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.
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