Trump’s Doomed “Golden Dome” Isn’t Even Our Worst Military Boondoggle Right Now

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President Donald Trump hasn’t talked much lately about Golden Dome^[2], his much-ballyhooed defense initiative that he claimed could shoot down enemy missiles as they darted toward U.S. territory, thus transforming—in some ways, ending—the nuclear era.

Maybe that’s because a consensus has emerged that the program is doomed to failure except as a giant sinkhole for money to defense contractors.

Just this past May, Trump claimed^[3] that the program—which he likened to Israel’s Iron Dome system—would cost just $175 billion and be up and ready by the end of his term.

Yet a new study^[4] published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute estimates that the program will actually cost, over the next 20 years, somewhere between $252 billion and $3.6 trillion, depending on its scope—which has not as yet been outlined.

The author, AEI senior fellow Todd Harrison, writes, “As long as its requirements are undefined, Golden Dome can cost as much or as little as policymakers are willing to spend.”

Currently budgeted at $25 billion for just this year (and projected to soak up about as much every year from now till the end of time), it’s a fair bet that Congress—beholden to weapons contractors and desperate not to appear “weak on defense”—will be willing to spend much more. This is on top of the roughly $400 billion^[5] that has been spent on the program—under different names, including “missile defense,” the “strategic defense initiative,” and (as a nickname) “Star Wars”—since President Ronald Reagan initiated it back in 1983.

Nothing militarily useful has come of the effort in the four decades since, and it’s not for lack of trying. The task is just hard, if not impossible.

It’s worth noting here that, from the start, Trump has failed to grasp the nature of Israel’s Iron Dome, Reagan’s SDI, or the vast distinction between them.

He first proposed the idea of a vast new program in his address to Congress this past March^[6], a bit before he named it “Golden Dome” or inserted it as a line item in his military budget. He noted that Reagan had tried to erect an anti-missile defense system, but the technology didn’t exist. “Now we have the technology,” Trump claimed. “It’s incredible, actually. And other places—they have it, Israel has it, other places have it. And the United States should have it too.”

The statement was confused at best. Israel’s Iron Dome program is designed to intercept missiles with a range of 40 miles traveling at twice the speed of sound. The sorts of missiles that would attack the continental United States—ballistic missiles launched from silos or submarines—would fly as far as 6,000 miles at 10 times the speed of sound. The technology required to intercept one type of missile is completely different from the technology required for the other.

Besides, the U.S. already has a lot of air and missile defenses that can do what Iron Dome does, as well or better—the Patriot and the Standard Missile, to name just two. (These American-made weapons have joined Iron Dome in shooting down Iranian missiles aimed at Israel.) No country has a defense of the sort that Reagan attempted and that Trump has in mind. After 40 years of testing, U.S. weapons scientists have managed the feat of hitting one mock warhead with one anti-missile projectile, as long as the testers know when the mock warhead is fired and where it’s coming from. This is a remarkable technical feat. But the program’s managers have never even tried to hit two warheads with two interceptors, much less a dozen with a dozen, or even at one warhead that zigzags on its way to the target, as Russia’s new generation of hypersonic missiles is said to do. They haven’t held such tests because they know the tests would fail.

The failure to grasp the complexity of missile defense while continuing to dump money into a doomed project would be bad enough. Troubles, however, are also quaking on the offensive side of America’s nuclear-weapons enterprise—specifically, the program to build a new land-based intercontinental ballistic missile, the Sentinel, to replace the 400 current ICBMs, known as Minuteman IIIs. The Minuteman missiles are old; they were first deployed in 1970. However, they are not as antiquated as the timeline suggests; their parts, components, and support gear—even their warheads and guidance systems—have been overhauled to such a degree, they’re hardly the same missiles that first went into the ground more than 50 years ago.

And now it turns out, the Air Force, which has been running the program, says the Minuteman can be tweaked to last until 2050^[8]—for another quarter-century. (Originally, officials said the old missiles would be obsolete by 2036.) The acknowledgment nullifies the alleged need for a new missile entirely. In fact, the Air Force is publicizing this possible “life-extension” because the new Sentinel has experienced so many technical delays and cost overruns that it’s not going to be ready in time to replace the Minutemen as originally scheduled.

When Sentinel was first proposed, officials said it would cost $77.7 billion and be deployed starting in 2029. Last year, they admitted the cost had risen to $131 billion^[9], and it’s not certain when the first missiles will be ready to go.

The case for keeping ICBMs at all, much less for building a new model, is rather tenuous. Many years ago, ICBMs—the land-based “leg” of the “nuclear triad”—were the only weapons in the arsenal that had the speed and accuracy to destroy enemy (mainly Russian or Soviet) ICBMs in their blast-protective underground silos. (Submarine-launched missiles weren’t accurate enough, and bomber aircraft would take too long to get to the target.)

However, in 1990, the Navy installed new Trident II missiles in its submarines. The Trident IIs were just as accurate as the ICBMs—and, therefore, just as able to destroy enemy missile silos. Because they roamed under the ocean’s surface, the subs were also undetectable and, therefore, less vulnerable than fixed land-based missiles to an enemy preemptive attack.

Some analysts argued, and still do argue, that land-based ICBMs are inherently “destabilizing” weapons. Because they are able to destroy enemy missile silos, and at the same time are vulnerable to an attack by the same enemy, their very existence creates incentives for preemption in a crisis.

The only somewhat valid argument for having any ICBMs at all is that they would complicate an enemy’s attempt to knock out America’s nuclear arsenal. Maybe so. But we don’t need 400 ICBMs just to complicate an attack that would be very complicated in the first place—and probably suicidal, given the likelihood that submarines and bombers would survive an enemy first strike. Probably 40 missiles, maybe just a dozen, would be plenty.

Trump isn’t responsible for Sentinel. (It’s quite possible he’s never mentioned the weapon.) It originated back in 2010, when President Barack Obama agreed to update the nuclear weapons arsenal in exchange for the Senate ratifying the New START nuclear arms–reduction treaty that he signed with then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. (That treaty is still in effect, though it’s set to expire next year.) Actually, Obama tried to hedge his commitment, promising to “modernize or replace”^[14] the nuclear triad (italics added). In his mind, “modernize” could mean simply improving a weapon’s software. But Republicans in Congress insisted he pledged to replace the entire triad—to fund new ICBMs, submarines, bombers, cruise missiles, the whole lot.

And all of those weapons are in development^[15]. There is widespread support for a new bomber (some of the B-52s date back to the 1960s) and new submarines (at some point, a submarine’s nuclear core just stops working), but some opposition has emerged to the Sentinel ICBM—not much within the current Congress, whose majority party lacks the appetite to oppose, or even carefully analyze, anything that bears Trump’s signature.

It may take a new Congress to put the Sentinel out of its misery, and perhaps to rethink the Golden Dome too. In the meantime, tens of billions of dollars are being squandered, hundreds of billions more are scheduled for further squandering, and nobody with a voice seems to care.

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