| Very dramatic image at the link shows levels from ground into the air: to GMD Battlespace, then LEO, MEO, and finally GEO. A taste: |
[CentristLibertarian] Stuck in 1983: The Golden Dome Panel That Couldn't Leave the Cold War
| It seems to me that Golden Dome is not a Cold War thing so much as aimed at Iran and China getting overexcited — Russia, poor darlings, have hollowed themselves out with the Ukraine war that they can’t walk away from if they want to keep the rump of their empire from spinning off altogether. |
Brookings convened three of the most credentialed missile defense minds in Washington to discuss a trillion-dollar national security program. They discussed 1983 instead. The occasion was the Congressional Budget Office’s new report on Golden Dome - the president’s homeland missile shield, which is now priced by CBO at $1.2 trillion over its first twenty years.
| How much of that number would have been spent anyway, to not nearly as good effect? Like President Reagan’s Star Wars, even the pieces of it are something useful, it seems to me. |
The panel had a CBO analyst who led the study, a University of Maryland arms control scholar, and a Brookings senior fellow with thirty years in the field. What it did not have, at any point in ninety minutes, was a frame built for the war we’re actually in.
The name they borrowed and abandoned. The program started life as an executive order called “Iron Dome for America,” which was a direct nod to Israel’s short-range, high-volume, combat-tested interceptor system, that is actually shooting down cheap rockets and drones in sustained saturation attacks right now. The panel mentioned Iron Dome exactly once, to explain the name, and then never returned to it. Not once did anyone run the obvious comparison: Iron Dome’s cost-exchange problem, where a $40,000 interceptor kills a $500 rocket,
| …an ugly cost:benefit analysis except that 1) the alternative to spending it is annihilation, and Israel is relatively rich, and 2) that was the first and second gen. cost. Next gen. is the laser thingy they recently added, which kills incoming at pennies a shot instead of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per — and the Israelis are working on the next generation upgrades after that to further decrease costs and increase effectiveness. And they will happily sell the improvement to the War Department, so long as the White House remains friendly, sharing the savings… |
is the same math Golden Dome’s conventional drone-defense layer will face at a scale Hamas never approached. Instead the panel spent ninety minutes rebuilding the Strategic Defense Initiative — boost-phase kill chains, absentee ratios, and the ABM Treaty, because that’s the debate they know how to have. They inherited the name of a system built for one kind of war and spent the hour analyzing a different one.
The threat they conflated. Golden Dome’s own executive order covers ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles, and drones. This is “any aerial threat,” in the CBO analyst’s words, encompassing both nuclear and conventional weapons. That is not one problem. Intercepting a nuclear-armed ICBM in boost phase and shooting down a $2,000 quadcopter are different engineering problems, different cost curves, and different strategic logics entirely. The panel’s real interceptor stockpiles — THAAD, Patriot, and SM missiles, are the same ones being drawn down right now in Ukraine and in the Iran strikes, a live, present-tense depletion problem that got exactly one question from the floor and one non-answer in response. Meanwhile, the panel’s intellectual energy went almost entirely to the nuclear-strategic half of the mandate: MAD, arms races, and McNamara’s threshold. The conventional half — the half with real combat data sitting in Kyiv and Tel Aviv right now was an afterthought.
The word they never defined. “Deterrence” got used a dozen times, and specified maybe twice. Deter whom, from what, and through what mechanism? The Brookings fellow strung together accidental launch, a deliberate North Korean attack, and a generic “one-off attempt at intimidation” as though they were the same problem requiring the same tool. This is odd considering an accident isn’t a deterrence problem at all, a small state’s calculated gamble is a different deterrence relationship than a peer’s limited nuclear gesture, and coercion is a third thing entirely. Only the arms control scholar bothered to close the loop with actor, behavior, mechanism, all present, and then he applied it exactly once, to the one scenario (all-out nuclear war) where sixty-year-old logic still cleanly holds. Every scenario short of that — the Guam gambit, the Kansas hail-mary, and the drone swarm got the word “deterrence” applied like a poultice, without anyone rebuilding the argument for a world that no longer has two actors in it.
The question nobody would answer. A member of the audience asked, straightforwardly, where the threshold sits — how much conventional or nuclear catastrophe is too costly before you stop and reassess. The Brookings fellow’s actual answer: “At some point in that situation, I stop counting dollars. I’m just counting lives and the survival of the species.” That is not an answer. That is an exit from the question, dressed up as gravity. Nobody on the panel ever named a target confidence level — is 60% intercept probability acceptable, is 90%, against what specific attack size, etc. that would let a taxpayer connect $1.2 trillion to a stated amount of risk reduction. You cannot govern a program you refuse to bound.
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