Cotton cautious of new force

U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, an Army veteran who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, raised doubts Thursday about the need for a sixth branch of the armed services to defend the co u n t r y ’ s interests in space.

While the final frontier must be a top priority, creation of a separate, independent Space Force could be inefficient, Cotton said during an interview with Arkansas Democrat- Gazette reporters and editors at the newspaper’s office in Little Rock.

Fielding questions for more than a half-hour, he addressed a variety of topics, including President Donald Trump’s trade policies and tweeting habits, Iran, the 2018 elections and marijuana legalization. Cotton’s comments came shortly after Vice President Mike Pence announced plans for a new Space Force, to be launched by 2020.

“I have some reservations about a sixth service that would create a whole new military bureaucracy as opposed to either a subordinate service or a functional combatant command,” the Republican from Dardanelle said.

The Space Force would be the first new military branch since the creation of the U.S. Air Force in 1947. Prior to that, the Air Force was a part of the Army.

Given the importance of satellites and the potential for space weaponry, the U.S. can’t afford to cede control of the heavens to other military powers, Cotton said.

“Space is a contested domain, just like land, air and sea. And we need a better focus on what’s happening in space. Right now it’s a little too fractured across our military and across the intelligence community, in my opinion,” he said.

A half-century after American astronauts first orbited the moon, the race for space supremacy has intensified.

“Space is a critical domain for the way we fight our wars today. We’ve seen that going back as far as the Persian Gulf War, the way we were able to mass forces, use precision-guided munitions and Global Positioning System for our troops,” Cotton said.

Operation Desert Storm liberated Kuwait in 1991 after its occupation by Iraq. An international coalition, led by the U.S., defeated the forces of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

“If you look at China’s military buildup over the last 30 years, it’s designed almost entirely to prevent what happened to Saddam Hussein in 1991 from happening in China and to ultimately exclude American influence and power from the western Pacific. That includes anti-satellite technology and space weaponry,” Cotton said.

As the U. S. military increases its focus on space, one option is to create “an entirely new service,” Cotton said.

The Space Force could also be “a service within the Air Force, like the Marine Corps is nested within the Navy. It could be a new combatant command like the special operations command or the transportation command or cyber command. What they do is they draw forces from the five services to focus on special operations or transporting soldiers and their equipment and materiel or combating cyberattacks and launching our own cyber offenses. It could be some kind of hybrid of those,” he added.

A subordinate service or combatant command might be better than an entirely new service branch, he added.

During Thursday’s interview, Cotton addressed other issues.

TRADE

Cotton portrayed Trump as a supporter of free trade.

“The president doesn’t necessarily want to start a trade war. He wants to end a trade war. A trade war that countries like China have been waging for a long time and which we’ve never really joined,” Cotton said.

Trump would be happy with “zero tariffs, zero barriers, zero quotas. … He’s trying to get other countries to sit down at the negotiating table and change their trading practices,” Cotton said.

MARIJUANA

Asked whether he foresees Congress codifying provisions protecting the medical marijuana industry, Cotton said: “Not in the near term. I’m doubtful. … I think the science is pretty clear that marijuana can have substantial negative effects on the cognitive mental development of our youth, and that anything that makes it easier to get a hold of marijuana is therefore going to make it easier to get into the hands of our youth, no matter what safeguards you put on it.”

Cotton said he is “very sympathetic” to those who want to use medical marijuana to ease the pain of terminally ill family members.

“I just worry … that the negative side effects outweigh those understandable desires,” he added.

Cotton