Trump announces "Golden Dome" missile shield
President Donald Trump has revealed plans to build a completely new missile defence system for the US by the end of his term of office, with 25 billion US dollars having been earmarked as start-up funding for the project. The shield, modelled on Israel's Iron Dome, is expected to cost around 175 billion dollars in total. However the US's territory is around 440 times larger than Israel's. Criticism rains down in the media.
Megalomania and a waste of money
The Golden Dome is a typical Trump project, The Independent writes:
“Like his infamously unfinished and useless wall along the Mexican border, it is supposedly 'visionary', but is, in reality, flawed and vastly expensive. There is no reason why the relatively small Iron Dome system, designed to frustrate short to medium-range missiles, could be scaled up in anything like the way necessary to withstand a sustained attack from intercontinental ballistic missiles or rockets from space itself. ... Maybe Trump should ask his now strangely absent friend Elon Musk about whether the Golden Dome is a good use of American taxpayers' money.”
No such thing as complete protection
Fending off missiles is always far more complicated than carrying out missile attacks, political scientist Gevorg Mirzayan explains in Izvestia:
“When it comes to missiles, defensive systems are always inferior to offensive ones - both in terms of the cost of interception, which is often many times higher than the cost of firing missiles, and in terms of the technology. Missile weapons are constantly being modified: more powerful, individually guidable multiple warheads are being developed, and speeds are increasing (hypersonic technology). Missile defence systems simply cannot keep up with these innovations. In the event of the kind of genuine massive attack which superpowers are capable of, their missiles could therefore penetrate any dome.”
Reagan's Star Wars project revisited
Relatively young US high-tech companies such as SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril are behind the project, economist Sergei Alexashenko explains in a Telegram post reprinted by Echo:
“Their natural desire was to grab a chunk of the defence budget, which the new Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth was supposed to push through, but that didn't work out. No one has ever managed to take money away from defence contractors, so they had to come up with something new to sell to the president. Then Ronald Reagan's Star Wars project was pulled out of the drawer, because what's old and forgotten can be sold as new. Of course it's not exactly the same: for one thing the technology has evolved, and for another there's the Iron Dome in Israel, which works perfectly against Hamas missiles.”