The Time is Right for Trump’s “Golden Dome” Defense of America

During much of the Cold War, America placed a high priority on defense of the American Homeland. Radars, Missiles, and Jet Interceptors were pervasive across the Continental United States. These capabilities withered greatly with the fall of the Wall dividing Berlin and Germany in 1989. Since that time, the American Homeland has been largely barren of defenses against hostile aircraft, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, drones, or rockets. The existing missile interceptors in California and Alaska are small in number and the rest of the defenses in the United States are spotty and almost insignificant.

President Trump announced an end to this era of defenselessness on January 27, 2025 with his Executive Order entitled, “The Iron Dome for America”, which he now refers to as “Golden Dome”. Iron Dome references the Israeli systems that were originally designed to knock down simple, small rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Lebanon, but has evolved into a much larger, tiered network of capabilities that proved an integral part of the historic events of 2024 where two mass volleys of different weapons were launched at Israel from Iran and other locations.

“The existing missile interceptors in California and Alaska are small in number and the rest of the defenses in the United States are spotty and almost insignificant.”

You didn’t mention Canada as part of both the US and Canada’s continental defense grid. Neither do the prospects look good that that will change any time soon.

Will Canada contribute their part in our mutual defense? Of course they should, but I think not, not with all this “Canada must become the 51’st state” hoopla.

That’s a thought, but the reality is the reason there is no defense is nothing is going to work. The velocities are too high.

A space based approach would require sooooo many interceptors that we’re looking at multi trillion dollars, even at modern launch costs. The problem is they are in orbit. They don’t just hang over the east and west coast, or north and south border.

They would only be overhead in those locales for a few minutes (literally) per day. So you need thousands and thousands of them to have a few overhead at all minutes of the day.

Russian boomers offshore shooting hypersonics reduces enroute time to a few minutes, maybe less than 3 to the Pentagon. Yield about 100 kt, a fraction of the megaton warheads they tested back in the 60s.

The reverse, btw, is not so. Russian ICBMs are often mobile. Not parked in a silo for easy targeting as we do in NoDak.

BTW if you study this stuff you find that this is the reason about 80% of US warheads are sub based. About 60% of Russian because their landbased leg is much less vulnerable.

So . . . any defense we put up is about cities, not warheads, though we do make that easier for their officer corps and its training to not target civilians . . . by putting so many of our bases near cities.

Overall reality, if you’re going to defend something, defend the Houston refinery complex. Shut it off and our food doesn’t reach shelves and surrender follows.

Not that Russia would want to deal with supervising our cities and the filth associated.

Honestly this sounds like a huge waste of money.

Honestly, you're 100% + correct!

I mean, it's not like we've got so much mulah ($$$) sitting in the bank and looking for some crazy way to spend even more.

But, wait. We're only $37 trillion in debt and growing every day -- let's just piss away another trillion or two 'till we can't do it anymore. Maybe even open up another 800 military bases around the planet -- maybe even on that moon or Mars.

Sure. Great idea!

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