The U.S. Space Force—the only military branch born in the information age—has declared itself a “digital first” service. But its leaders are still wrestling with the challenges of digital transformation and working to build a 21st century service culture, they recently told attendees at an industry conference.
“One of our biggest challenges is getting all of our folks’ heads around a new way of doing business,” said Brig. Gen. Kevin G. Whale, a Royal Canadian Air Force officer on assignment to Space Operations Command, or SpOC, to serve as deputy commanding general for transformation. Whale spoke alongside other Space Force and U.S. Space Command leaders during AFCEA’s Space Force IT Day on Feb 10 as part of a panel discussion titled “Focus and Priorities from the Field.”
SpOC is the pointy end of the Space Force spear, the service’s field command—occupying the equivalent organizational rung of a major command in the Air Force—that provides capabilities to U.S. Space Command, the unified combatant command for the battlefield beyond the atmosphere.
Kaufmann bases these opinions on a new nationwide poll commissioned for the report that finds, for instance, that half of respondents ages 18 to 35 think that political correctness is a good thing because it protects against discrimination, while only a third of young adults thought it stifles free speech. And those attitudes come out in their reactions to concrete situations: “On average, people 18–25 are 20 points more likely to back a firing or no-platforming campaign” than those over age 50.
You may remember, for instance, when the internet company Mozilla fired its CEO, Brendan Eich, after his donations to the Proposition 8 campaign in California to define marriage as being between one man and one woman became public and led to outrage from the left. Kaufmann finds that “young people who are in the political center have a 50% chance of backing the firing of Eich, compared with centrist voters over 35 who have less than a 20% chance of doing so.”
Kaufmann’s numbers are disconcerting in themselves, but all the more so because they confirm a poll from the CATO Institute that had similar results. That poll found that 44 percent of Americans under age 30 supported firing a business executive if he or she donated to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. That is double the 22 percent support found among those over age 55.
The phenomenal success of the most recent Spider-Man instalment (about to take over Avatar’s mammoth box office) and the film’s many, many cameos have upped the ante for the next Marvel adventure, something the new tease of Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange 2 is certainly aware of. While we knew from the last trailer that Elizabeth Olsen’s tortured Wanda would be a major part, the new ad has confirmed a rumour that Patrick Stewart would be starring as well. It was a mere voice tease (and not enough to 100% confirm that he’ll be playing X-Men’s Professor Xavier although it seems very very likely) but just that alone managed to briefly break the internet. We’ll find out how their worlds collide in May.
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