The Military Reality Behind Star Wars

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2018

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's a blast from the past this week and Jason and Matthew get ready for 2018. Here's what we said back then:

From Star Wars to Battlestar Galactica, few battlefields are as fought over in pop-culture as space. Which makes sense. Since the end of World War Two, people have looked to the stars as the next great frontier of both exploration and warfare.

For the United States, the Space Race was about both prestige and gaining an advantage over its Cold War enemies. And since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, peopled have looked to the skies above and wondered if the next great war might take place in literal vacuum.

But according to David Axe, editor-in-chief of War Is Boring, the war in space won’t look anything like what Hollywood has long pictured. Slow moving robots, lasers and logistics will dominate combat above the skies.

In this week’s War College, Axe dispels the popular myths of space as a battlefield and let’s us know what’s really going on in Earth’s orbit. Axe describes how to weaponize existing satellites, the missiles America and China have developed to knock those satellites out of the sky and the low-cost plans the Pentagon has to maintain its edge in the stratosphere.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast.
0:02.0	Support this show through the A-Cast supporter feature.
0:05.0	It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment.
0:09.0	Just click the link in the show description to support now.
0:13.0	Hello, the War College listeners, it is I your humble host, Matthew Galt,
0:16.0	Jason Fields is shivering away in New York City, but that's okay because we have another rerun today date. The last one we promise. The holidays, they kind
0:27.0	of got us by surprise I was trapped in a time warp in Texas for a long time, much longer than
0:31.9	I anticipated, and Jason was trapped in the Northeast
0:35.0	in a cold front, much longer than he anticipated.
0:38.2	We do have some shows recorded, we are just putting them together.
0:41.3	We are excited about the way the show is going to look in
0:43.6	2018. We thought it might be fun today to look at a blast from the way back from
0:49.8	2015 from I think this is the sixth episode of the show that we had ever done.
0:54.0	It was the first time Jason and I had ever actually seen each other in the flesh.
1:00.0	And it was the only time in war college history where all of the participants of the conversation
1:05.3	were in the same room.
1:08.4	We're having a conversation here with editor-in-chief of Wars Boring David Axe about what a war in space might look like and why it's important.
1:20.0	Those are the kind of conversations we are having in 2015.
1:23.0	Oh, how naive we were.
1:25.0	Join us next week when we will have a brand new episode of War College,
1:29.0	but until then, here's David Axe on War in Space.
1:34.0	Nobody is actively mobilizing to fight in orbit,
	...

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