Speaking to an audience of military personnel in California earlier this year, United States President Donald Trump unveiled his scheme to create a sixth branch of the US military: the "space force".
According to Trump's version of the story, the idea had unfolded as follows: "I was saying it the other day cos we're doing a tremendous amount of work in space. I said maybe we need a new force; we'll call it the space force. And I was not really serious, and then I said what a great idea, maybe we'll have do do that."
Of course, such flashes of creative brilliance are to be expected from the man who self-identifies as "a very stable genius".
It seems, however, that the whole space force notion may not have materialised in as spontaneous a fashion as Trump has implied. As CNN pointed out, the idea for a "space corps" as a distinct military branch surfaced last year but was ultimately "nixed from the final version of the $700 billion bipartisan defence policy bill".
Rewind a bit further in time, and we find that a similar suggestion was also put forth in 2001 by a commission headed by soon-to-be US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Anyway, facts are flexible in the Trumpian era. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.