Col. Jack Wassink is a former Marine Corps jet jockey with a weird new mission. This blunt, 45-year-old chief of the Marine Corps’s tiny Space Integration Branch in Quantico, Virginia, shepherds the Marines’ radical vision of space warfare.
Unlike the Air Force, Navy and Army, all three of which sponsor expensive satellite programs, the cash-strapped Marines are pushing just one space concept. It’s called Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion, or SUSTAIN, and it’s a reusable spaceplane meant to get a squad of Marines to any hotspot on Earth in two hours — then get them out. The idea is to reinforce embattled embassies, take out terrorist leaders or defuse hostage situations before it’s too late. “The Marine Corps needs [this] capability,” Brig. Gen. Richard C. Zilmer told Congress in 2004.
“The Corps has always been an expeditionary force, a force of readiness, a 911 force,” Wassink says. “All SUSTAIN is, is a requirement to move Marines very rapidly from one place to another. Space lends itself to that role.”
Read more at Military.com. And check out Marines who aren’t in space at my Flickr … and in black and white in my graphic novel WAR FIX.
Ermmmm…. Isn’t this getting kinda… Delusional?
Delusional? Nah, it’s a whole squad of Marines! The sonic boom announcing their arrival will just add to the element of surprise. Just think about what we could have done with them in Mogadishu. Besides, this thing has got to cost tens if not hundreds of billions, providing a great economic boost to our economy.
So what are the SEAL’s good for if the Marines get their space vehicle?
Right, see, I still believe cap troopers are somewhere in our future (praise be to Saint Heinlein), but somehow my crystal ball says the time is not yet upon us.
For the money this would cost a handful of infantry are a little underwhelming. And what sort of launch vehicle are they looking at? Obviously something less succeptible to weather delays is in order. The Spaceship One method has some promise, although it might require two new airframes instead of one. I don’t think NASA’s old B-52H will be up to this.
And they should wear power armor. Yeah! And have flamethrowers! And miniguns!
It’s the job of guys at home on the internet and those watching poorly made slide shows at DARPA symposiums (with their Heinlein and Warhammer collections at home and dominating their subconscious) to be delusional.
Everyone of them is just dying to see exoskeletal body armor that can sustain unenforced marines for days at a time and allow them to survive tank rounds to the face.
However, sometimes, this stuff just makes me laugh. For example the jerk with the slideshow at DARPA SYMP 2004 who decided implanting artificial genetic “organs” that produce HGH and adrenaline at will, as well as let Marines go without sleep for weeks was an implementable good idea by 2015.
No thought to going home after having your brain put in a 4 year hormonal and chemical blender set to “kill”. I’m glad he wasn’t back at 2005, but the way his words put a twinkle in the eye of the other geeks there…
So what are the SEAL’s good for if the Marines get their space vehicle?
I think the solution is pretty obvious. Clearly the SEAL’s need a tunneling delivery vehicle. Drilling through the center of the earth is lots more stealthy than blasting into orbit.
And when LockheedMartin/Boeing/Raytheon start cranking out the PowerPoint slides for the must-have “Mole SEAL” gadget, I want a piece of the action. All I ask is a puny 0.00000001% — about a billion or so.
Why not teleport them into combat…
Also, I here halfnium grenades are all the rage.
All sorts of new tech seems silly until you have it, then you often wish you’d had it sooner.
Okay, we’ve now inserted a squad deep in a hostile country to reinforce an embassy…now, who rescues them? We’re expecting the squad to hold out for days while the MEU steams at full speed to the “hot spot”? Or, we’ve sent them to kill a terrorist leader deep in some central asian country and expect them to hike out? Has anybody thought beyond the testosterone rush?
Sub Orbital flight that would be needed to drop these guys anywhere in the world in just a few hours was show to be fairly cheap and very much within our grasp by the X-prize. There are obviously a number of large obsticals to overcome in order to drop marines into a point target without killing them but it could be done with some R&D. The Marines are just starting to look into this knowing how many of the leaps in tech have already been made but still keeping an eye on the future.
As to what happens to the squad once they are there? Same thing that happens to para born troups I would think.
Ripley!