Is Trump’s Golden Dome Missile Defense System a Pipe Dream?

Hannah Bowlus,  August 13, 2026, https://inkstickmedia.com/is-trumps-golden-dome-missile-defense-system-a-pipe-dream/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

US President Donald Trump’s highly touted ‘Golden Dome’ will cost taxpayers untold sums of money. Will it even work?

The Golden Dome for America is US President Donald Trump’s vision of an impenetrable shield protecting the entire United States from land, sea, air, and space against short- and long-range weapons armed with nuclear warheads or conventional munitions. It may not survive the Iran war. Regional missile defenses deployed by the US and Israel have failed at times. The Golden Dome relies on their success. 

A year and a half and $25 billion since the president announced the Golden Dome, plans still remain classified, and the White House has backed off of the claim it will be virtually impenetrable. 

Experts and congress members eyeing the $1.5 trillion defense budget — an additional $17.5 billion for the Golden Dome in a separate reconciliation bill, and an estimated $100 billion for the war on Iran — are now rethinking missile defense.

In March, the Cato Institute warned that the Golden Dome, “modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome and air and missile defense (AMD), rests on a system now showing clear vulnerabilities.” The think tank cited several instances of Iranian attacks breaking through Israeli defense systems. “If Israel’s shield can be tested this way, the lesson for the United States is clear: a similar effort risks wasting vast time, money, and resources on a promise that may not hold.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimates it could cost $1.2 trillion to build missile defenses that still couldn’t fully defeat a smaller salvo of missiles. A more robust (though still penetrable) dome might cost $3.6 trillion. The US Space Force says it will cost only $185 billion.

The best the Golden Dome could perform, even at the $3.6 trillion price tag, is an 80% interception rate, one report concludes, though it notes that is an unrealistically optimistic scenario. If Russia launched its nuclear arsenal with this Golden Dome in place, and 20% of their missiles evaded thousands of space-based interceptors, at least 75 million Americans could perish immediately. Some 1.4 billion would likely die globally in the ensuing famine and climate disaster within two years.

In May, US Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told a press conference on Capitol Hill that the Golden Dome was a “vanity project” for Trump that would cost Americans at a time when economic insecurity is rife. “We’ve got 48 million people in the United States of America, the richest country in the history of the world, who are food insecure or hungry,” McGovern said. “When you start going down this road of a new arms race, where there’s no end in sight … we’ll have nothing for anything else.” 

Laura Grego, a research director at the Union for Concerned Scientists, suspects the Golden Dome is doomed like its progenitors. “I think we’ll spend a lot of money before we get there,” Grego told Inkstick. 

Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics were among the 12 companies selected to develop space-based missile interceptors, the costliest and most technically daunting piece of the Golden Dome. Each manufacturer has current missile defense systems operating on US bases and in Israel. These extraordinarily expensive systems of sensors and interceptors have repeatedly failed while the US and Israel waged war on Iran, and throughout Israel’s war in Lebanon.

Inkstick asked each company how they could guarantee a workable missile defense system in space when their weapons in conventional war failed. None responded.

Elsewhere, Lockheed Martin’s CEO has predicted the next few years will be a feast for contractors. Anduril’s CEO said the defense industry is more energized than ever. 

Money is one motivation for pursuing the Golden Dome, Grego says, but there are also true believers in missile defense who take its enormous financial cost as proof of its legitimacy. It should and will work because the US has spent $500 billion on it. 

Since the US first left the anti-ballistic missile treaty, government officials have claimed to currently own working defenses to “fix the problem of nuclear war.”

“My worry is that the people who should know better believe it,” Grego said. 

Just this year, the Missile Defense Agency’s Lieutenant General Heath Collins testified to Congress that the ground-based midcourse defense system had “made the impossible possible, hitting a bullet with a bullet.” By its own evaluation, the program has a 55% intercept rate in highly scripted and uncomplicated tests. 

n this and past wars, the Pentagon has exhibited a tendency to mislead the public on the efficacy and maturity of its weapons. Golden Dome details have been concealed, even to Congress, despite its members approving $25 billion toward it last year. 

In May, General Michael Guetlein, the manager of the Golden Dome, claimed he had spoken to 400 potential defense contractors about the project. He said he expected the Golden Dome to be completed on time.

Elsewhere, concerns are mounting. Speaking in Congress in June, US Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois, argued that the Golden Dome should be investigated for large-scale fraud. “The people getting federal taxpayer money for this have been caught repeatedly lying to Congress and to the public about what the technical status of those [weapons] are,” he said. 

The backbone of the Golden Dome, a tranche of data relay and early warning satellites, has already been launched into low Earth orbit. It’s over-budget and behind schedule. The Government Accountability Office has urged the Space Development Agency to be more transparent about its progress.

Companies awarded contracts for the tranches of satellites were allowed to self-report on the technical readiness of their own products. They gave themselves high scores, inaccurately, GAO wrote in one assessment, potentially derailing the entire program in the process. 

The bulk of the Pentagon’s request for an additional $17 billion in Golden Dome funding relies on another reconciliation bill that might never materialize. House Republicans recently drafted a supplemental bill with $60 billion earmarked to offset the cost of the war and cover immediate defense priorities. 

US Representative Jodey Arrington, a Republican from Texas, blasted Democrats in July over reconciliation. He insisted that Democrats should support the bill in order to “support our troops in time of conflict.” He claimed it was about providing the armed forces with “baseline readiness — not Star Wars and Golden Dome and transformative modernizing of the military — just the bombs, bullets, and battlefield readiness for our men and women in uniform to finish the fight successfully and return home safely.” 

In a recent hearing on missile defense, US Representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, questioned the logic of the Golden Dome when regional systems were falling apart. “What I don’t want to be doing is getting bogged down in a war in the Middle East that we’re losing while also spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars here at home” on the Golden Dome, he said.

Congressional appetite for the Golden Dome is flagging in the face of a more than $100 billion war. Iranian missiles have resulted in costly damage to American bases and military equipment across the Middle East, and recent reports have revealed that the US stockpile is dwindling fast. “There are lots of relatively cheap ways to circumvent a system or make it obsolete right away,” Grego explained.

A country could increase the number of its salvo, make its missiles faster, shoot decoys, attack sensors and interceptors. These are basic measures that would drive up requirements and costs of the Golden Dome.

In April and October of 2024, Israel claimed it intercepted 99% of projectiles fired by Iran. Trump subsequently praised Israel’s missile defense capabilities and, while announcing the Golden Dome, insisted that the US “is entitled” to the same kind of protection. Independent analysis, though, estimated that Israel’s interception rate was closer to 80 or 85%. Israel was able to destroy so many targets before impact because Iran’s missiles were relatively unsophisticated, armed without countermeasures, and aimed at less populated areas in a country 470 times smaller than the United States. 

August 19, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

$1 Trillion And This Is All We Get?

Spending does not equal value when it comes to Pentagon contracting

Lisa Savage,Aug 16, 2026, https://went2thebridge.substack.com/p/1-trillion-and-this-is-all-we-get

More bad news for the Pentagon as another highly expensive warship goes dark.

“On July 24, 2026, while conducting routine operations in the Indo-Pacific, Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG 65) reported an engineering casualty involving its generators, causing a loss of power,” reads the statement. “There were no injuries to the crew, who demonstrated resilience, grit, professionalism and unwavering steadiness in their response.”

The loss of power meant sailors were without galley services, toilets and air conditioning. Potable water was also affected, Comer said. He did not respond to a question about how sailors handled waste.

I’ve already written about the woes of the USS Abraham Lincoln which is reportedly about to be replaced the the USS George Washington (without the USS Benfold in its entourage), leaving zero aircraft carriers in the waters around China for the first time in many years.

Military types have been less than impressed with the disrespect, gaslighting, and minimizing of the Commander in Chief and his minister of war about the Lincoln’s woes, a 5,000 person ship that must now be supplied from Diego Garcia 3,000 miles from Bahrain where Iran destroyed a crucial U.S. naval base.

Typical of a draft dodger’: Rep. Seth Moulton blasts Trump’s response to USS Lincoln crisis

“The U.S. had no plan going into this war”

Retired Maj. General Randy Manner on Friday accused President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth of “spewing lies” about the reportedly deplorable conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and its extended deployment in the Middle East

A professional military that sees national defense as a sacred calling and that embraces martyrdom if necessary it is up against a whiny Gen Z force that mostly thinks of the U.S. military as a job. My husband: “Probably the only job they could get.” He’s right if we’re talking jobs with benefits like health care and college tuition for high school graduates.

The leadership of this crack military force? They are focused on spending big, bigger, and biggest bucks on elaborate systems like Golden Dome that are highly unlikely to produce interception of hypersonic missiles as promised.

But military-industrial promises are made to be broken.

In the excitement over finally pulling Russia into war, General Dynamics promised to build artillery shells that U.S. proxy Ukraine was running through rapidly. GD took $533 million from taxpayers to equip a factory with state of the art robots purchased from Turkiye.

Those involved described a project that was rushed and ill considered from the start. Congress paved the way, removing government contracting guardrails — meant to ensure taxpayer money isn’t wasted — so that Ukraine-related defense projects could be funded quickly. The Army took advantage, handing General Dynamics lucrative no-bid awards without knowing whether the machines it planned to use could perform the desired work. The Army’s due diligence was inadequate, four former Army and General Dynamics officials told ProPublica.

Descriptions of the malfunctioning robots reads like bad sci-fi and suggests, at least to my mind, sabotage.

The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week..

according to interviews with 12 former factory workers.. the flaming robot arms also kept smashing into things. They slammed into computer numerical control machines, breaking their windows and bending their doors. They knocked over shells. They bashed into safety fences. Workers talked about the arms going “rogue” and began calling one of them “Johnny 5” after a sentient military robot from a 1980s movie..

Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer [emphasis mine] to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell. “We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.”

If someone comes up with a better metaphor for the U.S. approach to maintaining its imperial ascendency, please let me know.

Who will be held accountable for the artillery shell boondoggle? Not GD executives.

Wages of Failure: Since the Army halted two production lines at the factory, the General Dynamics unit responsible for the debacle has received contract awards totaling $2.5 billion.

Maybe Turkish robotics firm Repkom will take the blame?

Paranoia set in. Repkon refused to share passwords needed to control important equipment, according to five former General Dynamics employees. Sometimes workers would be startled by the sight of a machine moving by itself and realize it was being controlled by someone in Turkey. Spooked, General Dynamics workers tore out hardware to cut off remote access to the machines, two former workers said.

If this is starting to sound like a bad movie plot with espionage and sabotage threads, keep in mind that you paid way more than $17 to see this film. But not to worry! Private-public partnerships with contractors all over the globe are racing ahead to produce fast, powerful military hardware that will attempt to compete with Iran, China, and Russia. All three of which are currently demonstrating the decisive power of a loyal, patriotic work force called upon to step up production in the face of existential threats.

General Dynamics workers in my state go out on strike regularly for better pay and working conditions, while their CEO slurps up another bonus.

In April 2024, General Dynamics CEO Novakovic told investors: “In the U.S., we are rapidly increasing ammunition production with the opening of our Texas facility.” General Dynamics failed to conduct a scheduled first article test in Mesquite that same month.

I’ll let Xi Jinping have the last word here. From his 2015 plans for The Governance of China:

There cannot be sustainable development in the world when some countries are getting richer and richer while others languish in prolonged poverty and backwardness.. Such practices as beggar-my-neighbor, shifting crises onto others and feathering one’s nest at the expense of others are both immoral and unsustainable.

Confronted with complex threats to international security, fighting alone or fighting with a blind faith in the use of force [emphasis mine] will not get one anywhere.

August 19, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Paper Tiger: the Failure of America’s Trillion Dollar War Machine

So the US is using multi-million dollar missiles that are irreplaceable in the short term to try, and often fail, to intercept Shahed drones that cost Iran between $20,000 and $50,000 each.

To make up for the Navy’s dwindling missile stocks in the war zone, the US is flying B-1 bombers from a British airbase at Fairford in England to fire Tomahawk missiles at Iran

 SCHEERPOST, August 12, 2026, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies​

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the United States spent $21 trillion on its military between 2001 and 2024 (in constant 2024 dollars), equal to the combined military spending of the next eighteen countries. Iran barely made that list at all, spending only 2% of what the US did, and SIPRI estimated Iran’s 2025 military budget at only $7.5 billion. So how is Iran holding its own against the multi-trillion-dollar US war machine?

A critical difference between the US war on Iran and previous US and allied bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Gaza, is that the US and Israel have failed to destroy Iran’s air defense system and cannot fly warplanes over Iran without risking the loss of planes and pilots to enemy fire. Iran has wisely built its critical defense infrastructure underground, with arms factories, weapons stockpiles and launch sites sheltered safely beneath its impenetrable mountainous terrain.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed on March 10th that the US had “total air dominance” over Iran, but that is still not true. Instead, US forces are mainly attacking Iran with stand-off weapons from outside Iran’s borders, radically depleting US stockpiles of extraordinarily expensive weapons. 

Even though US warplanes avoid entering Iranian airspace, the Congressional Research Service has reported that the US has lost at least four F-15 fighters, an F-35, an A-10, seven KC-135 refueling planes, an E-6 AWACS plane, two MC-130J special operations aircraft, a helicopter, a high-altitude Triton drone and 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones.

By contrast, during the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces lost only one A-10 and six helicopters, after systematically destroying much of Iraq’s air defenses through a low-intensity bombing campaign conducted under cover of the so-called no-fly zones, which the US, UK and France unilaterally imposed after the First Gulf War in 1991.

In 2003, the US Armed Forces dropped 13,000 tons of bombs and missiles on Iraq in the first 30 days of the war. But only 800 tons, or 6%, of those munitions, were cruise missiles and other stand-off weapons like the ones the US is now relying on against Iran.

The US has already depleted a third of its stand-off and air defense weapons stocks, including JASSM and Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-2, -3 and -6 anti-aircraft missiles, as well as half its stocks of Patriot and THAAD interceptors and the new Precision Strike Missiles that are replacing the shorter-range ATACMs. These missiles range in price from $700,000 each for JASSMs up to $12 million each for THAAD interceptors, and many will take years to replace.

So the US is using multi-million dollar missiles that are irreplaceable in the short term to try, and often fail, to interceptShahed drones that cost Iran between $20,000 and $50,000 each. This is a stark contrast from Iraq in 2003, when the US weapon of choice was its 500 lb. GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb, which cost only $22,000, and the 7,000 bombs used to attack Iraq were easily restocked.

To make up for the Navy’s dwindling missile stocks in the war zone, the US is flying B-1 bombers from a British airbase at Fairford in England to fire Tomahawk missiles at Iran. So many planes are now flying from so far away to attack Iran that the US has also had to send dozens more aerial refueling planes to reinforce the sixty it already hadstationed in Israel.

The Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine that the capacity to quickly ramp up production of relatively inexpensive artillery shells and drones can be more critical in a war than spending trillions on big-ticket weapons programs. Meanwhile, the corrupt US military-industrial complex has built a gold-plated revolving door between the US arms industry, the Pentagon top brass and a captive, co-opted civilian government. It has produced ever more expensive weapons, but it has lost nearly every war it has fought. 

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. in his 2018 book Losing Military Supremacy: the Myopia of American Strategic Planning, Andrei Martyanov warned that huge US investments in aircraft-carriers and other big-ticket warships and warplanes were rapidly being rendered obsolete by a new generation of Russian and Chinese missiles capable of traveling much faster and farther than the most advanced missiles in the US arsenal. 

Now Iranian missiles and drones have fundamentally altered the military balance in the Middle East. They have driventhe US military out of its bases in the Persian Gulf and are forcing US aircraft carriers to stay 1,000 miles from the coast of Iran. US Central Command has had to relocate its regional headquarters from Qatar to Jordan, but Iran has attacked it there too. 

Now the United States is repositioning more of its forces in the Middle East to Israel. This raises the stakes, and increases the risks, of any future escalation in the war on Iran, and it further expands the entangling US military alliance with the genocidal state of Israel, which most Americans now oppose.

On August 8, Iran reiterated six points from the Memorandum of Understanding that Trump already signed on June 17, and insisted that the United States must comply with them before it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping. 

Western commentators have described these as tough new conditions, but they are neither new nor tougher than before. They simply make explicit what was already implicit—for example, by specifically mentioning Palestine and Yemen, whereas the original memorandum merely called for ending the war “on all fronts, including Lebanon.” The United States and Israel started this war, and the United States has the power to end it by negotiating in good faith, based on the memorandum it already agreed to.

The American people have sacrificed enormously to pay for this obsolete, overpriced, and ineffective war machine. Many have paid with their lives, their limbs or their health. All of us pay the opportunity cost of our leaders’ warmongering and reckless squandering of our national wealth, leaving us without the basic support systems that our neighbors in other developed countries take for granted, from universal free healthcare and quality public education to living wages and paid vacation time. 

The US government’s corrupt priorities leave our most serious problems unaddressed, while undermining global efforts to address them, from the destruction of the climate and the natural world to the ever-present danger of nuclear war. 

As this year’s primary election results suggest, most Americans want a society that cares for its people, with a government that addresses our most urgent needs. That must surely include dismantling this failed, corrupt, out-of-control and absurdly expensive war machine.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors ofWar In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. https://scheerpost.com/2026/08/12/paper-tiger-the-failure-of-americas-trillion-dollar-war-machine/

August 17, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment