Will Trump’s Missile Defense Plan Work?
Will Trump’s Missile Defense Plan Work?
Peace is in the air with both the pope and U.S. president trying to bring peace to the Middle East. Our main story examines the state of play in Lebanon. Could the former hotbed of Hezbollah make a lasting peace with the Jews?
America the invincible? Donald Trump announced new details of his plan for a “Golden Dome” missile shield to intercept missiles heading to the U.S. But it won’t keep America safe.
President Trump said it would cost $175 billion and be operational at the end of his term—and be nearly 100 percent effective.
“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space,” he said. A satellite network would detect and track missiles. Little other details were announced, but in March, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said they wanted missile interceptors in space.
I don’t see any way that it is will be as cheap, as accurate or as quickly built as Trump says. Missile defense is hard: You’re trying to hit a rocket with another rocket. America has been working on the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (gmd) system to defend against North Korea for years. Yet as Jaganath Sankaran of the University of Texas and Steve Fetter of the University of Maryland wrote in 2022: “Despite two decades of dedicated and costly efforts, however, the gmd system remains unproven and unreliable. It has not demonstrated an ability to defeat the relatively simple and inexpensive countermeasures that North Korea can field. The gmd system has suffered persistent delays, substantial cost increases and repeated program failures.” Golden Dome relies on new technologies and different ways of striking missiles—it’s still a hard task.
Hard things can still be worth doing, of course. Making North America immune to nuclear strikes (Canada has talked about joining in) is audacious. It would transform global politics: If the U.S. can strike China and then block a Chinese counterstrike, then the era of Mutual Assured Destruction is over. Because it relies so heavily on space-based assets, it also accelerates the creation of a new theater of war in orbit.
The more important reason we know it won’t keep America safe is found in Deuteronomy 28:52, where God warns that if the nation disobeys Him “thy high and fenced walls … wherein thou trustedst” won’t keep it safe. God doesn’t prophesy a gradual decline and fall for America. Those high fenced walls are still there—the nation has impressive defense technology—but they can’t protect a sinning nation from God’s correction through foreign powers.
Return of the king of debt: $25 billion for the Golden Dome is just one item in the “big, beautiful” spending bill President Trump tried to convince Republicans to pass yesterday. He went to Capitol Hill as a handful of Republican holdouts blocked its passing, demanding cuts to Medicaid to help bring U.S. borrowing under control. Trump expressed his frustration in coarse language, with a senior White House official saying the president is “losing patience with all holdout factions.” At least eight Republicans have said they’re still against it, enough to easily block its passage.
As Carol Wroth wrote for Fox News:
The United States has a hair-on-fire problem: its debt. … Our deficit is running at a wartime level, around double the historic average as a percent of GDP, and interest on the debt has now surpassed spending on defense, which is not a healthy indicator for a country and its fiscal stability.
A main cause of this issue is Congress and their years of reckless overspending. Unfortunately, it lies in their hands to fix the problem they helped create.
Currently, Congress is at work on “one big, beautiful bill” to address taxes and spending. And what we have seen thus far is still too big and doesn’t address the critical issues at hand. Frankly, the new bill needs a “fat shot” (the humorous moniker President Donald Trump used for weight-loss drugs like Ozempic). And without it, we are just going to push our country nearer to a fiscal cliff.
The trillions in savings promised by doge haven’t materialized yet. Without them, something has to be cut. Yet we’re seeing President Trump return to his “king of debt” approach—to use the title he gave himself in 2016.
Trumpet executive editor Stephen Flurry published an article called “The King of Debt” in 2018, warning that “the United States will be borrowing nearly a trillion dollars every year from now on! That is astronomical.” In reality, America has borrowed over $2 trillion.
“America is addicted to debt,” he wrote. “We are hooked on it like we are hooked on drugs, and no one is serious about conquering this nation-destroying addiction.”
This massive level of debt is a moral failing and it is destroying the nation, as he explained in that article.
IN OTHER NEWS
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America launched the “largest air strike in the history of the world” recently—and most of the world didn’t notice. Adm. James Kilby said the uss Harry S. Truman and its strike group launched 125,000 pounds of munitions into Somalia, as the U.S. fights the Islamic State. Radical Islam continues to threaten to destabilize the Horn of Africa.
