At $175 billion, Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense system already came with an astonishing price tag. Yet according to one new analysis by the group Taxpayers for Common Sense, that early estimate could be a drop in the bucket compared to an actual cost so high the Golden Dome simply “will not work.”
To come to that conclusion, the new analysis compiled various reports from expert sources. One of them, conducted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, suggests that taxpayers could spend $3.6 trillion on the Golden Dome over the next 20 years, or $4.4 trillion adjusted for expected inflation.
To put this in perspective, if we pooled all the physical money together in the US, it still wouldn’t be enough. Including currency outside the US Treasury and Federal Reserve Banks, there’s currently $2.43 trillion floating around the US — a far cry from what we’d need.
That’s not even assuming worst case scenario; shooting rockets out of the sky is an incredibly convoluted engineering challenge, after all. To even sniff an interceptor success rate “very close to 100 percent,” the AEI suggests just the space-based interceptors (SBI’s) — orbital counter-ordinance, essentially — could cost as much as $6 trillion on their own.
Under the $6 trillion scenario, the AEI estimates the US Space Force could field as many as 85,400 SBIs. That’s a lot of infrastructure, and it assumes a generous ratio of real-world success, where it only takes a handful of SBIs to knock out each adversarial rocket.
According to the American Physical Society Panel on Public Affairs’ February report, the amount of SBIs required to knock out just one adversarial rocket could really be in the hundreds, assuming we’re shooting down last-gen missiles. Next-gen solid state intercontintental ballistic missiles, however, could require “at least 1600 interceptors” per missile.
Given that Trump’s geopolitical rivals, China and Russia, may have 750 ICBMs between them at the moment, we’re talking 1.2 million SBIs worth of ordinance to assure security. (That’s before we even mention the hundreds of cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons in play.)
“If Golden Dome could guarantee our security for nuclear weapons, one could argue that these astronomical costs would be worth it, but from all these viability problems and the history of failed attempts, it’s very clear that it won’t,” Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense told the Federal News Network.
Indeed, even if there was enough money to pay for the defense project, there’s still a fundamental problem: in over 40 years of missile defense research, technicians have only knocked one mock warhead out of the sky. That, we think, just about says it all.
More on Trump: Crypto Guys Who Bought a Huge Gold Trump Statue Now Have a Problem
The post There’s Not Enough Money in the World for Trump’s Golden Dome appeared first on Futurism.
