I had one takeaway from Trump’s State of the Union address aside from what most everybody else is alarmed and disgusted over. It needs to be addressed. It is Trump’s promising a “Gold Dome” over the country to protect it from attack. You can read the details in this article. Basically it is Ronald Reagans “Star Wars” on steroids.
Trump wants a golden dome over the United States that makes it invulnerable to missile attack. He likened it to Isreal's "Iron Dome" which is used very effectively to shoot down rockets before impact.
He wants to call his "golden" not, I think, just because ‘Iron Dome’ is a registered trademark of the Israeli defence company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. I would hazard a guess this is because he thinks calling by the name of his favorite metal, the metal he is obsessed with, makes it superior. Forget that gold is hardly a stronger metal than iron. He could have called it “The Steel Dome.”
There is so much wrong here. Aside from the obvious fact that the United States is a far bigger country than Israel which only has to protect itself from missiles and rockets fired from only miles way, if the United States is attacked it will be by ballistic missiles fired from across the globe.
Add to this the question as to which countries would have the capacity to attack us this way. There are only two, Russia and China. Of the two Russia has the most missiles and, most important to consider, some of them are the hypersonic Kh-47M2 Kinzhal. This missile travels at 10 times the speed of sound or Mach 10. This means that currently there is no way to shoot them down.
Let's assume that Russia is still our enemy. This may be a bold assumption since there is growing evidence that Trump has shitcanned our alliance with former allies. Perhaps Russia has become our ally and our former allies have become, if not enemies, countries, as I wrote yesterday, which he doesn’t give a fuck about.
Say Russia, Russia, Russia is as Trump says, a giant hoax. If Trump isn’t in bed with Putin, we have to make the assumption that Russia is the only country which might threaten us with annihilation. Then a first strike from them, while devastating, would still result in our retaliation from our nuclear triad, and destroy much of Russia.
If it was even possible to build an infallible "golden dome" defense system, dismissing the budget breaking cost which would make all the DOGE cost savings negligible, there is something exponentially worse that this would do. It would start an arms race with Russia which would make the Cold War arms race look like it was a midget standing next to a giant.
Now that I’ve gotten this out of the way, military expert that I am not, just from a common sense point of view, let’s look at where the most likely attack from a foreign power is likey to come from. This ought to be a no-brainer. It is over what in the quaint old days used to be called the “Worldwide Web.” Now we may call it “The Cloud.” Web or Cloud, every country has an infrastructure venerable to what is now called cyber-attack.
If you haven’t heard the news about what Pete “ChristianWarrior” Hegseth has just done, you haven’t been paying attention:
Not only that, but as noted in the AP article, the “Trump administration also has rolled back other efforts at the FBI and other agencies related to countering digital and cyber threats.”
The article also says that “during his Senate confirmation hearing this year, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said America’s rivals have shown that they believe cyberespionage — retrieving sensitive information and disrupting American business and infrastructure — to be an essential weapon of the modern arsenal.” This is the CIA director selected by Donald Trump.
We have two giant questions here.
One is whether Russia is still our enemy and the greatest threat to our homeand security. By a threat to homeland security I don’t mean a threat from imaginary maruading migrants raping and pillaging their way across the land, but to the homeland being obliterated by a hostile power. How much more real is the threat of a nuclear attack today than it was when the overriding deterrent to a nuclear attack from Russia was mutually assured destruction, or MAD. This aspect of geopolitics is derived from game theory and the Nash equilibrium, although the end of civilization is no game.
The second giant question is whether this “Golden Dome” is really made out of iron pyrite, otherwise known as “fools gold.” Put another way, will it really work as promised? (Actually iron pyrite did have a military use. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was a source of ignition in early firearms.)
Another way to put it is to quote Shakespeare and remind ourselves that “all that glitters in not gold.”
“The popular form of the expression is a derivative of a line in William Shakespeare's play The Mechcant of Venice, which employs the word "glisters," a 16th-century synonym for "glitters." The line comes from a secondary plot of the play, in the scroll inside the golden casket the puzzle of Portia’s boxes (Act II – Scene VII – Prince of Morocco):”
All that glisters is not gold—
Often have you heard that told.
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold.
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgment old,
Your answer had not been inscrolled
Fare you well. Your suit is cold—
Is it worth the cost if it is nothing more than Trump’s self-aggrandizing showmanship and he’s trying to sell the country a pig in a poke? Is it worth the incredible cost if all we will get is something that “glisters” and doesn’t do what it is supposed to do?
Maybe Trump, Pete Hegseth, Dept. of Treasury head Scott Bessett, White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett and economic advisors you’ve never heard of should get together with Elon Musk and do a little basic arithmetic and measure the cost of the “Golden Dome” against all of the supposed savings from DOGE. If memory serves me, the other night Rachel Maddow said that the personnel cost of federal employees, not counting the military, amounted to 5% of the budget. Musk could fire everyone and Trump still wouldn’t be able to cut the taxes for his billionaire friends.
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