Space — the final frontier. And it’s not just a geeky Star Trek fan greeting anymore. It’s the official motto of the Defense Department’s R & D boys and girls, who can’t wait until we control the heavens with our “Rods from God”:

With no fanfare, the Bush Administration is taking military control of what it terms “near space,” thereby laying claim to the area of the Solar System that lies between the Earth and the Moon’s orbit. “A key objective … is not only to ensure U.S. ability to exploit space for military purposes, but also as required to deny an adversary’s ability to do so,” is how the Pentagon’s 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review explained U.S. strategy. […]

According to the Space Command’s Strategic Master Plan, by 2025, the United States will have developed the capability to strike any target on Earth within minutes. To that end, the Pentagon is developing a space-based arsenal. These Star Wars weapons include laser-armed satellites—in military lingo, SBLs (Space-Based Lasers)—that will shoot down an enemy’s earth-launched missiles, destroy hostile satellites, and attack Earth-based enemy installations. Also on the drawing board are un-manned satellite gunships that would smash earthly targets with non-explosive tungsten rods. Such projectiles, known as “Rods from God,” would be so hard and traveling so fast that they could penetrate and destroy a four-story underground bunker. […]

Today, the obstacles standing in the way of U.S. space dominance are China’s budding space program and the European Space Agency’s plans to deploy the Galileo satellite system. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration is trying its best to persuade the European Union to put its space program under NATO control. And, this spring at the Space Warfare Center at Schriever Air Force Base, a space-based war game set in the year 2017 pitted the U.S. Blue Team against the Chinese Red Team. Participants at this year’s games were told not to get “bogged down in discussions about space law and policies, which disrupted the game’s military operations” in 2001.

Not exactly Star Wars, but certainly near space wars. More money for the military industrial complex. Another arms race, this time with China. More useless tax dollars wasted on conceiving the means to more efficiently kill non-Americans with little or no immediate risk to our soldiers manning the keyboards of these satellite based weapons. And we wonder why our democracy is failing, our infrastructure crumbling, our education system not educating and our health system falling apart. Maybe, just maybe, its because we’re so enamored with toys for our military to play with (and yes, that is sarcasm) that we forgot what our values principles, and morals used to be. We’d rather spend money on the means to destroy other human beings than on ways to make our lives, and theirs better.

Someday, as we huddle in our cardboard boxes watching the heavily armed conveys of the rich and famous pass us by, we will look up to the skies and see twinkling there the cause of our demise as a Republic: our obsession with military solutions to making us “safe and secure” from all harm. All harm, that is but the self-inflicted variety.