Over the weekend, President Trump shared a design for a new “service dress uniform” for the members of the United States Space Force on his Truth Social account. The design image, featuring close-up details of a collar insignia, shoulder details, sleeve patches, and belt buckle, reads that it was “inspired by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper Uniform. Modernized for the Guardians of the Space Domain.” (Guardians are the Space Force’s equivalent of the Air Force’s airmen or the Navy’s sailors.)
That is a curious choice of inspiration. Starship Troopers, a sci-fi war movie directed by Paul Verhoeven, the filmmaker behind Basic Instinct and Showgirls, was a huge flop in 1997. The movie was based on the novel by Robert A. Heinlein about a future where humanity is at war with a race of alien “Arachnids” that look like giant monstrous bugs.
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Verhoeven told Empire Magazine he disliked Heinlein’s book and mostly took the assignment as a means to subvert the material, turning what he saw as a “right-wing book” into a film that was a dark satire about the dangers of fascism. As he put it…
It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn’t read the thing. It’s a very right-wing book. And with the movie we tried, and I think at least partially succeeded, in commenting on that at the same time. It would be eat your cake and have it. All the way through we were fighting with the fascism, the ultra-militarism. All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, ‘Are these people crazy?’
The U.S. Space Force was established in 2019, during Trump’s first term in office. Although Starship Troopers performed poorly with critics and audiences on its initial release, it did receive two direct-to-video sequels in 2004 and 2008 and is now widely regarded as a cult film.
At this point, the Space Force uniform design is just that; conceprt art. We’ll see whether any military officers ever don these Starship Troopers-esque looks. Either way, I remain totally uninterested in fighting the Arachnids. Those things are terrifying.
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