1 year ago
65
A few weeks back, we heard the unnerving news that America's newest military branch, the U.S. Space Force, was still struggling to define a mission for itself after three years of existence. This is generally not what anyone wants to hear from a group with large-scale military capabilities; when military generals start wondering what the scope of their own missions might be, they historically tend to conclude that their mission should involve a more proactive approach to blowing things up.
Put more bluntly: The growing frustration of Space Force generals trying to imagine larger and better-defined military roles for themselves is only going to lead to trouble, and we'd better come up with a Midnight Basketball program for troubled three-star and four-star generals real quick here if we want to avoid being cut off from our whole solar system due to sudden-onset Kessler syndrome.
That, then, is the newest possible existential crisis facing the country. It largely flew under the national radar, though, because a far more existential crisis cropped up at the same time, and when it comes to which of those existential crises is the newsier, more attention-grabbing version, there's simply no question.
I am speaking, of course, of the coming mermaid wars.
