GERMANY’S 2021 SPACE COMMAND: SOME MORE THOUGHTS
It's interesting to watch the world-wide meltdown and responses to Mr. Trump's re-election, and one of these I think might - and I stress, might - be taking place in Germany. That country, it seems, has established it's own space command, according to this story from 2021 shared by M.D. As the article makes clear, Germany is certainly not alone in doing so, following the USA and France, and one must assume similar command structures in China, Japan, and Russia. The real question for me is why Germany is doing this. The article outlines the usual reasons, but also, to my mind, hints at something else:
Germany establishes new military space command
What I find intriguing about all these European powers' space commands is the curious fact that with all the Europhoria surrounding NATO and the EU, one would think that some sort of integrated command structure would be in the offing. One may certainly assume that is the goal, and that such cooperative arrangements already are in place for the various major European powers to share space information. Nonetheless, the space commands remain separate, and now Germany has joined the club, spinning off space matters from the command structure of the Luftwaffe. So why does Germany want a space command?
The article lists the usual reasons:
The military is “responding to the increasing significance of space for our state’s ability to function, the prosperity of our population, and the increasing dependency of the armed forces on space-supported data, services and products,” the ministry said in a statement.
The rest of the article is pretty much the standard boilerplate of reasons for the command:
As with NATO, the emphasis for ASOC was more on space as a defensive domain, with the aim of protecting German systems and further investing in space situational awareness, according to the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Berlin is not alone in its efforts to create a separate military space entity. The U.S. Space Force was established in late 2019 as a separate military branch under the Department of the Air Force, and now boasts a separate budget line from the Air Force and its own representation on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond. While initial Space Force personnel were transferred in from space-related units within the Air Force, the nascent service will soon welcome its first — and soon to be former — Marines, soldiers and sailors.
So there you have it: Germany is establishing its space command to protect crucial space assets that are necessary to the functioning of the German state. In other words, the reasons given are exactly the same reasons given by every other power expanding their military presence in space: the military is needed to protect the space lanes just like navies are needed to protect the sea lanes.
But I suggest that the first statement in the article gives away much deeper motivations, motivations that in Germany's case make a great deal of sense, especially given the economic setbacks the country has experienced in the wake of America's sanctions war against Russia, its attack on the Nordstream pipeline, and so on: the Germany economy is suffering, and as everyone knows, the German economy is the locomotive of Europe. To paraphrase a statement usually applied to the USA, when the German economy gets a cold, the rest of Europe gets pneumonia and the flu. It's that first quoted line from the article that has me thinking along a very different line of high octane speculation. Here it is once again:
The military is “responding to the increasing significance of space for our state’s ability to function, the prosperity of our population, and the increasing dependency of the armed forces on space-supported data, services and products,” the ministry said in a statement.
Note that this is actually an official statement of the German Defense Ministry. and one of the reasons listed for the establishment of the space command is to ensure "the prosperity of our population." For a country with an export-driven economy that is being crippled by the American sanctions regime against Russia, and therefore with a large heavy industry manufacturing base, if that nation wants to protect and preserve that heavy industrial base, it must find some way to do so. In Germany's case, it has been government policy since the end of the Second World War to keep its heavy industry, tool and die industry, and manufacture capability within German territory. This has been done by a variety of measures including subsidies. More typically, nations resort to tariffs to protect their industrial plant and manufacturing, as indeed we're hearing from the incoming Trump administration.
But in Germany's case, this route is not really feasible. The second route available to preserve a heavy industrial plant is also well known, and I submit that this may be what we're looking at here: massive military spending. In this case, space affords an opportunity for all sorts of spending to stimulate the economy and put those heavy industries to work. It provides a way for Germany to say to the USA "Look, we're doing our part; we're contributing to the defense of space assets. We're anticipating threats and being proactive in response." And so on. And the other geopolitical reality is also I work: the American empire is rapidly fraying at the edges, and cannot continue forever, and this is apparent to everyone, particularly to everyone in the capitals of America's allies: London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo...and Berlin. The bottom line is, no matter what sorts of pressure Mr. Trump may put on Europe to "do its fair share" in its own defense, the European powers are going to have to do that anyway, and the first and most vital priority is space. Germany established this command in 2021... but now has even more pressing economic reasons to "beef things up".
It's this combination of (1) economic circumstance and opportunity and (2) geopolitical reality that is at work here behind all the standard boilerplate in 2021, imagine it now. And that "economic" factor I suspect looms large in the calculus of other space powers including the United States: the "little spats" in the Ukraine or Palestine, gruesome though they are, are hardly big enough to keep multi-trillion dollar military industrial complexes running. Truly spectacular and gigantic threats are needed...
... enter space commands, and all the UFO narratives being pushed recently, and now officially recognized and acknowledged, by governments.
The trouble is, when fabricating threats in the form of space false flags, don't be surprised if the genuine article actually shows up... And no, I don't mean just China....
See you on the flip side...
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