The Allied Worlds Space Force is the spacefairing military service of the Allied Worlds. The name "Space Force" was coined by analogy to various planetary or subplanetary government "space forces" or "aerospace forces," and not to distinguish it from other branches of the military - the Allied Worlds have no Army, Navy, or Air Force with which to contrast the AWSF. (The AW do have the Spaceborne Infantry, but these "space marines" are part of the AWSF and not a separate armed force.) The AWSF cooperates with system-level or planetary space forces, orbital guards, and law enforcement agencies, and provides transportation and logistics for other allied forces participating in planetary actions.

Its motto is Tuemini societatem!

History

The AWSF was formed after the Unification Wars as the standing military of the victorious Allied Worlds. Since then, it has participated in a handful of major conflicts over its long history, most in the first century and a half of the alliance, when the AW was more interventionalist in planetary affairs and many bounds were untested. The Allied intervention in the Dirac civil war was the most recent major conflict involving the AWSF, and interrupted roughly a century of peace.

The AWSF has in general had success in protecting space traffic from attempts at piracy and extortion.

Mission

The Allied Worlds face both actual and hypothetical threats to which the capabilities of the AWSF are targeted. The AWSF cooperates closely with local authorities and the GAW for law enforcement and counter-intelligence investigations, and assists with logistics and enforcement actions requiring spacecraft.

One actual threat is space piracy, which might more accurately be described as a form of extortion - pirates demand payment in exchange for not destroying valuable ships in some poorly secured region. (Often attacking with improvised drone ships controlled from covert mobile stations embedded in nearby civilian populations.) Space Piracy is the primary concern of the Orbital Guards, but many regions under the jurisdiction of the AW lack their own orbital guard and rely on the AWSF to provide that function, at least in part. AWSF patrols are made to deter this sort of crime.

The existence of the AWSF also frees member states from having to plan individually for common defence against hypothetical threats (invaders, etc.) Interstellar space forces are a huge capital expense, and the cost of supporting the AWSF tends to make having redundant interstellar space forces particular to a single state especially cost-prohibitive. This has the beneficial side effect of member state politicians not being able to threaten each other with them - care is taken to assure that the AWSF does not have superior loyalty to any one planet or member state within the AW.

The AWSF, necessarily being provided with a variety of flexible, long-range ships, has a humanitarian role in disaster relief, evacuation, emergency resupply of colonies and mining outposts, and so forth. Combined with security patrols and training exercises, this work constitutes the bulk of the AWSF's activity in the present.

Personnel

The AWSF is an all-volunteer organization, recruiting from all AW member states. It has its main training facilities on Thane and on a station orbiting Iridia. It is relatively small given the scope of its work, with around 48,000 personnel at the present time. (It was larger during the Dirac civil war intervention, and at various other times of major conflict; it has also in times of low tension been smaller.) Automation is used extensively but viewed as complementary to sentient beings.

The AWSF has comparatively high turnover, with many members viewing a term of service in the Space Force as a stepping stone to a career in commercial spaceflight or other fields.

The AWSF is open to all people, but Humans and Biran do normally serve on separate ships and facilities because of their different life support and habitat needs.

Fleet

The AWSF employs a number of types of spacecraft.

With the resolution of the Dirac civil war, the AWSF has been removing many craft from active service, mostly keeping them uncrewed in cold shutdown in high orbit around New Iridia. The Zheng He and Marco Polo are refits of rapid response ships that were considered surplus to defense needs and made available for the exploratory mission.