A needless, extravagant ballroom. Questionable gifts, not least the 747-200B aircraft from the Qatari government. An inane decision to add a blue protective coating to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in Washington. These events increasingly point to the loss of sound mind. The galloping profligacy and indulgence hardly stops there for the administration of President Donald Trump. There is the never to be neglected military-industrial complex that remains boisterous and demanding.
On the latter, the Trump administration has been particularly egregious, not least on the issue of running through expensive inventories of weapons in an illegal war it has waged with Israel against Iran. One of the great offenders in the anthology of idiotic decisions is the national missile defence (NMD) system Golden Dome, renamed after being deemed too proximate to Israel’s Iron Dome defence shield. In name, and in inspiration, it glows with the gloss of its progenitor, vapid, fatuous and free with cash not his own.
In its May 2026 report, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in responding to Trump’s executive order issued in January 2025, is helpful in describing what is being sought. “In accordance with the executive order, the notional NMD system that CBO analyzed would provide a layered defense against ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, cruise missiles, and other aerial threats”. Such a system was also envisaged as involving “space-based and surface-based interceptors and would provide coverage of the entire United States, including Alaska and Hawaii.”
The COB report mentions four layers of interceptors operating in an independent capacity or collectively with a command-and-control system. In dreamy space, 7,800 purpose made satellites will be able to neutralise some 10 intercontinental ballistic missiles in simultaneous, efficacious fashion, including hypersonic glide vehicles. Three Ground-Based Midcourse Defense sites, each equipped with 60 Next-Generation Interceptors or Ground-Based Interceptors, will be focused on an upper-wide surface layer to engage ICBM threats. A lower wide-area surface layer, featuring four sites on US soil, will be equipped with 48 SM-3 Block IIA interceptors to knock out ICBMs and hypersonic glide vehicles. A layer at the regional sector level will have 35 interceptor and radar sites, equipped with THAAD, SM-6 Block IB, and Patriot interceptors ready for ICBMs, glide vehicles and cruise missiles.
Private contracts are rushing to cash in on the bountiful bonanza. As of last April, Space Force had awarded 20 contracts worth $3.2 billion to 12 firms to construct space-based interceptor capabilities. Details on the firms and what exactly will be done by each are hardly abundant, but a note of urgency to spend has been struck. “Adversary capabilities are advancing rapidly,” Program Executive Officer for Space Power Col. Bryon McClain warns in a statement, “and our acquisition strategies must move even faster to counter the growing speed and manoeuvrability of modern missile threats.” The usual breast-beating jargon follows. “Utilizing Other Transaction Authority Agreements, we attracted both traditional and nontraditional vendors, while harnessing American innovation, and ensuring continuous competition.” Commitment and collaboration from such “industry partners” would permit Space Force to “demonstrate an initial capability in 2028.”
The costly scale of this palace-in-the-sky project was always going to be vast. The vastness, however, has become a bone of contention. The CBO contends that the bill would come to $1.2 trillion. Annual operating and maintenance costs, assuming it will ever be built, will run into $8.3 billion. The Pentagon’s accounting is startlingly and suspiciously lower: $185 billion over a 10-year projection. (Todd Harrison from the American Enterprise Institute pitches for a wider range of possible costs: between $250 billion and $2.4 trillion.) The canyon between these predictions is the very sort of thing to chill the investment line into defence companies that have won contracts to build Golden Dome. Those putting money into the merchants of death will surely want something tangible at the end of it.
The maintenance bill for aspects of the system, notably those satellites intended to carry the 7,800 space-based interceptor (SBI) missiles, can only cause palpitations for anyone overseeing the future budget. The fact that they will operate in an orbit approximately 300 to 500 kilometres close to the earth entails a period of use lasting in the order of five years, after which they will slow down and perish in the atmosphere. A fifth of the fleet would need to be replaced annually.
The most critical failing of Golden Dome is that it can hardly work given that the satellites will never be able to thicken and concentrate the skies over the US with anything resembling a dome. It would more accurately constitute a globe covering points of the earth encompassing threats. The shield, in other words, can hardly be impervious. As the report states: “Although the notional NMD system analyzed by CBO would be far more capable than defenses the United States fields today, it would not be an impenetrable shield or to be able to fully counter a large attack of the sort that Russia or China might be able to launch.”
This injects a note of gnawing pessimism on the strategic consequences of deploying the system, which remain “unclear because they hinge on an adversary’s perception of the defense’s capability and how that adversary chose to respond.” Golden Dome might encourage regional adversaries to bulk their stocks of long-range missiles, nuclear or conventional, or develop “more effective countermeasures to improve their chances of penetrating the NMD system.” That’s the deterrence canard well and truly scotched.
The overly confident panjandrum behind the project is Director Gen. Michael Guetlein, reliably narcotised by the language and the fantasy of the venture. He has shown little patience for the CBO wiseacres, who did not consult the program office before releasing the report. “They’re not estimating what we’re building,” he said with spiky defensiveness at an event hosted by Tectonic and Payload, both defence technology and space publications. “It’s as simple as that.” In simple terms, simply understood by Guetlein, the technology used by the CBO report is anchored “for a different fight”, namely the distant era known as the 2000, where things were done differently. Defence, in that context, focused on a limited area, or one point of defence. Golden Dome is audacious, daring, expansive. Not a matter of single points and local areas. “That is not what we need for the homeland.” Regional defence demands “a different architecture. And you can’t just take what we’ve done in the past and multiply it forward or you’re going to get large numbers like the CBO got.”
Where has this been seen before? The audacious project tapdancing between lunatic assumption and costly bravado? Militaries, at the best of times, drain, draw and empty the coffers of state, tilting at imaginary windmills of menace. The military-industrial complex demands feeding and even codling. The more expensive, the better. Never mind the lessons of the Iran War, which demonstrate that attritive, staggered conflicts waged by opponents with greater means of economy, will prevail against those heavy spenders on high-tech gadgetry. Golden Dome is speedily assuming a form elephantine and white in colour.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
