Space Force: Building The Legacy Read online

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  ​One part of the military usually overlooked is the Reserve, in its various forms. The reserves spend most of their time as civilians, in civilian occupations. But like the Minute Men of old, they are ready for emergencies, and every state governor is glad to have them. And it’s important to remember that they are volunteers, and in any organization, volunteers are worth their weight in platinum.

  ​And you really have to handle them differently ...

  FRICKIN’ GUARD GUYS!

  Christopher DiNote

  ​“Frickin’ Guard guys!”

  ​Mr. Thomas P. Throckmorton from the United States Space Force’s Inspector General’s Office felt a warm shot of something like joy in his chest.At least, he hoped that’s what it was. He barely stopped his hand from wiping his sweating forehead, a habit permanently ingrained by the Great Coronavirus Crisis of 2020. Instead, he nervously rubbed his thumb and forefinger around his tie tack, the way his Catholic great-grandmother had rubbed her rosary beads.

  ​I’ve got them this time. This Podunk, one-off goofball outfit didn’t stand a chance of surviving, not with the management compliance inspection report in his hands. The report was absolutely loaded with damning, career-destroying words like “marginal,” “non-compliant,” and the utterly dreaded “unsatisfactory.” He knew it had to be indicative of wider, systemic issues; his favorite kind. The kind of systemic issues that got commanders fired, missions taken away, and hopefully, precious funding put someplace where it could actually do some good.

  ​“Hey Mr. Frogmorton, you ready to see the Ops Floor?” The thick-bellied Master Technical Sergeant, one of the unit’s full-time members who served as Thomas’ “handler” for the higher headquarters inspection, loudly broke into the little side office set aside for Thomas and his IG team, and broke up Thomas’s train of thought.

  ​“Throckmorton!” Thomas shouted. All weekend, it seemed as if no one in the unit was willing to get his name correct. He knew they were making fun of him. Absolutely positive.

  ​“Yes, Sir, of course. Hey, c’mon, Sir, let’s get going. We need to wrap this drill weekend up and get to the unit barbecue. Families and kids’ll be there. Folks got regular work tomorrow too.”

  ​Oh yes, we wouldn’t want to keep the families waiting, now would we? He mused snidely. MTSgt Willard here had interrupted a pleasant little fantasy, which involved embarrassed generals, a SECDEF on the bureaucratic warpath, and just maybe a guest spot or two on “Defense Weekly Live!” one of the top micro-market subscription live streams.

  ​Thomas smiled to himself. Heck, he knew he wasn’t the model of an objective, unbiased public servant, nor did he care. What he had was a twenty-years-and-still-going- strong beef with the National Guard going back to the Space Force’s establishment. Back then, he was Colonel Tommy “JP” Throckmorton, Judge Advocate, United States Space Force. Tommy was one of the very first generation of transfers from the Air Force into the new service, taking the oath and swapping name tapes in 2022, with the world still reeling from COVID-2019, just before it dove headlong into a brutal four-year recession.

  ​He was well on his way to getting his first star and becoming the top JAG in the newest service branch, and then, of all things, the damn National Guard drove a stake through the heart of Tommy’s otherwise flawless career. His crime? Well, he spoke up at the wrong time, with common sense, the absolute horror, in the long-standing battle over how the USSF’s reserve component ought to be legally, operationally, and philosophically structured.

  ​That didn’t go over well in certain corridors of the Pentagon, and even less so in certain chambers of Congress. His sentence? Put out to pasture in a dead-end Pentagon job dealing with the ninth circle of JAG hell: contract fraud. It wasn’t supposed to end like that.

  ​Nonetheless, here he was. He smiled, slipped the report into the blue “Space National Guard” folder the unit had given him on arrival, and stood to follow the senior NCO. “Sure, Master Tech Willard, let’s go. I’m all set.”

  ​“Oh hell, just call me Ricky! I’ve been in this unit since it was Air Guard before the big conversion to the Space Force. We used to fly tankers, and before that we had F-16s! Old-school manned C-models. You’ve never visited us before have you? Wait till you see this, it’s pretty awesome.”

  ​Uh huh. You got it Ricky. Wait until you see what I got, I think that’s pretty awesome, too. Tommy knew he shouldn’t be smiling, but this buffoon probably thought he was genuinely excited at the prospect of seeing their antiquated “operations floor.”

  ​Master Tech Willard led Tommy on a ten-minute, rambling walk across the unused airport runway. They passed several half-occupied, decrepit buildings until they reached their destination, a very large, very old hangar. Tommy could still make out one of the unit’s many previous names on the remains of stenciled lettering across the bow of the roof. When the unit lost its manned flying mission decades ago, their very powerful congressional delegation successfully lobbied to keep the unit alive, and managed to get a space mission forcibly dropped here in the middle of nowhere.

  ​The building exterior held a certain “patina,” or, “character,” as the talkative Willard called it. Tommy thought it funny, despite the fact that fully atmospheric aircraft had left here a long time ago, the interior of the hangar still felt, and smelled, like the guardsmen had just replaced an engine only an hour ago. He had to admit, it made him a little bit nostalgic, and he felt just the tiniest twinge of sympathy for this outfit. They, like many others, had to adapt and change to new technology, a new world, a whole new ballgame. Only a tiny bit of sympathy though.

  ​Finally, after a show of “Security Theater” at one of the human-sized doors set inside the sealed aircraft hangar doors, Willard and Tommy climbed a set of stairs to a second-story CONEX trailer. The whole space back-up command and control mission lived inside a series of trailers, stacked on top of each other like the new-style tenements that had popped up all over the globe during the last decade or so of upheaval. A rat’s maze of catwalks, fire escapes, and scaffolding covered the whole warren. Looking out and across the massive hardened shelter-style, and probably Cold War-era hangar, he saw that while the aircraft doors were permanently sealed, a retractable dome covered the top and was opening. Painfully slow and loud. The center of the hangar was a dish farm, and individual dishes and control vans rose up on equally painfully slow and loud lifts.

  ​Tommy took it all in for a few seconds before Master Tech Willard spoke, “Ain’t it cool? Not as cool as Vipers taking off in full AB, you know, but cool in its own way.”

  ​Tommy nodded his head in agreement. Then, he noticed that while Willard made a show of using his access badge and PIN code, the door to the command trailer slipped open at his barest touch. It wasn’t locked, or alarmed, and Tommy doubted that it could lock at all. Here’s another one for the report.

  ​“Colonel Barnes!” Willard shouted. “Hey, Jim, can you hear me? I brought the IG!”

  ​Barnes turned and smiled broadly. “Oh hey, Ricky! Mr. Frogmorton, it’s good to see you again! Sorry we couldn’t do an in-person review of the inspection report this morning, we had a little thing come up as you can see here.”

  ​Tommy just let that one slide, “Oh no worries, Col. Barnes!”

  ​“Please, call me Jimmy.”

  ​“Right. Jimmy.”

  ​“Yup, I know you gotta get going tonight, but I think you’ll really get a lot out of watching a live mission right here from this unit!”

  ​Wait, what? Tommy was royally confused, “Live mission? What live mission?”

  ​“Well, let me have one of my folks brief you right up. You’re cleared right?”

  ​“Yes, of course. Do you want me to send my -?”

  ​“Nah, I believe you; I figure you gotta be.”

  ​And that’s another one! Tommy’s mental notebook switched into overdrive. This is going to be the nail in the coffin!”


  ​“Okay, Space-One-Cee Dibble! Get your butt over here, and let’s show the IG what we do for real.”

  ​“Yes, Sir!”

  ​Tommy found himself facing the largest Spacer First Class he’d ever seen. Maybe, the biggest enlisted troop he’d ever seen in ANY branch of service, from any country on the globe. Not only was he a giant of a very young man, who looked like he had never shaved a day in his life, if the tattoo on his arm indicated anything, Dibble might also be the world’s biggestweeabooas well.

  ​Tommy dragged his attention from the distracting tattoo, and tried to focus on the S1C’s words.

  ​“So, Sir, we’re a space ground-based command and control back-up system for the constellation of Space Force Battle Management Stations in orbit around the planet. We help ensure their redundancy and resiliency, so that we never lose our ability to C2 forces anywhere, anytime, and we do that from home station here. We also rotate crews on mobilization orders across the stations as well. We have one up there now, on the ‘Dark Star’ you see on screen here.”

  ​“Yes, I saw your immersion briefing on Friday, thank you.”

  ​“Ain’t he somethin’?” injected the Guard Colonel. “His mom and I don’t get along too well any more, but, hey, the Guard is family. He’s the fourth generation to serve in this unit, and we got another four or five couples at any time, a couple of parents, kids, at least one set of grandparents. Lots of families have been in this unit since, heck, at least since the First Vietnam War, and all the way through all the desert ones. By the way, his mom is the communications squadron commander. I hope you’ll get to meet her, but I won’t be there.”

  ​Tommy just had to know, so he bit. “Why not, Jimmy?”

  ​“Well, the divorce has been pretty contentious so we both got no-contact orders. We still have to work together though, so our mediator suggested we communicate only through the JAG. That’s probably more than you wanted to know, but it’s not like it’s a secret or anything.”

  ​Oh. My. God. These people are insane.

  ​The S1C politely waited out the interruptions, and continued as if nothing happened.

  ​“Annnyway, yeah. Another part of our mission is that we also can direct military satellite recovery and repair missions. Those are so complex we sometimes need both the ground station here as well as the one in orbit to carry it out. For the next part of this briefing, I’ll introduce you to my intel counterpart, Senior Spacer Thibodeaux.”

  ​Nothing happened.

  ​Dibble yelled, so loud that Tommy could actually feel it. “PHOEBE!”

  ​“WHAT?” came the annoyed reply, seemingly from nowhere.

  ​“BRIEFING! NOW!”

  ​“Oh! Right! Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  ​If Dibble was the largest troop Tommy had ever seen in his life, then he was supremely confident that “Phoebe” might have been the smallest, ever, and he was also sure that, as loose as the dress and appearance regulations had grown over time, they weren’t so loose as to permit THAT particular shade of red as an authorized hair color.

  ​“Hi, Sir! I’ll be giving you your Intel briefing on this mission. So, we’re about to direct an all-Guard satellite weapons of mass-destruction mitigation team, or ‘S-WMD-MT,’ to disarm an old People’s Republic of China ‘zom-sat.’”

  ​“Wait a minute, wait a minute, slow down please!” This is out of control!

  ​“Oh, it’s okay, we’ve done this before. This particular team is from a different state than we’re used to working with, but they’ll do fine, they always do.” Barnes tried his best to assure Tommy, but to little effect.

  ​“No, it’s WMD? What WMD?”

  ​Phoebe smiled a Cheshire cat smile. “So, like, my friend Gina, she’s a guardsman too but she works over in finance, anyway she’s a college student majoring in astronomy, and she, like, has this thing for ‘zom-sats,’ you know, decommissioned satellites they park in a graveyard orbit and just leave them up there.

  ​“Yes, I know what ‘zom-sats’ are.”

  ​“Okay sorry, but this is really cool.” Phoebe gesticulated wildly as she spoke faster and more excitedly with every sentence. “You see, Gina is taking a bunch of mandatory history classes right now, and, like, she’s doing the regional affairs elective on China? Especially the break-up of the PRC, like, ten, twelve years ago, and the whole ‘New Warlord Cliques’ thing still going on today?”

  ​“Is there a point, young lady?”

  ​“Trust me, you’ll love this. So, she’s got this hobby of looking for old, dead, PRC military satellites, or rumored mil-sats, because she gets extra credit for, like, multidisciplinary studies or something. And!” Phoebe paused for dramatic effect.

  ​“And?” Tommy had no choice but to play along, but his brain, as well as his patience, neared overload.

  ​“And, like,about two weeks ago, she saw a really weird signature that screamed ‘late-2020s PRC mil-sat’ so she called up a friend who lives in Shanghai, and he’s a live streamer who does all this reporting on the New Beiyang Army that took over that big chunk of northern China when the CCP regime fell in the ‘30s. Anyway, he tells her that there was all these rumors, unconfirmed but supposed to be verified in the all the archives that got scanned and pushed online when the civil war there started, that talked about ‘dead-man switch’ satellites loaded with KEWs – with big kinetic darts.”

  ​Holy crap, girl, breathe! Tommy thought, surprised, impressed, and slightly horrified she could spew all that information in one breath. Wait, how could someone just out in the regular world figure all of this out? Calling a personal contact inside of a “country” we don’t even recognize as existing? Hold on, did she say KEWS!

  ​“Did you say ‘KEWs? Kinetic Energy Weapons?”

  ​“Yup, a dozen! And they’re pointed at us! Well, not literally us, but North America. Umm. Thing.” Phoebe let her voice trail off. The look on the beltway big shot’s face hinted to her that maybe she should stop talking for a second, and let the commander handle this.

  ​Fortunately, Jimmy Barnes didn’t disappoint her, or leave much to chance.

  ​“Sir, trust me, you’ll love this. The Guard’s had this mission for about ten years now, and man it keeps us busy. We’ve got about the only people left who can work with the older hardware, the older programming languages, all pre-quantum computing, pre-AI, steady-state electronics and servos, stuff they don’t bother to teach much no more, but we do.

  ​“Heck, this whole unit’s full of tinkerers, we built most of the gear you see there, about to rendezvous with this thing, crack it open, and shut it down once and for all. Since there ain’t no more central Chinese government, we really don’t have to ask their permission either. The UN is touchy on the subject, and the Russians hate it. They always do a flyby to harass our folks, that’s why we have the ground redundancy too. We all ‘turn on’ to federal active duty orders if they do something bad.”

  ​Tommy started to open his mouth in protest, “But!” Barnes continued, either ignoring or ignorant of the bureaucrat’s rising agitation. “Nope, just let ‘em work. Phoebe there’s my chief enlisted manager’s step-daughter, she’s gotta be the smartest person in the unit. Talks even faster than me! Go on, finish up the story!”

  ​“Yes, Sir! So like I said, Gina, I mean S1C Lorenz, sends me all of this data, I mean a ton of observations, and some very low power, infrequent telemetry from the thing, which means of course that it might be alive, but failing, which would be very bad given our suspicions. So, I take all of this because I do modeling at night…”

  ​“HAH!” Dibble snorted.

  ​“Not THAT kind of modelling! Ew. No, I do a lot of AI modeling and simulation, and from that I kinda built a collection target package. The boss, I mean the commander, signed off on it, we sent it up to SPACECOM, and they confirmed it and authorized us to do the mission, and boom goes the dynamite!”

  ​At that very moment, the salvage crew transmitted that all KE
W darts had been removed and the satellite de-powered safely. Once they were safely several thousand kilometers away, a very small explosion took place, just enough to break up the major components, vector them in decaying orbits, and eventually burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere.

  ​Colonel Barnes drilled into Tommy with his own horrendously wide,satisfied smile. “Not bad for drill weekend, huh? Look, I know we didn’t ace the inspection, I’m not stupid, but we can fix all those things. However, if we didn’t have so much experience in this mission, we all might even be dead right now, or shortly. At least everyone in a large chunk of the National Capital Region. Phoebe and her shop here did the threat analysis as part of the mission package. We don’t take ourselves seriously, but we take our mission deadly serious. You’re welcome!”

  ​Two weeks later…

  ​The Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness looked Tommy dead in the eye, folded her hands under her chin, and said nothing. Her eyes never moved, never so much as blinked or left Tommy’s. There wasn’t a hint of emotion, not even a Mona Lisa smile on her face.

  ​“JP, do you want to know why you never made brigadier general, and why you’re never going to make it into the senior executive service?”

  ​“Ma’am?” Tommy was genuinely confused.

  ​“It’s because you’re a jerk, Tommy. A bona fide, certified, dyed-in-the-wool, complete and total asshole.” Her voice softened only a little, just enough to demonstrate a tiny hint of weariness.

  ​“My advice to you,” and then she completely changed, “is to go and retire already! Seriously! You have grandchildren who hopefully don’t despise you. Go, get a plaque and a nice watch or something, anything, but just go home to that incredible, expensive place you have over in Bethesda, take your wife out on a date and try being human for a change! Write a book, I don’t know, take up woodwork, and stop blaming the frickin’‘Guard guys!’”