Chapter 349 Follow the Leader
After a lengthy standing ovation, the reporters finally came to their senses, remembering that the press conference notice had mentioned that they would be allowed to ask questions. And once they finally came to their senses and remembered they were there for a press conference, not a press briefing, hands rose among the crowd.
Trump pointed to one of the reporters he knew in the front row. “You first, go ahead.”
“Are you indicating that you’re closing the door on the option of a unified world military?” asked the correspondent from Fox News.
“No, we aren’t doing that. We’re starting by ourselves because America is the leader of the free world and it’s time for us to step up and lead. We’ll eventually come to an agreement, but by taking the reins now, we’ll be able to get a headstart so the time we spend closing the deal isn’t wasted,” he answered. His press corps had already given him a list of questions that would likely be asked and prepared him ahead of time. He pointed to the next reporter, the correspondent from Breitbart. “Your turn, go ahead.”
“There were three plans presented to the security council. Why didn’t we propose our own, and which of the three plans will your administration support?”
“We’re still weighing our choices, but thankfully it was me that won the election. If it was Clinton, who knows what kind of mess we’d be in now?” The White House Press Corps staffer standing behind the cameras paled and broke out into a cold sweat. The president was going off script again. “Such a mess, so many messes. My administration will choose only the best plan after carefully weighing the options. Only the best,” Trump said. He knew the Breitbart audience and what they wanted, so he would give it to them in order to keep their attention focused on him. He silently sighed, then pointed to the correspondent from MSNBC. He still had to at least appear fair, after all.
“What do you think will happen to countries that can’t afford to create a space force, like you just directed our country to do?”
“They can invest money then, or researchers. R&D is still needed at the moment and even if they aren’t as smart as we are or as rich as we are, they can at least deliver coffee and push mail carts.” He pointed to the correspondent from CNN.
“Wouldn’t every country forming their own space branches while the talks are ongoing create a strategy clash as each country fights to have the world adopt their strategies and doctrines?”
“That’s part of the reason I directed the formation of a space force today. I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman. And a good one, too. So good. And even the worst businessman knows the benefit of being first to market and I’m far from the worst. Politicians like to talk, talk, talk, but soon they’re gonna realize that we left them all in the dust and, in a year at most, the whole thing will be settled and we’ll still be on top. So it’ll be our space force that leads, and our doctrine that they follow, and our strategies that they enact, I promise you that.”
The Q&A session lasted longer than most, and Trump mostly answered them well. He stuck mainly to allowing the media outlets that supported him to ask questions and avoided the unfriendly reporters until he wrapped up the conference and left.
......
The reaction to Trump’s announcement was immediate. The Americans, at least, calmed down and returned mostly to normal when they saw that something was being done. It could be compared to the reaction after the attacks in 2001, where there was an initial panic until the government stepped in and announced a concrete plan on how to prevent it from happening again. The same thing happened with the discovery of extraterrestrials now, and the same approach to calming the public had worked again.
And the calm period hadn’t arrived for America alone, but also for the rest of the world. Or most of it, at least. In North Korea, there had never been a mass panic to begin with, as the government hadn’t informed the regular citizens of the discovery at all in the first place. Kim Jong-Un was patting himself on the proverbial back over having foreseen the period of mass panic and solving it before it could even start.
Another reason the panic had died down in the rest of the world was because of the common belief in America’s strength. After all, America had been the world police for decades, and generally speaking, when they said they would solve a problem... the problem was soon solved.
One way or another.
Besides, now that the United States had acted, their opponents would do the same, if only to not be left behind or left vulnerable. After all, a space force was just another army, albeit one that could be used to attack anywhere on Earth.n/-OvElBIn
And the people weren’t wrong, either, as hours after Trump’s announcement, Russia and China announced the formation of their space forces as well, if differently named. For Russia, it was the Roscosmos Armed Forces, and in China, it was the Chang’e Guardian Force.
China and Russia also announced that they would be ramping up their production of nuclear weapons, as they believed only those would be useful in space warfare. They were the strongest weapons humanity had developed over its entire existence, and with the radiation contamination being a non-issue in the vacuum of space, they were perfectly suited for ship-to-ship combat.
As for the rest of the countries in Europe, they each announced they would be negotiating as a single body, the EU. They had already opened a dialogue with the American government to see if they could share the financial burden between the many countries in the EU and America, but if that didn’t work, they would be forming their own European Space Navy as a single military entity.
As relative normalcy returned to the world, people looked for opportunities to profit and a new market bubble was blown. Analysts and trendsetters, like Warren Buffett, believed that the space boom would go even further than the dot-com bubble in the late 90s.
With the formation of a new market bubble, companies that had something to do with space, such as SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, and Maxar Technologies, experienced a meteoric rise on the stock market, hitting the limit every day. People heavily invested in them with the belief that their shares would continue increasing in value nonstop over the next decade or two.
The legitimate companies weren’t really a problem. In fact, they were a great opportunity for everyone, and something that Aron had envisioned as part of his unified research program idea, but there were still problems. Shitty companies began appearing one after another, promising that they had The SolutionTM to everything and attempting to take their companies public as soon as possible. That said, nobody but the poor people were fooled by their claims; rich people could already recognize them for what they were: a pump-and-dump scam, where the company would cook their books and make wild claims in order to attract investors and drive their share prices up, then dump all of those shares after they made enough of an increase, pocketing the difference.
It was absolutely against the law, but for some strange reason, the Securities and Exchange Commission either didn’t have the time or lacked the interest in pursuing the companies that had obviously been formed specifically to break that very law.
