, growing into the shoes, right? Growing out of the, you know, the shoes of, you know, of, you know, what the Space Force started as, and realizing, you know, it's kinda like this. Right? You know, you're you also mentioned that, hey. The Space Force starts, you know, with this great continuity with the air force.

But in many ways, that would be kind of like, you know, if if after I created NASA to beat the Russians to the moon, and I asked somebody, well, what's NASA all about? And you said, well, these are the activities that NACA does. Right? There's a lot of continuity with NACA, and this is what what NACA is doing currently, right? What's important about the Space Force to me isn't what it's doing, it's what it's going to do.

You know, the reason to create a Space Force wasn't to continue doing what we've always been doing. It is to enable doing a huge number of things that we have never done. I I do agree it's about the future that we're we're looking to create. The I think and this is a a lesson that I learned the hard way many times in NASA for well, let me stop. I think that the organizations such as one such as NASA have had their hands tied in many respects where, for example, NASA cannot market.

They they're not allowed to market by their doctrine. They cannot say they've built, they've grown, they've developed, they deliver. And a bad word, the world or humanity doesn't understand some of the contributions that the participation of Global Society or NASA or Collaborative Ventures have delivered. So they can't say, well, with with the Russians, we did this amazing thing, and you should hear about it.

Should the Space Force be less constricted also to show the other side of what the Space Force is supposed to be delivering? Because without this conversation, without you and I sitting down you and me sitting down today, I would not have thought of it in this way at all. You know, I I don't remember coming up against a problem where we were externally limited from telling our story, it could be that I'm just not, you know, aware of it.

But, you know, to me, the problem was always internal, that for whatever reason, you know, organizational incentives had made, in my view, military leadership too timid to speak about anything but the most mundane things that were in their lane. And I think that the reason why that happened because it wasn't always that way. You know, we used to have this very, very vibrant, you know, debate, with these fiery generals, you know, who, you know, disagreed on things.

And part of it, I think, was that, first of all, the army and the navy were separate departments that were in competition, and they were not unified under a, you know, a common department of defense that could keep them in line, and enforce group think. The second thing was that when the air force was young, you know, this hadn't really solidified yet, and it was scrappy, and it really wanted its independence, and it wanted it was ambitious about mission space. It was ambitious about resources.

And in fact, it it ended up getting the lion's share of the resources. And, you know, under Eisenhower, you know, he would play favorites, so the services had to really compete.

Well, what seems to have happened, you know, is that as the as we formed this unified department of defense, in order to kind of, maintain itself against the the broader civilian control in the in the Department of Defense, such as McNamara, the generals all banded together in this, you know, cooperate, you know, get along, collegial manner.

And so this extremely vibrant and useful diversity of views that we had before jointness, you know, has been, you know, replaced by, you know, a much more collegial, you stay in your lane, I'll stay in my lane. And so, you know, Arnold, when he was the first chief of staff of the air force, he he he felt at liberty to speak about, you know, the the larger air faring needs, you know, what civilian stuff would do. This is pre FAA. You know?

So there was a very strong hand by the military in, you know, shaping, you know, US policy and foreign policy with regard to aviation. And, you know, now, you know, it really feels as if if it isn't commenting on something operational or a military system, you know, and, you know, it there is a timidity to provide best military advice on grander designs and strategy in any kind of public forum, which I think is unfortunate, you know, for the for the nation.

And I and the other problem is that because that doesn't happen in public, it similarly conditions all the younger officers to be to think that that's not their job in their lane to to think larger and broader. So there's a you know, it it it was a constant frustration for me, you know, initially when I would be educating, you know, students, because I was an instructor of of joint warfare, was that, you know, hey. You know, it isn't just about, you know, planning for fighting.

You know, there's planning for shaping. There's planning for force structure. There's planning for industrial base. You know, the, you know, there's competitive economic planning, and, you know, I would get this sort of deer in the headlights look of, like, you know, what are you what are you talking about? You know, that's not my job, that's not my lane. I signed up for the military. I didn't sign up for all this other garbage. Well, it isn't so much No.

I I don't think it is garbage, but in their head, it's like that I'm not in business. I'm in the military. And what you're doing is you just you expanded their vision very quickly that there's more to the more to the purpose of the role of the air force or military, which I think is brilliant.

So, you know, anyway, the we have we have some interesting internal institutional problems to to fight to get back, you know, what I think, you know, a colleague of mine talks about sort of the the tyranny of the joint vision. There is a lot of goodness in terms of establishing the Department of Defense and a common system and going after the ability of forces that weren't built to inter interoperate to to interoperate. Right?

But this same, you know, it's created a monoculture that, you know, I think is problematic. You know, I once heard a senior civilian tell me, you know, that he felt like they were in a very uncomfortable position, that the that what he wanted was a bunch of military folk that were, you know, like aggressive dogs on leashes that he had to hold back and say, no. No. No. That's not a good idea. We shouldn't do that. Right?

But what he found was that, you know, he felt like he was, as the civilian, always having to kind of push them from behind to, you know, to to come up with aggressive ideas. And that that I don't think is a healthy, I I had that I had that same thing working with the military. I was so surprised at how cordial, how the the the mistaken guy that their their true north was was that everybody had to get along in the room.

And ideas come from sometimes conflict, pushing the limits, And I've often said to legal in even commerce or nonmilitary, I've had to say to people who are legally oriented or people who are HR oriented, no one in the room is going to do what we're saying. What they're doing is they're flexing their muscle to see opportunities, and then we bring it back, and we find out where there are those opportunities that work.

And I was very surprised in my work with the military, How I had to push them more than they were able to have me say, wow, hadn't thought about that. You know, I would say that that I I had that experience a lot. And, you know, I I had the experience of coming across civilian consultants that were way more creative and hawkish, you know, in the room many, many times, you know, when I was the chief of future technology for the Air Force, the and sort of the chief futurist.

The you know, the it's interesting, but, like, right now, and in particular, the air force is extremely collegial. And, I mean, you can see this collegial nature. Like, there was just one of the Space Force leaders were talking, you know, very, very recently saying that, you know, well, you know, in terms of, like, moving over stuff to the Space Force, we we don't wanna break the Army, we don't wanna break the Navy, we don't wanna break the Air Force. You know?

And on one level, you know, I I I think that's a sane and and reasonable thing to say, but on another level, absolutely you do. You know, you want to break everything and agglomerate those resources into what you and your ideology believes is the optimal organization for the nation, you know, and and the others and their problems, you know, are are theirs to solve. You know? And And if we don't have that level of aggressiveness, right, where you get a lot of things from good atmospherics, right?

That's true. But at the same time, you benefit so much from competition and conflict and inter service competition and conflict. And and I I wouldn't want my Space Force to take a timid position. Right? I would want them to be arguing to the American public that they deserve a much larger share of the budget and it should be taken from the other services because they can't do as much for the nation.

And I wanna hear the same thing from the navy and from the air force, and then we'll let, you know, the adults, you know, above their level decide. And, yes, I agree. And that's where I was kind of pushing towards this dream force because if I was going to sit down at the head of the table, if this was my role to take over the Space Force, I would sit down, I would have a full fledged plan of what I planned on creating. I would also in my head, I would ask everybody where they think it would go.

I'd fill up whiteboards around an entire room for days days, if not months, and then pick the optimum position and say, this is what we're going to build. This is the future dream force, Space Force. And our role is to build it and to let the air force do the same for them. They've got new guidelines. They're no longer the Space Force. That is not their that that's not their destiny. So let them build the optimum position that they should hold within is it the 5? Their 5 forces?

Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Space Force. So I would say that would be the role. That's why I was asking what is your optimum dream for us? Was it By the way, I love your methodology because that's essentially exactly what we did over 3 years of Space Horizons.

Lots of whiteboards, lots of blue sky thinking, lots of interaction, you know, with brilliant people from the private sector and others and, you know, mapping out different scenarios and, you know, what happens here, what happens there. And, you know, at the end of it, you know, we had a complete political agenda, you know, long before this became on, you know, the president or chairman Rogers', you know, agenda. Right?

We we had it in our mind, you know, what it should look like, you know, enormous number of things. Right? What the legislation should look like. But it will take a while for that I mean, one of the things, you know, David, that I would say that, you know, you've probably come across the distinctions between, you know, formal authority and and leadership that is, you know, based on authority, and then leadership that, you know, is sort of emergent. Right?

Mhmm. And, you know, and thought leadership. And what I've noticed about leadership and strategy in general, right, Is that and and this would be, you know, if there if there's any young people in any bureaucracy, whether it be corporate or, you know, the government or the military, here's some advice that I would share. I'm sure you know this very well. We'll say. Strategy happens where it happens. It's like bubbles that happen in a beer mug.

And you have to be delighted, and you have to shape and facilitate and work, you know, with that at whatever level you are. But if you think, if you were a cog in the machine, and you assume that somebody above you is smarter, wiser, more perceptive, and you just need to wait for them to give you guidance for what you already see is required, right, you are fooling yourselves. You have to, at whatever level you're at, if you've got the insight and strategy, you have to push that uphill.

The system's not designed to take that. It does not like that. It will resist that. But don't believe that just because people are higher in the hierarchy, that they have some magical vantage viewpoint that you don't. It is a duty incumbent upon people at every level to share strategic insight. The yeah. And I I completely agree. It's, we could have a full hour or 2 on this alone.

How do you get an individual to have the other tools that are necessary for them to be able to to politically, to be psychologically, to deliver the sales message, to articulate the story so that there is buy in. And too often, the lack of skills being taught are how to defend their position, how to be able to understand what no means and what yes means. And it's when I worked with the military, I remember one scenario. I think I wrote about it in the book.

I said, this one guy came to me, and he said and he was in innovation. That was his department. He was in product development. And he said, we don't have enough man hours to be able to do all the projects we've been getting. We are inundated. We cannot keep up. We do not have the the the means to be able to facilitate them. And I looked at him and I said, how are you changing this? Well, we're doing this. And the answers were very, they were on quicksand. So I said, why don't you try this?

Call in your commander. Flatter him. Say, you are one of the people I respect more than anybody in the military, and I would like to learn from you. I've got projects, and I wanna know how you would address prioritizing them so I can understand how to prioritize them, because you've obviously done this before. But you do it in in a professional way. And I say professional meaning in a way that someone else will buy it, not that it has to be professional like you're standing at at attention.

And I said, I'm gonna guarantee you what's gonna happen. He's gonna look at you and say, sure. Because he's gonna be impressed that you came to him, and you're going to lay out what's going on. And he's gonna say, oh my god, get rid of this. We're not doing this. We're not doing this. Cut this out. Put the priority here. Move this here. Move this there. And I said, 25% of your projects will disappear before you know it. Because they don't even know you're working on them.

And he said, well, I'll try it. Let me see. Like, a week later, he called me back. He said, oh my god. He ripped to shreds half the things we're working on because they had been forgotten. They were no longer a priority. There were sequences. And when he was done, he took the mantle, he took the the sword and said, I'll take care of this. You just do your job. Do what needs to be done. But those things aren't taught.

And this this conversation, and I'm assuming because we've touched on a lot of militaries do more than fight wars, we've touched on a lot. So there's probably something there you wanna add. I think what we've done here, at least in my mind's eye, for me, anybody listening to, but for me, is you've given me an expansive view of something that I thought I had a good handle on. And there were many points that you brought up that I was saying to myself, okay.

First of all, you articulated it extremely well. And second, the way in which you delivered it allowed me to explore, And I loved it. I mean, I I've I've, it was 2017 you and I met. And I think I asked you not long after that to be on the program. And I'm glad you reached out to me saying you're ready now. It's just, like, what? Where did this come from? You should if you saw my face, you'd be surprised how how I reacted. It was like, oh my god. And this was fantastic.

This is not where I expected it to go. And I I and I'll share with the people listening just for the sake of them understanding. I never see the outline. I never see what the top the the components are. I only see a title that we come up with. So I'm often walking into murky water. I have a direction that I feel, but I'm not right most of the time.

And in this case, this was absolutely phenomenal to expand that thinking of the purposes of the dimensionality of the the complexity of a military, a military, not a US military, a military in its role within the constructs of, more than what we see. It's probably the easiest way for me to say. So I this is fabulous. Fabulous. Do you have anything to add, by the way? I'm not gonna say do you have anything to add more of militaries to more than fight wars?

Yeah. Yeah. I'll I'll I'll I wanted to respond to, you know, your your earlier, you know. So I completely agree with you. So, you know, when in terms of, like, providing people with the tools, you know, this was something that became, you know, apparent to me that, you know, particularly in the military, I imagine this is probably the same in most bureaucracies. Right?

You start off at this lower level where you are encouraged to learn the rules and to follow the rules, and and the world really does look like a hierarchy. You know, you've got a boss, he's got a boss, everything, you know, but as you move up, you get to a certain level where most of what you do is not directly and easily resolvable hierarchically. Even if it could be, the bandwidth isn't there, so everything you do becomes much more political.

And by political, I mean the sense that people have different values, you know, for how they want to harness the the collective resources, and that and there's no adjudication function other than, you know, consensus agreement or some level of coercion and force. And and that requires an entirely different skill set. Mhmm. You know, that that hasn't been taught in any way at the lower levels, and, you know, it it requires, you know, networking and influencing skill sets.

Yeah. And that was something I really enjoyed. But one of the things that has always been apparent to me is the self similarity of problems or, that exist at, like, all levels. So, you know, one of the things is like strategy, like, strategy exists at every single level that, you know, you could be at. And this notion, you know, that that you said, like, what are you doing to change the situation? What are you doing to change the rules under which you're operating? Right?

Is really one of the most fundamental things that we we don't teach people, or we don't start. People tend to want or have been socialized to be comfortable with well structured problems, and so it doesn't occur to them that, you know, if I don't like this game I can just extend and build the chess set this way, you know, or I can alter the rules, or maybe I'll just go over and carve myself another queen.

So, you know, the idea that you can structure reality, and there's a really interesting underutilized term by a scholar whose last name was Riker called 'hairsthetics.' And 'hairsthetics' I think he defined, you know, I'm paraphrasing slightly, is structuring the system to win and continue winning.

And when we talk about the context of the Space Force and what's globally, or you know, what's happening between the U. S. And China, right, it's a heresthetic problem, where each side is trying to structure the fundamental rules and position of the system to give them strategic advantage to continue winning, and space forces are just one tool that allows that structuring of the environment in the system.

Completely agree, and I I go back to captain Kirk in Star Trek and changing the computer game simulation so that Exactly. When. And continually winning was also he continually won because he became the captain of the enterprise. So he had the ability to continually do what he was looking to accomplish. So, yeah, I I wish they had used that word, hair aesthetics, in the program. It would have helped a lot. So I mean, I'm along that line. Right?

I mean, this is this is something for I think, you know, I I would you know, it's important to empower, you know, people. You're talking about, you know, empowering this this individual who is frustrated. Well, you know, you can't start from the the strategist doesn't start from the position that these are my pieces, and those are the other guy's pieces, and that's the board. The strategist starts from there. He looks at it, and he says, I own all the pieces.

I can manipulate the other guys' pieces, I can structure the underlying, you know, rule set. So, you know, when I encountered problems for what I wanted to do, you know, I kept bumping up against the fact that I didn't have a Space Force. So I just decided it was time to to, you know, create the political constituency and get one. And it's the same thing, right? I'm frustrated by the fact that we don't have settlement yet in law. You know, I'm working to change that.

I wanted to see us have property rights, you know, enshrined, worked on that, and I want to see certain things reflected in the Space Force mission. And I'm working to change all those rules. And, you know, I started doing that from a very low level.

So I really think that it's just important for it's an important insight that your power in a system really isn't conditioned on your job title or position, that there are routes to influence and routes to change the, you know, the game, you know, that are available to people who, you know, want to put in the extra effort. I'll add not only the extra effort, but the ability to circumvent that effort. Maybe do it in 1 tenth at a time by leveraging something.

Something in their in in their space that allows that to happen. You can you could talk to 10 people and try to get everybody to agree, or you could talk to the boss. That's right. So much Then then everything else disappears. And I actually had that in the military. I had one guy for 2 years trying to get everybody to agree, having separate meetings, having this and that. And I said, how can we get this done in a day? And he looked at me. He said, what do you mean?

I said, you've been talking to people for 2 years. I want it done in a day. And he looked at me, and I said he he said it. He said, well, I could talk to the commander. I said, why don't you just do that? Exactly. You know, sometimes though, it's not you that has to talk to the commander. You know, sometimes it's his peer that needs to talk to What what I meant was we his boss. We had to get the right person to make the move, and I use a different terminology. Wasn't gonna go into it all right.

Yes. I agree. Somehow, you have to influence that one person to make that decision so all 10 of them disappear. The dominoes would have fallen. And that's a great analogy because bureaucracies are built like domino, you know, trains. You know, they're they're we're like many, many cogs that turn from a single master cog, you know, at the top, or like a puppeteer, right?

Yeah. To command a bureaucracy, you have to capture what's at the top, and there are many, you know, strategies that are available to actors that that want to do that, but they have to be taught, and and in many times, you have to overcome, you know, cultural inhibitions that people have to doing that, because they think, oh, that's not legitimate. I can't or shouldn't do that. And it usually takes some education to show that everybody else who's successful is playing that game, you know.

Not easy not easy for people to see. Not easy for people to see. I I I've had these conversations and going this is all to me and space and every and space, the project Moon Hut. I've had these conversations recently and a woman today said she is in the legal side, we're talking about space and she was talking about making change and I said, let me ask you a simple question, how long are you married? She said, yes, 25 years. I said, have you changed him?

And she kinda got it, and I said, well, let's make it a little easier for you. You're a woman. How many times in your life, how you talk to men, and have you said to them, you will never understand until you're a woman. Meaning, inside of you, you're saying there's hormonal, there's shape, there's body, there's all periods, there's all sorts of things, and you will never understand me unless you are me. And I said, so you have to come to the conclusion, was my summary to her.

Well, I gave her a few other examples, but my summary to her was that it's not that everybody doesn't want to see. It's that it takes time, effort, and energy. It takes a lot to sometimes move that individual to at least accept, perceive, or value that decision, and that's your role. It doesn't just happen. You cannot expect everybody to come to your side. That's the role when you're paid to think. That's your job. And, she got it.

So I've gotta say, Peter, this, this was fan this is was fantastic. I I feel that I got to know a lot about you in the way in which you framed certain components, and I and I love the angle in which you took many of the thoughts that I was thinking about before I got there. It is I'm not trying to come up with a question to kinda end the podcast. I'm my mind says, is there something that you wish you had told me that you hadn't shared with me yet?

No. I mean, this is a good place, I think, to end and and, you know, my last point, you know, most of it's already been covered, but, you know, the the the key point I would say is that military is due to a lot more than fight wars. They're this deep reserve of societal strength that, you know, flexes in response to a number of contingencies.

Conflicts rare and episodic, but catastrophes happen all the time, and that's when you need this organized exertion of, communication, transportation, energy, and physical transformation.

And so the militaries are composed of people, they don't like to risk their lives you know, unnecessarily, so they want to take a broader view, they enjoy helping others in humanitarian operations, so you are going to see military airlifts helping earthquakes, you know, the Army helping with, Army Corps of Engineers with flood relief, you know, you see military professionals helping with Ebola and now COVID nineteen.

I think when we met, I was talking about a colleague's idea to, a military colleague's idea to put a doomsday seed vault on the moon. Mhmm. And of course, you know, many of us, you know, the military has been the chief proponent of space solar power for more than a decade.

So because, you know, militaries have to worry about these highly stressing cases of transportation, communication, energy manufacturing, those technological contributions like GPS, Internet, rail, jet engines, steamships, right, they're very far reaching.

And so, you know, space is exceptionally challenging as an environment, and to have a dedicated military space force that is going to try to advance those things is going to end up having a profound and profoundly positive impact, you know, on the quality of life for probably every citizen of the planet. Well, fantastic. That said, I'm going to say for everybody who's taking the time out to listen to this podcast to listen in. I thank you.

I do hope that you learned something today that will make a especially that it will make a difference in your life, the lives of others, the way you perceive and move your life forward. The age of infinite, infinite possibilities, infinite resources, our podcast is part of the Project Moon HUT Foundation's initiative to change how we live on Earth for all species.

And I'm hoping that today's episode, which was eye opening to me, was just as eye opening to you so that we can achieve these desired outcomes. Peter, is there a single best way to connect with you? LinkedIn is probably the best place. I've got a profile, and it's easy to contact me there. So it's Peter g a r r e t s o n. That's correct. And for me, David Goldsmith, I would love to connect with you also. You can reach me at [email protected]. Instagram, I'm at mister David Goldsmith.

We've got connect on Twitter at at project moonhot or at goldsmith. We have a YouTube channel we just put up. It's Project Moon Hut. You can see our logo, our our image there. So you could see there's just 2 videos at the present time. We just move them over. And that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.