Did the bright-eyed enlistees of the Space Force join up thinking they’d one day be fighting alien invaders like they’re, we dunno, Master Chief?

Their jobs, in reality: drawing their weapons on imagined human invaders.

As the Associated Press reports, security at the Vandenberg Space Force base in California held five news reporters and two military officers at gunpoint because they thought they were intruders trying to crash the gates.

The snafu took place on Monday ahead of a groundbreaking ceremony for a new training facility for missile operators at a nearby federal airfield in Santa Barbara. 

Making this all the more egregious, the reporters and military personnel the base security detained had been invited to be there. That memo, clearly, wasn’t passed along.

A Space Launch Delta 30 public affairs spokesperson gave a statement addressing the incident, attributing it to a breakdown in communication — but didn’t offer much in the way of an apology.

“Vandenberg Space Force base is experiencing an increased number of unauthorized entry attempts,” the spokesperson said in the statement, per the AP. “Every potential unauthorized presence must be treated as a legitimate threat until proven otherwise. While we recognize this may have been unsettling, the security of the base and its personnel is our priority.”

According to the accounts of the reporters who were detained — they were from local outlets including Noozhawk and KEYT, via the AP — they and the military staff were part of a convoy being escorted on the base by uniformed public affairs staff in a government minivan. 

It’s about as official an entrance you can make, but security officers, apparently thinking this was some elaborate heist, suddenly ordered them out of their vehicles and drew their weapons. The two military members were handcuffed and placed in base vehicles, while the civilian reporters were ordered to sit on a curb. They were detained for more than 30 minutes, causing them to miss the event, before they were finally let free.

“We respect the military’s need to provide security for the base,” Noozhawk editor-in-chief Tom Bolton said in a statement Wednesday, as quoted by the AP. “But clearly what occurred was unfortunate and unnecessary, and potentially dangerous, as firearms were drawn.”

Are tensions really that nerve-bitingly high at a boring old Space Force base to warrant this kind of overkill response? Is this part of the Trump administration’s playbook of intimidating journalists, as it did when it issued subpoenas for five New York Times reporters who dared raise questions over the president’s gifted Air Force One from Qatar? Or maybe testosterone levels are just running too high, as Pete Hegseth planned.

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