Donald Trump sees himself as the President of Peace. He never served in the military. He has lobbied the Nobel Committee that awards its annual Peace Prize. This man of “peace,” however, in the last three weeks has shown a predilection for war. With the latest spending on war preparedness, described as a generational investment, he now intends to take Americans down a rabbit hole by inflating the annual and already bloated Pentagon budget to $1.5 trillion.
Why $1.5 Trillion?Â
The number $1.5 trillion was first thrown out by Trump on Truth Social. Trump, who never backs down from a lie and always doubles down once he spouts one, has now given the number wings, with the Pentagon figuring out new ways to spend Americans’ money.
Does the war in Iran justify the $1.5 trillion? Certainly not, although it is adding several billion dollars a day to war spending, and War Secretary Pete Hegseth has recently requested that Congress authorize a $200 billion supplement to the existing nearly $1 trillion annual spending.
Enter The Golden Dome
If the $1.5 trillion is to be spent, much of it will go to the seriously under-budgeted Golden Dome. This proposed U.S. defence shield to protect domestic land, air and space assets has been given an initial $175 billion price tag. That number appears to be another pulled out of a hat.
Why? Because many of the proposed technologies have yet to be invented, and because the scale of coverage will likely be well beyond the country’s capacity to implement.
To stop incoming drones, missiles, and bombs, current interceptor technologies won’t cut it. No defence research or science laboratory has yet to create Star Trekkian shields.
Shielding all of American airspace isn’t the same as putting an Iron Dome over a tiny country like Israel. Iron Dome, despite press accolades, has had limited success protecting a land mass of 20,770 square kilometres (a little over 8,000 sq. miles). It consists of 10 Iron Dome batteries designed to protect populated areas covering 155 square kilometres (60 sq. miles) each. That’s why we see newspaper reports that Iranian and Hezbollah missiles are killing Israeli civilians. The reason is simple. Iron Dome has too many holes.
U.S. defence experts, when considering an equivalent to Israel’s limited Iron Dome, describe a system with a minimum of 10 to 20 times the density of coverage to cover America’s urban areas. That leaves most of the rest of the country, amounting to more than 5 million square kilometres (3 million sq. miles), without a defensive shield.
What $1.5 Trillion Annually Will Not Buy
There is no chance that the proposed $1.5 trillion will cut it in implementing the Golden Dome. The last time the U.S. government considered something like it was back in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.
Reagan called it Star Wars. Its real name was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). In 1980’s dollars, the never-built SDI budget estimates varied between $170 and $540+ billion.
The current U.S. defence budget sits at around $895 billion without the $200 billion Hegseth funding request. That puts the number over $1 trillion annually. Now add planned Golden Dome expenditures.
A Breakdown of Golden Dome Projected Costs By 2035
- New technology development initiatives to create a comprehensive defence shield will gobble up a minimum of $170 billion annually for the next decade.
- Ground-based systems equivalent to Patriot or THAAD, the current technologies being used by Israel and Ukraine, if scaled nationwide, will add at least another $200+ billion over ten years.
- Sea-based systems such as Aegis-class destroyers and cruisers will each cost at least $2.7 billion to meet America’s maritime needs. Projected ship numbers come in at between 77 and 90 to meet Golden Dome requirements. Costs in current dollars range from $208 to $243 billion.
- Space protection will dramatically inflate the current Space Force budget of $40 billion annually. The Golden Dome calls for a constellation of tracking satellites, interceptors and anti-satellite defence systems, likely adding between $500 billion and $1 trillion annually to the Pentagon budget.
The proposed war budget of $1.5 trillion is hard enough to contemplate. But the numbers described above add trillions more, costs that will fall on an America with an increasingly ageing population and many other priorities.
Is this a price worth paying to feed the ego of a malignant narcissist President?
The Current Nuclear Deterrence Reality
What sane and rational American would see the Golden Dome as a good investment? What does it say about the current nuclear deterrent, supposedly the shield built to protect the country from enemies?
Annual maintenance expenditures for America’s nuclear deterrent today amount to $40 billion annually. With modernization underway, the nuclear deterrent budget is being topped up annually by $60 billion until the mid-2030s.
Consider the Pentagon’s own assessment of 1% likelihood of using the nuclear deterrent in a future war. That’s $100 billion spent annually for a defence that would only be used after an enemy’s first strike because its deployment is guided by the principle of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).
Some at the Pentagon argue that the Golden Dome would be a substitute for the current nuclear deterrence strategy. Build a protective shield over the country, and nuclear weapons will no longer be a threat.
Reality suggests a very different scenario. Building the Golden Dome could be the invitation for an enemy first strike before its full deployment. If that were the case, then the Golden Dome would make Americans less safe, and for the rest of us, make life as we know it even more precarious.
