Lol

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman added that the government is already evaluating data on space-based sensor capabilities, which look “promising,” and doubled down on Guetlein’s prior projections.

“You have to put together the right contract vehicle to launch the satellites,” he said. “I think by the end of the decade, you will start to see capability delivering data. I won’t say that that’s accomplishing the mission by ‘29. I think Guetlein’s assessment that this is an early 30s delivery of a real capability is not too far off.”

This caught my eye. The tl;dr is that until a major problem in the new Vulcan Centaur rocket is found and fixed, the US government can’t launch any of its advanced radar and radio-interception spy satellites.

Satellites can be loaded onto rockets either vertically or horizontally. Horizontal is way cheaper and easier and faster, and is perfectly OK for like 99.9% of commercial or scientific satellites.

But the US’s NRO (National Reconnaissance Office, designers and builders of America’s spy satellites) like to do a vertical payload integration. The credible rumours are that their current generation of non-optical spy satellites use extremely delicate unfolding mechanisms to unfurl massive radio antennae dishes after deploying to orbit. Those satellites can never be horizontal in Earth gravity or the mechanisms would jam and fail when trying to deploy their delicate radio dish “spiderwebs”. Amateur astronomers have spotted NRO satellites that have unusually big and faint silhouettes that are consistent with large non-solid radio dishes.

There’s only three rockets available that are certified for NRO launches. That certification called NSSL is based on both reliability and capability. Two are the horizontally-integrated Falcon 9 and its Falcon Heavy variant. They do launch some NRO satellites, but the also-credible rumours are that they’re handling the more robustly-built satellites that are using off-the-shelf hardware, not the massive-unfolded-radio-dish spy sats.

If the NRO satellites this general is referring to could handle horizontal integration, this general could call up SpaceX and have a Falcon 9 booked for the following month. SpaceX operates on a business model of simply launching rockets on rapid schedule. If there’s not an outside paying customer for a given launch, they just load it with Starlink satellites and launch anyway. It’s very much a thing but the fact is Falcon 9 is highly reliable and highly capable, and it’s quick and cheap (by spaceflight standards) to book a flight on short notice.

The third NSSL-certified rocket is Vulcan Centaur operated by United Launch Alliance. That’s a 50/50 shotgun wedding partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin and has an absolutely hilarious origin story. NRO is holding off on future launches because two of the four Vulcan Centaur launches so far have had nozzles on its solid-fuel boosters explode during flight. By pure dumb luck neither resulted in a loss of the vehicle and they were able to limp into orbit. But the NRO is extremely unhappy with this poor safety record and is withholding future contracts for their ultra-expensive years-long-construction-time satellites until the cause is found and fixed.

It really seems to me that Trump doesn’t take this whole “war” thing that seriously, or perhaps that he’s unable to understand the significance of it, but likes the spectacle of it. Trump is clearly playing the stock market, and we know that there’s insider trading going on before and after his announcements. I think that Trump believes, in a sense, “The Ramadan War is Not Taking Place,” as though this is something that happens ‘‘over there’’ that he can exploit for money in the same way you’d exploit any other stock, but for which there are no real consequences. However, Iran, Lebanon, and Israel, are fighting this war for real. It will become real for Trump when oil reaches $200 per barrel, and then he might very meekly try to arrange some type of backroom deal with Iran, which Iran will probably refuse. Who knows what happens after that?

It’s attack helicopters like the AH-64 which are operated by the Army. It’s kind of confusing, but it’s a consequence of a bunch of administrative stuff they came up with - originally the Air Force was subordinated to the Army, then it became its own independent branch and got all the fixed-wing combat aircraft, but rotary-wing aircraft, that is helicopters, weren’t covered, and since the Army wanted its own stuff for close air support so they’d be less reliant on coordinating with the Air Force, they invested in those.

Classic inter-branch infighting, people make a big deal about the Japanese in WW2 and their competition between the Army and Navy, but the reality is it happens in all militaries with multiple prominent branches to some extent (although Japan in that period was, admittedly, still a more extreme case than most).