The zombie idea of nuclear missile defense returns with the announcement of President Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile shield, a program so stupid and costly that it could make the F-35 follies look like a side show. An orbital anti-missile system is a dream come true for the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), but a nightmare for taxpayers and a dangerously destabilizing aggravation of international arms racing. Observing the saga of missile defense is like being a character in the film “Groundhog Day.” Since the 1960s, over and over, the Pentagon has issued declarations of the imminent success of their missile defense projects, and year after year tests and battlefield events demonstrate that these systems cannot reliably intercept missiles. So I will again attack this zombie idea.
Golden Dome depiction for low-information voters
Learning the Wrong Lessons
Israel’s Iron Dome system, whose example inspired Trumps missile defense boondoggle, has effectively intercepted hundreds of crude Palestinian short-range rockets. Israel’s Arrow and David’s Sling long-range missile interceptors have been able to shoot down older Iranian and Yemeni medium-range ballistic missiles. What Israel has not been able to do is intercept the latest Iranian missiles that incorporate terminal maneuvering.The weakness of Israel’s missile defense capability was demonstrated On October 1 of last year, when about 30 Iranian missiles struck military targets, effectively penetrating missile defenses. For the last few weeks, Israelis have been going to bomb shelters every time Yemen launches a missile toward Israel, clear evidence that Israel does not have a reliable missile defense capability.
It is a conceptually straightforward engineering problem to intercept a missile flying on a ballistic trajectory. Newton’s laws govern the flight path of a ballistic missile, and radars and computers can steer an interceptor to meet the incoming missile if it is in range and time permits. However, deviations from a predictable ballistic trajectory create problems which the interceptor missile may not be able to overcome. Iran has developed warheads that alter their speed and trajectories as they approach targets, thus enabling them to evade interception. Iran has also used decoys to overwhelm missile defenses. Similar methods have been used by Russian missiles in the Ukraine war, where U.S. supplied Patriot missile interceptors frequently fail to destroy incoming targets.
Iron Dome – Trump’s inspiration
Instead of recognizing the shortcomings of missile defense technology, Trump has boasted of his intention to emulate the “success” of Israel’s Iron Dome, but on a vastly greater scale, making the U.S. impervious to enemy missile attack. Without any technical justification, Trump intends to spend billions on an unproven orbital missile defense system with a potentially unbounded ultimate cost, all while the U.S. runs unsustainable budget deficits.
Trump’s grandiose Golden Dome program is an aspirational project that has no documented proof of feasibility and thus faces major technological hurdles. This decision is an unfortunate echo of the Reagan administration’s ill-fated Star Wars missile defense program, which also briefly considered orbital missile interceptors. After many decades spent chasing the dream of missile defense, all the U.S. has produced is a few dozen ground based ICBM interceptors deployed in California and Alaska, with a testing success record of about 50%. The Army’s Patriot and THAAD systems have had mixed results against modern short-range missiles, and the Navy’s costly SM-3 was barely able to defend against relatively unsophisticated Houthi missiles in the Red Sea.
Orbital Defense Problems
The initial $25 billion commitment to the Golden Dome program in the current proposed defense budget is based on unproven theoretical concepts for orbital missile interception. Orbital interceptors face the same difficulties as ground-based systems. The issues are summarized in the following table.
As the table shows, for every missile defense measure, there is a countermeasure that the defensive system must cope with. Orbital interceptors have the positional advantage of striking in the relatively long mid-course phase of an ICBM’s flight, but they still must deal with the unsolved problem of decoy discrimination, and they are still faced with the unfavorable arithmetic of a saturation attack. Even if, by some miracle, all technical obstacles are overcome, there remain low-flying cruise missiles and nuclear torpedoes, weapons that can slip under the Golden Dome.
Burevestnik – flying under the Golden Dome?
The Sky is Not the Limit for Golden Dome Spending
Golden Dome will be a bonanza for the MIC because orbital missile defense systems are very costly. We are not talking about cheap and cheerful Starlink satellites that are mass produced and launched dozens at a time. Elements of Golden Dome will require extraordinarily capable sensors, complex interceptor missiles, and elaborate, secure, command and control equipment. With no commercial competitive pressure, the MIC vendors will set the hardware prices to levels that are out of this world. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has already estimated that the space-based components of the Golden Dome could cost between $161 billion and $542 billion over a 20-year span. Given the history of runaway defense programs, this estimate is likely to be very optimistic.
Once Golden Dome has sensors and interceptors in orbit, there will never be enough of them. The spacing of the interceptors in their orbits determines their minimum reaction time to make an intercept of an incoming missile, so the more interceptors in various orbits, the better the chances of mid-course interception. Decisions to include launch phase and terminal phase interception capability would add further to the desired quantity of orbital components. But why stop there? What about the 800 U.S. military bases worldwide and U.S. allied nations? Shouldn’t they be under a global Golden Dome? All of the increasingly numerous orbital assets would need constant upgrades as better hardware is developed, and there would be a steady need for replacement satellites because low Earth orbits decay after 5-10 years. Thus, the total lifecycle cost of Golden Dome is potentially unbounded. This project is a vision of paradise for U.S. defense corporations.
Racing to Ruin
Geopolitical strategists have long maintained that ICBM defense systems are dangerously destabilizing because they can provide an incentive to conduct a first strike against an adversary that lacks a defensive shield. Even a partially effective defensive system might be sufficient to block the retaliatory strike of an adversary weakened by a successful first strike. In the nuclear era, defense planners must make conservative decisions and prepare against capabilities, not intentions. It was the development of the feeble U.S. missile defense systems begun in the Reagan era that led Russia to produce hypersonic maneuvering ICBM warheads and long range nuclear torpedoes, Moreover, an ignorant or overconfident leader might act aggressively, mistakenly believing that the missile shield is highly effective, thus raising the risk of nuclear war by miscalculation. Thus, Trump’s missile shield program, however faulty, will lead to a new cycle of arms racing, increase the risk of nuclear war, and squander U.S. economic resources. This is good news for U.S. arms makers but very bad news for the rest of us.
Conclusion
Trump’s Golden Dome would leak like a sieve if ever the terrible day of a nuclear missile attack arrives. Its inability to deal with an onslaught of thousands of ballistic targets, maneuvering hypersonic warheads, and low-flying cruise missiles would result in catastrophic damage to the U.S. The proposed system would make us less safe by destabilizing nuclear deterrence and aggravating arms racing. Even if we avert the horror of nuclear war, the heavy cost of Golden Dome will be borne by all Americans. The terrible waste of misguided military spending was eloquently described in a 1953 speech by President Eisenhower:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Now, thanks to Trump, Americans will be upgraded to hanging from a leaky dome of gold.
Thanks. Excellent report.
In Trump’s zeal to be Reagan 2 perhaps he should take another shot at Nicaragua. Is Ollie North still around? Plus it’s a good site for another canal should the Panama thing not work out.
Per Wikipedia, there have been a dozen US military deployments to Nicaragua since 1853. Interestingly, they don’t list the 1980s Contra involvement as a deployment.
Grenada will always remain the greatest military victory the United States ever achieved. The US is still resting on its laurels over that one.
Ah, Grenada. Gunship Diplomacy at its finest.
i cant remember, was that about nutmeg, or commies?
As I believe Harry Seagoon said, “That’s where the grenades come from! Duck!”
regret to say that you’re mistaken. but he did say, “duck’s disease! the curse of the seagoons.“
Isn’t Granada the one where the Granadan army and those Cuban engineers were causing so many problems for the invasion force that the US was forced to deploy every reserve that they had? And when it was over, more medals were awarded than there were US troops that went into that island? The Sands of Iwo Jima it was not.
Actually putting the satellites up could lead to war. Which country owns low earth orbit?
Say Russia responds by putting their satellites right next to the American ones and these Russian ones are designed to destroy the American ones?
That very possibility was the premise of Warday by Whitley Schreiber and James Kunetka (pub. 1984). The US is on the verge of deploying a anti-ballistic missile defense system (“Spiderweb”). The Soviets decide that this will be the prelude to an American first strike, so…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warday
Thank you for the article, and the excellent quote from Eisenhower, a significant military general and President who certainly knew weaponry, global politics, regime change (some via his own doing) and saw the true cost of it all.
Any knowledge as to the circumstances of that 1953 speech?
Good question. I’ve seen the quote many times but never checked out the context before. Noble words to be sure, but apparently the quote was not aimed so much at wasteful US military spending as one might assume, but rather it was more of a jab at the Soviet Union – https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-chance-for-peace-delivered-before-the-american-society-newspaper-editors
Quite a bit of hypocrisy and irony if you read the whole thing. Eisenhower seems to ignore his own advice given earlier in the same speech –
“Fourth: Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.”
Maybe I should read the entirety of Ike’s oft quoted farewell speech about the military industrial congressional complex too…
Thanks for the link! (excellent resource I didn’t know about)
It’s true that Eisenhower saw the “true cost of it all”, the MIC. In fact, I think he waited until the end of his term to present that speech because if he’d have pushed against them during his presidency, he would have been killed like the Kennedys, MLK and the two attempts (so far) to take out Trump. He knew their control of the US was all encompassing and of course, still is.
Ike wasn’t wrong, but MIC won that fight long ago. Thanks for the concise illustration of the latest cash-grab.
“Golden Dome” makes me think of a sweaty bald man with jaundice, which I suppose could fit as an analogy somewhere.
Extending the analogy; a New Yellow Peril?
Preparing for a Chinese missile attack is not enough. We must also prepare for zombie pandemics and alien invasions.
Honestly, this is just thinly disguised grift. US military has made a habit of putting weapons through an extended development cycles that line the pockets of the military-industrial complex without actually producing working weapons systems. Zumwalt destroyer, Littoral combat ship Ground Combat Vehicle, M1229, M10 Booker, Manned Ground Vehicles, ARRW, etc. It’s a long list of failed projects, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Golden Dome on it in a few years.
To be fair, Lockheed Martin does not seem to be proposing anything like orbital defense. Trump seems to be slapping a name on existing and already planned systems. I’m not seeing anything as exotic as what was contemplated under “Star Wars”.
The US killed the ABM treaty way back in 2002, so there’s nothing stopping anyone from working on ICBM/nuke interceptors–Russia and China have been doing so. It’s just a question of whose MIC can deliver reasonable results. As Haig says, a system that works so well it would upset the big-power nuclear balance is unlikely from anyone… but particularly the Western MIC.
What this would mean is a nuclear weapons arms race.
The purpose of a missile defense was always to destroy the majority of the enemy nuclear weapons in a first strike (ideally around 90 percent), then rely on the missile defense to absorb most of the 10 percent of the enemy’s nuclear weapons that survived the first strike. That was the idea behind winning a nuclear war.
Although ineffective, it forces the Russians and Chinese to respond by developing a new generation of even deadlier nuclear weapons (which the Russians have already been doing since the original Reagan Star Wars SDI, resulting in weapons like the Topol and now the Sarmat ICBM), along with their own missile defense.
As they are going to be not profit driven, and based on the results of the most recent conflicts, my bet is that the US is going to fall further behind the Russians and Chinese at missile defense. Russia’s air defenses have been doing pretty well in Ukraine.
Interesting!
To destroy most of Russia’ retaliatory weapons would toss enough debris to spur nuclear winter.
However ABM treaty was to address this type of arms race.
US has not fared well since abandoning ABM. No progress from 40 years of Star Wars.
If the MIC does no better than past $500 billion will be wasted.
For example: Ground BasedMidcourse is a 3 stage missile that launches a kill vehicle that is faulty, but deployed and on alert. MIC launch reliably for satellites is dismal.
Golden Dome is grift.
The depiction of the Golden Dome is flawed. To work, especially when considering Phase 1 and Phase 2, shouldn’t the sensors and space based interceptors be positioned all around the entire world?
All objects in low Earth orbit are positioned around the entire world, because they are orbiting Earth.
The song Eight Miles High seems appropriate. The instrumental portion is not soothing and the lyrics can have several meanings. Could easily be the closing song for an Armageddon type film.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Il9q397lL0&pp=ygUaZWlnaHQgbWlsZXMgaGlnaCB0aGUgYnlyZHM%3D
Poseidon says “Hi”
Are they even thinking about the subs with nukes?
“They” are imagining “subs” in space, with nukes.
Really, no nukes needed. Basic old “Rods from Gods” will do the trick without fission byproducts to worry about. Drop a ‘guided’ asteroid on the oppositions homeland. Anyone with space flight capability can play that game.
Maybe there is a switch and bait going on. The talk is of a Golden Dome but perhaps the true intention is the militarization of space – which directly contradicts the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. You have had goons from the US Space Force say that the purpose of that organization is to “dominate” space and “deny” it to other nations so it is another warfighting domain. They also said that the USSF has to dominate space first before any other country dominates it first which is kinda a self-fulfilling prophecy. Will we see nukes in orbit over the earth to overawe other nations resisting US hegemony? I think that there may be plans on the board to replace the International Space Station with a space station under the USSF eventually. Because of the costs though, I would imagine that DC would demand that all their vassals would kick in money and resources to build it in the spirit of “cooperation” – or else. If this is the future then I can only pray for a Kessler Effect to kick in to deny space for everyone. We would lose a lot but that would be a small price to pay to avoid orbital nukes, now passing overhead in a town near you.
my dad worked at nasa(JSC,for Lockheed, apollo12=>skylab), so ive been paying attention to this sort of thing for literally as long as i can remember.
USA! space domination is a ship that sailed away and crashed into the pacific a long time ago.
and Musk and Bezos, et alia, are poseurs.
China would be my bet…and remember how many scifi stories have Chinese Taikonauts doing their thing(2010 a space odyssey)…or even all the chinese slang in Firefly?
If your business relies on a platform you don’t have a business F35/F47 version… can’t wait for the Golden Dome arrangements
Allvin: Air Force owns more tech on F-47, dodging F-35 mistake antiwar.com
No wonder the US is 2 generations behind Russia and China.
The US is not a serious nation. Otherwise fee-fees would be hurt.
I’m pretty sure the US with the Civil War and WW II showed that government central planning wins wars and putting collars and leashes on business people keeps them from undermining a nation’s goals.
Reaganesque Zappa-–>
Missile defense has become a significant factor in today’s wars.
It is very difficult for the layman to obtain accurate information concerning the capabilities or performance of the various missile defense systems. Media reports, whether of success or failure, are likely to be disinformation. In any case, we won’t really know unless, God forbid, there’s a “big show.”
I do know, however, that several of the major technical obstacles to the Reagan-era SDI have been overcome (e.g. lack of computing power). I also know that successive US administrations, regardless of stripe, have continuously pursued development of missile defense systems, for over forty years.
Trump or Harris, this thing was going ahead (maybe she would call it “Joyful Dome,” or “Rainbow Shield.”)
You could say it’s all just MIC corruption. But that’s true of much military expenditure–grift and incest. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the weapons are bad. Krupp was cozy with the German gov’t, but their guns seem to have worked.
Even with a trillion bucks a year, a lot of proposals get denied (e.g. the multi-billion plan to remodernize the battleships.) Those with license to spend, will give to their friends, but they still buy some things rather than others. I see that they keep buying missile defense, for over forty years straight.
Of course, “defense” in this context is tactical. Strategically, these are offensive systems, meant to restore the first-strike potential.
For my part, I had grown comfortable with the strategic nuclear parity, based on the robust second-strike capability of the USA and USSR, that prevailed through the 1970’s and ’80’s. The return of “normalcy” to nuclear warfare, i.e. that nuclear attack and defense are now more closely competitive, with the relative advantage now with one, now with the other, as is the case with most other areas of warfare, presents me with an inconvenient truth.
It may soon become possible that somebody could get nuked, without everybody getting nuked. Therefore, somebody is going to get nuked. That “somebody” is a lot of people, and the world will go on, without them. That thought saddens me more than the thought of Apocalypse. It seems more forlorn.
I posted this late in last links but maybe also appropriate here. Apologies for my redundancy.
I watched a lot of live war porn on TV during the 1st Gulf War. I, like many, had a ring-side seat for much of what was happening, presented on my TV. One time I was watching a wide night view of Isreal and the dark skys above the land.
So in the upper-right of my screen I watched a missle trace coming down toward the center ground. No doubt an incoming SCUD missle. As this entered the screen I saw, coming up from the ground in the lower-right another missle leaving a trail heading up toward what must have been the SCUD path. No doubt this was a Patriot missle.
The Patriot seemed to head accurately toward the SCUD trace but when I expected where the two trajectories seemed to cross on the TV screen I was viewing, nothing happened.
I don’t recall if I saw an explosion on the ground where the SCUD was heading, but I do recall thinking about my imagined parabolic path of the unexploded Patriot and seconds later I saw a big flash on the ground in the distance around where that Patriot coming down might have been expected.
So since that time, where my eyes saw this event captured on TV, I have assumed that the stories of what the Patriots were doing to stop SCUDs was largely bullshit.
Now, 30-plus years later, maybe the Patriots have had many improvements. Or, maybe they still suck.
Until proven otherwise I shall retain my early 90s expectations.
Connor may want to look up references to MMT by notables such as Stephanie Kelton and Randall Wray.
Federal taxes do not pay for anything; each appropriation creates new dollars.
Well, the saving grace here, at least for non-US folks, is that it’s unlikely to work.
ISTM that every recent-ish US weapons program, from the recently departed Booker light tank to the F-35 , the B2/21 bomber, the navy LCS, Zumwalt and Frigate programs, and the ongoing hypersonics mess is really just looting . AFAICT, none of them work at all well.
Now, I think we can expect to see fireworks as the new tech bro looters try to muscle out a bigger share at the trough from the MIC old guard.
I wonder if this is the US myth that they ‘outspent the USSR‘ about to face reality at last.
Of course the USSR fell for a variety of reasons, mainly because the elites in the satellite countries got themselves into hock with the Paris Club and then dutifully installed massive austerity that they though they could get just force on their people. But what really brought down the USSR was the anti-war movement, German Ostpolitik and the insane Soviet belief that the people that had perpetrated all those atrocities like The Vietnam War or Operation Condor would ever be good neighbours.
If the USA tries to outspend BRICS when its economy is on the brink of collapse then we might see the same sort of economic internal scavenging we saw during the dissolution.
At least we’ll get some good video games out of.
As a funny anecdote, a couple of Russian Duma members pointed out this week that Soviet Union wasn’t actually dissolved according to the constitution of the Soviet Union, so in a strictest legal sense it still exists. They also point out that the agreements for Russia inheriting Soviets Union’s position in international organizations and Soviet Union’s debt make it also legally clear that Soviet Union has been replaced.
Anyway, what I wanted to say is that Soviet Union “fell”, because in that union pretty much only Russian SFSR was producing more of the GDP than consuming it. And in the “Eastern Block” only Soviet Union was producing more than consuming – basically the Russian SFSR was bleeding money to Eastern Europe, Cuba, Angola and Vietnam.
Yuri Andropov was the first Soviet Leader who stated that without this “external burden” Soviet economy would do just fine – that and uprooting the corruption. He was, having been the Soviet ambassador in Hungary in 1956, a stern believer in moderate reforms. A certain Mikhail Gorbachev was his heir apparent.
Many experts in the 1990’s (when experts were still expected to have expertise) already admitted that the military budget of the Soviet Union didn’t ever pass 15% of GDP, and that the Soviet Union had had a comparative advantage in cheaper but more effective weapons.
Since it’s related:
Today entry on Moon of Alabama:
U.S.-Supplied Air Defenses Fail In Ukraine
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/05/us-supplied-air-defences-fail-in-ukraine.html#more