It's always seemed to me that a military space program was such an obvious and necessary thing that if the US doesn't have one, somebody's got some explaining to do.

The article describes what appears to be a half-century of consensus that the thing a military space program needs is a "military spaceplane" with rapid launch capabilities to capitalize on surprise. Again, if we don't have one by now, somebody's got some explaining to do.

Of course, none of that means we actually have a military space program.

Seems like all of the counterarguments developed on this thread have their own counterarguments, some of them unique to the notion of a supersecret program and the presumption that there's misdirection involved. Maybe the description of the sodium laser-corrected optics is wrong, but I'm not sure I'd call it the thread that would unravel the whole story. In something like this I'd go with the preponderance of evidence and try to correct for presumed misdirection...while trying not disappear into the funhouse maze. (This is why I love a good conspiracy tale!)

One of the easy arguments to demolish a conspiracy theory is the way that the difficulty of keeping something like this secret grows exponentially with its size, and a secret military space program would have to have some serious heft. In particular, I've always found that questioning where the funding comes from is a good way to deflate a conspiracy.

But I was fascinate to read the last part of the article, which suggests that funding came not in one hard-to-conceal big secret lump, but hidden in other budgets (the traditional way) and (I think representing a bureaucratic innovation) quite possibly in entire programs that, as far as the public knows, failed and shut down, but might in fact have succeeded and transferred their results back into the black realm. X-33, VentureStar, the aerospike engine with a "history"...one could imagine a supersecret master PERT chart with whole programs like that feeding into a master technology development plan for secret military spacecraft.

It coulda happened! But damn, I don't know that it did. But as I said when I started, it should have happened, and if it didn't, somebody's got some explaining to do.