Extraterrestrial Conflict
Right now, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains of the American West, there are two teams of Air Force specialists preparing to defend America’s interests — in space. They are the 26th Space Aggressor Squadron(26th SAS) and the 527th Space Aggressor Squadron (527th SAS), and their job consists of training the rest of the military for any possible contingency involving extraterrestrial combat and creating strategies to defend the security of any U.S. interests in space.
In other words, they play the role of the bad guys on a potentially intergalactic scale, “attacking” and provoking U.S. troops in mock space battles — as foreign countries and any other hostile power looking to threaten America in space. Space Aggressors train troops to make strategic use of space resources, for example by engaging in “brute force jamming,” which uses satellite networks to transmit signals to make any original message unintelligible to outsiders. However, they also train U.S. forces to fight without space resources, such as GPS and satellite communications, to ensure that they can competently fight using inertial navigation systems, compasses, and maps.
“We study threats to the space realm, either coming from space or based on land,” 26th SAS chief of training Captain Christopher Barnes told Seeker. “If we can’t directly replicate them with hardware, then we figure out if there’s a software solution or some way we can train people to the point where they can fight through them, if they have to, in a conflict.”
