CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Extortionate Expense of Golden Dome

Photograph Source: Wikideas1 – CC0

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........

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