We'll be ready to fight the aliens when they come!

I was talking with my fellow wise men the other day about how ridiculously far ahead of any enemies (technologically, that is) the US armed forces not only are, but want to be. In case you missed the last 20 years, our only competitor in either aerial or naval technology was the Soviet Union. Now, the European Union is going to air a fighter very soon which is probably better than our current generation of fighters, but remember, our current generation is almost three decades old. They may be competitive with the F-22, but we're already developing even better fighters than that (the JSF). Still, no one is competitive in the water. Not by a long shot. When the Chinese finally get to tooling around in fleets of diesel boats, we'll have been cruising in nuclear powered ships for 50 or 60 years. We're developing a nuclear boat that is more stealthy and more powerful than our current generation of subs, so by the time they have nuclear subs, they'll be about 70 or 80 years behind us technologically. And yet we'll be developing technologies that bring us a century or more ahead of anybody else's. And don't forget the army, ours is the most technologically advanced in the world. And when we finally put the Future Combat System in the field and enemies see our cyborg soldiers, there's no doubt they'll have seen nothing like them before.

And yet none of this is good enough. Evidently, we must be ready to fight in space before the time comes. Now, given human nature, I don't doubt that people will fight in space. There may, some day, be space pirates or giant space colonies who take to fighting. However, let's keep in mind that neither Virgin Galactic nor Blue Origin have taken even one flight, much less the thousands needed to push into space, nor is anyone in the world even considering space superiority. Well, except us, that is.

The US Air Force has just put out a request for proposal for a "Gaming and Training Environment for Counter Space Operations." In other words, they're ready for Ender's Game. Or maybe Space Wars.

The proposed intent of the software is to develop tactics, techniques and procedures relating to four key tasks: detect, identify, track and disrupt activities from space vehicles. In part, the request states:

This effort will explore the training utility of developing a gaming environment where these tasks can be trained and rehearsed in a realistic set of scenarios and simulations. The environment will need to have object models to simulate interactions between satellites and ground stations, model track data, display raw sensor data, and have the capability for multiple players to participate and to provide command and control and other tactical and operational information and interaction to the game.

I'm just wondering who or what they'll be training to fight? Will the enemies come in a variety of dish-shaped ships? Well, if it comes to it, there are a variety of sci-fi computer games out there that deal with space warfare. Instead of costing the taxpayers millions of dollars on custom software, perhaps they should just get Starcraft!