Photograph Source: Wikideas1 – CC0
The United States is responsible for half of global spending on defense. The Trump administration is committed to spending more than $1 trillion dollars on defense, and this figure doesn’t include the hundreds of billions devoted to the intelligence community, the Department of Energy, the Veterans’ Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security. There is huge waste in the defense budget, and the major culprits in this department are the unneeded modernization of U.S. strategic weaponry and the so-called Golden Dome national missile defense. The enormous cost and technological deficiencies of the U.S.-supplied, European-based missile defense system adds to the huge bloat in U.S. defense spending.
The Golden Dome missile defense system, as proposed by President Trump, is estimated to cost $175 billion. This cost is just for the initial three-year build, with ongoing operational and sustainment costs potentially pushing the total figure much higher. Some estimates from organizations like the Congressional Budget Office suggest a total cost between $161 and $542 billion over two decades. Since programs were first launched in the 1950s to build systems capable of intercepting incoming nuclear or conventional weapons, the United States has spent more than $400 billion on various missile defense programs.
Over the years, NMD has been a technical flop, having failed most of its tests. The NMD system has flaws such as an adversary’s ability to use shorter range ballistic and cruise missiles that could “underfly” NMD. The U.S. system could be defeated by numerous unsophisticated countermeasures and decoys that would overload the NMD system and create confusion. Moreover, the U.S. system will never be tested in a realistic battle environment, and there is no assurance that a U.S. system could be effective against all of the many varieties of countermeasures.
Even a flawed NMD system will create instability in the nuclear community. Russia would fear that the United States would feel protected by the so-called shield, and China would fear that its smaller nuclear arsenal would be compromised. The level of instability could lead such non-nuclear states as Japan and South Korea to pursue nuclear weapons and thus weaken the Non-Proliferation Treaty that has kept the number of nuclear states to nine. If unchecked, proliferation would have no logical stopping point.
Laser-driven systems, launched in the atmosphere or in outer space, have still not resolved their problems, despite billions of research dollars by various administrations over the past four decades. Testing of these systems has failed to produce credibility, and some of the tests have created a false reality by programming the flight characteristics of the targeted missiles and artificially identifying the test missile from the decoy.
Finally, there are alternatives to national missile defense, particularly the pursuit of arms control and disarmament. The United States missed a major opportunity in the 1990s and 2000s, when Russia was weak and open to a strategic dialogue and China was still committed to minimal strategic deterrence, Moreover, the last arms control agreement between the United States and Russia—the New Start Treaty—is scheduled to expire in January 2026.
The U.S. retreat from arms control and renewed commitment to NMD will only worsen the problem of nuclear proliferation as nuclear nations will pursue greater deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles and non-nuclear states, such as Japan and South Korea, could consider the deployment of nuclear weaponry. The absence of any nuclear dialogue at present and the strained relations between the United States and both China and Russia are major contributors to the current state of international instability. The Trump administration’s cut backs at the Department of State and the National Security Council as well as the politicization of the intelligence community will make it more difficult for the United States to enter a serious and substantive dialogue on any aspect of arms control.
Our European allies are opposed to a U.S. missile defense system because of the unilateral abilities it will provide for U.S. security and the risk of greater proliferation, President George W. Bush’s abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty marked a major setback to nuclear stability because it created an incentive to produce additional offensive weaponry. Overall, there is no reason to invest in a national missile defense system, and no reason to believe that, if we do, U.S. strategic security will be enhanced.
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