US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7993

As part of its version of the 2018 Defense authorization bill, the House Armed Services Committee voted late Wednesday night to create a sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces: the U.S. Space Corps, which would absorb the Air Force’s current space missions.

You could be forgiven if you haven’t been closely following the debate about creating the nation’s first new military service since 1947. Several members of the panel said they themselves were blindsided by the proposal, and staged an unsuccessful effort to block the change until it could be studied further — or at least until the full committee had held at least one hearing on the subject.

Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) said he only learned about the proposal last week, when it first came before the subcommittee on strategic forces.

“I chastised my staff and said, ‘How could I not know that this was happening?’ They said, ‘Well, they had a meeting about it and you missed it,’” Turner said. “A meeting is certainly not enough. Maybe we do need a space corps, but I think this bears more than just discussions in a subcommittee. We have not had Secretary Mattis come before us and tell us what this means. We have not heard from the secretary of the Air Force. There’s a whole lot of work we need to do before we go as far as creating a new service branch.”

Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), a retired Air Force colonel, was similarly surprised by the Space Corps proposal. She said she had not been aware of it until it appeared in the bill the full committee debated on Wednesday.

“This is honestly the first time I’ve heard about a major reorganization to our Air Force,” she said Wednesday evening. “This is sort of a shocking way to hear about a very major reorganization to our military, and I think it deserves at least a couple hearings and discussions on the matter at the full committee level.”

But the measure, which would also establish a new U.S. Space Command and make the new chief of the Space Corps the eighth member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has the support of both Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the chairman of the full committee, and its ranking Democrat, Adam Smith (D-Wash.) The bill language was developed by Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), the top Republican and Democrat on the strategic forces subcommittee.

All of them argued Wednesday that the creation of a dedicated service for space had been studied for years, and that the idea’s time had come.

“There’s been nothing shortsighted about this,” Rogers said. “We started working on it vigorously in September, and we’ve had countless meetings with a number of experts who have advised us as to how this should be construed. In fact, this idea for a space corps as one of the solutions to Air Force space came from the Rumsfeld Commission in 2001. GAO has done three studies on this, all of which tell us that you cannot maintain the current organizational construct of the Air Force and solve the acquisition problems and the operational problems that we have. The Air Force is like any other bureaucracy. They don’t want to change.”

Cooper agreed, saying the creation of the new service would properly reflect space’s importance as a new warfighting domain, “whether we like it or not.”

“And space has not been given adequate priority by our friends in the Air Force,” he said. “They do many things wonderfully well, but this is a new area, a new responsibility that a corps would help us address more effectively. We could wake up one morning and be blinded and deafened by adversary powers, because so many of our most precious assets are up in space. The chairman has had countless meetings about this over 10 months. I don’t know where my friend from Ohio has been.”

The bill would order the Defense Department to establish the new corps by January 2019. It would be a distinct military service within the Department of the Air Force, in much the same way the Marine Corps operates as a service within the Department of the Navy. The Secretary of the Air Force would oversee both the Air Force and the Space Corps, but the new chief of staff of the Space Corps would be a new four-star position, co-equal with the chief of staff of the Air Force. DoD would have to deliver reports to Congress in both March and August of next year on the details of how it plans to set up the new service.

Smith, the full committee’s top Democrat, said that schedule left plenty of time to iron out any unanswered questions about the plan.

“I think it’s being done in a deliberate and intelligent manner,” he said. “Space has changed. We’ve already taken for granted for too long that we dominate space, and we don’t anymore. We need to be ready to confront this, and yes, buried deeply within the Air Force, you could do that, but it doesn’t get the priority it deserves, given how important it is and how it impacts everything that we do.”

Although the Air Force’s top leadership has not testified before the House on the proposed reorganization, the service’s secretary and chief of staff have both expressed opposition.

“My sense is that we have an opportunity being placed in front of us right now to take a look at what is the way we fight in the air, on land, at sea, and we take those processes, procedures, tactics, techniques, and actually apply them across the space domain,” Gen. David Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month. “And so right now, to get focused on a large organizational change would actually slow us down. I think it would actually move us in the wrong direction.”

But Thornberry said opposition from the Air Force is no reason for delay, pointing out that the Pentagon has a long history of fighting changes to its own organizational structures.

“It was Congress that created the Air Force and the Department of Defense in 1947 when it became time to force the Army and the Navy together, it was Congress that did Goldwater-Nichols,” he said. “There are times when an issue becomes ripe and it is our responsibility to act. I believe this is the time for us to act.”

On July 04 2017 04:31 Danglars wrote:
Quite a disturbing case of the state in loco parentis, when courts decide in the child's best interest in a case when they aren't being pressed to foot the bill.

On July 04 2017 04:31 Danglars wrote:

Trump wades into the sad case of CharlieGard


The Guardian

Some of the more outlandish aspects of this case, which limits its scope of applicability to generalized critique of socialized medicine:
The parents of this sick baby privately raised money for a treatment program in the US. The state has said that he must die with dignity, not that they won't pay for the treatment. Courts blocked Gard's trip to America. Which leads to some very sickening dialogue on the hospital allowing the family more time before they switch off his life-support, after denying the parents the right to bring the child home or seek care on their own dime elsewhere. The Court ruled that experimental treatment was not in the child's best interests, of course ending by thanking the parents for their brave campaign to raise money for the treatment they denied. Quite a disturbing case of the state in loco parentis, when courts decide in the child's best interest in a case when they aren't being pressed to foot the bill.

On July 04 2017 04:59 Nyxisto wrote:


Children aren't their parent's property (at least over here), if this is in the best interest of the child and treatment only prolongs suffering this is the reasonable decision to make.

On July 04 2017 04:59 Nyxisto wrote:


Children aren't their parent's property (at least over here), if this is in the best interest of the child and treatment only prolongs suffering this is the reasonable decision to make.

On July 04 2017 05:23 KwarK wrote:
In the U.K. infants are people who get the protection of the law, even when that is protection from their parents. Parents are entrusted to make decisions on behalf of their children but they do not own their children and can have those decisions contested by an advocate appointed on behalf of the child. It's not really a controversial subject in my opinion. Hell, in the US you prosecute faith healing parents who deny their children medical care. Same principle here.

On July 04 2017 05:23 KwarK wrote:
In the U.K. infants are people who get the protection of the law, even when that is protection from their parents. Parents are entrusted to make decisions on behalf of their children but they do not own their children and can have those decisions contested by an advocate appointed on behalf of the child. It's not really a controversial subject in my opinion. Hell, in the US you prosecute faith healing parents who deny their children medical care. Same principle here.

On July 04 2017 06:15 Danglars wrote:

Not even close to the same principle; faith healing vs experimental medical procedures. In the UK, once a child is admitted to a hospital, the state is entrusted to make the best decisions for the child instead of the parent. Just brief them on the child's name and what a panel says is the dignified way to die. It reminds me of a US case a while back when a bureaucrat was brought to a house or senate panel and argued that his department knew better how to raise a questioner's kids than the father himself.

On July 04 2017 06:25 Toadesstern wrote:

sometimes parents are making horrible decisions. Be it parents who have their children taken away because of drug abuse or some other reason they can't take care of them in a reasonable way.
If what was said here is true and the therapy/medicine isn't even ready to be used on mice I'd agree with Kwark. It's a sad story but what do you want to do about it.

On July 04 2017 06:15 Danglars wrote:

Not even close to the same principle; faith healing vs experimental medical procedures. In the UK, once a child is admitted to a hospital, the state is entrusted to make the best decisions for the child instead of the parent. Just brief them on the child's name and what a panel says is the dignified way to die. It reminds me of a US case a while back when a bureaucrat was brought to a house or senate panel and argued that his department knew better how to raise a questioner's kids than the father himself.

On July 04 2017 06:11 Danglars wrote:

Apparently they are wards of the state and the state's caprice rather than under their parent's care.

when a bureaucrat was brought to a house or senate panel and argued that his department knew better how to raise a questioner's kids than the father himself.

On July 04 2017 06:20 KwarK wrote:

Do you not think that a highly educated, highly experienced civil servant might know more about raising children than some parents do?
Or that doctors might know more than the parents of their patients? Doctors do not make recommendations contrary to the wishes of the parents lightly. The courts are not on a power trip here, they are involved because the doctors involved in the case have communicated that the infant needs an advocate and that the parents are failing in that role.

These decisions, too, were probably products of “compassion.” But the state does not suffer with the sick. Justice Francis did not “look at the question from the assumed point of view of the child,” as the law naïvely demands; Justice Francis looked at the question from Justice Francis’s point of view.

The question, then, is not what would Charlie Gard want — a question no one can answer. The question is what do we owe to people such as Charlie, who cannot speak for themselves? What duty of care do we owe them simply on account of their being human beings, who are by nature possessed of an inalienable dignity? What obligations do we have to those who suffer, and how should we understand their suffering? And, pertinent to this case, under what circumstances should the tightest bonds of affection — those between parent and child — be subordinated to the judgment of the state?

The precedent established by Charlie Gard’s case will metastasize, as similar decisions have. It will be made to apply to children with more-familiar illnesses and better prognoses; it will be used to dismiss the input of parents whose values and priorities when it comes to medical care and end-of-life issues do not align with those of the state; it may be used simply to clear beds for “worthier” patients in a health-care system with very limited resources. This, presumably, will be “compassionate,” too.

Any day now, they’ll kill Charlie Gard. But it’s in his own best interest. Don’t you see?

These decisions, too, were probably products of “compassion.” But the state does not suffer with the sick. Justice Francis did not “look at the question from the assumed point of view of the child,” as the law naïvely demands; Justice Francis looked at the question from Justice Francis’s point of view.

The question, then, is not what would Charlie Gard want — a question no one can answer. The question is what do we owe to people such as Charlie, who cannot speak for themselves? What duty of care do we owe them simply on account of their being human beings, who are by nature possessed of an inalienable dignity? What obligations do we have to those who suffer, and how should we understand their suffering? And, pertinent to this case, under what circumstances should the tightest bonds of affection — those between parent and child — be subordinated to the judgment of the state?

The precedent established by Charlie Gard’s case will metastasize, as similar decisions have. It will be made to apply to children with more-familiar illnesses and better prognoses; it will be used to dismiss the input of parents whose values and priorities when it comes to medical care and end-of-life issues do not align with those of the state; it may be used simply to clear beds for “worthier” patients in a health-care system with very limited resources. This, presumably, will be “compassionate,” too.

Any day now, they’ll kill Charlie Gard. But it’s in his own best interest. Don’t you see?

On July 04 2017 06:20 KwarK wrote:

Do you not think that a highly educated, highly experienced civil servant might know more about raising children than some parents do?
Or that doctors might know more than the parents of their patients? Doctors do not make recommendations contrary to the wishes of the parents lightly. The courts are not on a power trip here, they are involved because the doctors involved in the case have communicated that the infant needs an advocate and that the parents are failing in that role.