From [HERE] You probably slept through it, but early this morning, the United States expanded the War on Terror to outer space.

The Air Force on Friday launched two spy satellites the military calls a “neighborhood watch” program in orbit.

Officially, the Air Force says its two Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program satellites will deter our enemies from conducting "hostile operations in space as an extension of the terrestrial battlefield,” Air Force spokeswoman Sarah Burnett told USA Today.

The military says its latest spy satellites will merely observe our existing satellites to make sure they don’t get hit by space junk or enemy missiles like the kind the Chinese and Russians are already developing.

Or as the pro-military Air Force Times put it, “So should a U.S. satellite mysteriously go offline, Air Force leaders could ... tell if it was a malfunction or an enemy attack that disabled the satellite.”

Forgive me if I feel less, not more, safe. For all the recently declassified talk of protecting our valuable space efforts, there’s one thing the Air Force won’t declassify: What devices are on these “neighborhood watch” satellites or even, as USA Today put it, “what they are up to.”

“The U.S. is not seeking to weaponize space,” Burnett said, unconvincingly. “Our goal is to work with all responsible space-faring nations to ensure a safe, secure, sustainable, and stable space environment."

The Air Force is spending about $10 billion on space operations — much of it in classified budgets. 

The goal is to speak loudly so that everyone knows America is carrying the big stick.

“We need to monitor what happens 22,000 miles above the Earth, and we want to make sure that everyone knows we can do so,” U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Douglas Loverro told Congress in 2014, when some details of the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program were declassified.

Space is the latest example of the ultimate American character flaw: we’re just not comfortable with foreign countries unless we can oversee what they’re doing and benefit from it somehow.

So maybe we’re not weaponizing space, but we certainly hope to Americanize it. One pending Congressional bill — called the “American Space Renaissance Act” — claims that action is needed “to permanently secure the United States of America as the preeminent spacefaring nation.”

The goal, of course, is to make sure we’re the top dog everywhere — even in zero gravity.

“Space has become a ubiquitous element of everything ... and leadership of the free world relies on,” retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula told the Air Force Times. “It’s very important to be on the leading edge of capitalizing on new technologies to keep us ahead of potential adversary moves.”

That includes Friday’s launch, as well as the Air Force's unmanned X-37B space plane, which has been in orbit for more than a year, yet whose mission has not been declassified. The military denies that its payloads include weaponry, but if the X-37B is on a peaceful mission, why is the Air Force running the program, not NASA? [MORE]