The Trump team has come up with another expensive high-tech pipe dream that will join the gold-plated kit that Russia and Iran are currently demonstrating is useless. From Laurie Calhoun at libertarianinstitute.org:
Back in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan famously championed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), referred to colloquially as “Star Wars.” Forty years later, in 2025, President Donald Trump has thrown his enthusiastic support behind what is tantamount to a rebranded, bright and shiny new version of SDI: the Golden Dome. It is surprising that so few commentators in the mainstream media have made the connection, apparently unaware of why the Star Wars program was abandoned.
Instead, pundits, politicians, and government officials such as Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth all speak of the prospect of the Golden Dome in reverent tones, evincing a state of manifest awe. Apparently either altogether unaware or insouciant of the many boondoggles to come, among other reasons why the original SDI project was scrapped, those who express ardent support of what is now being pushed as Trump’s project have bought into the seductive marketing line (as it was last time) that this is all a noble quest to keep Americans safe, by all means necessary.
Among other notable problems, the expansion of defense capacities into outerspace, which recommenced in earnest with the formal re-establishment of a U.S. Space Command (SPACECOM) in 2019, during Trump’s first administration, will in all likelihood initiate a new arms race. The original SDI program was criticized for abjectly violating the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABM) Treaty of 1972, which limited each signatory’s anti-missile systems to two sites with a maximum of one hundred interceptor missiles each. The George W. Bush administration withdrew the United States from the ABM treaty in 2002, claiming that it hindered the development of technologies to address novel threats. It is worth remembering that the same administration also stated in its 2002 NSSUSA (National Security Strategy of the United States of America) that “Our best defense is a good offense.”
How will they test it with no hypersonic?
Read that Patriot is being upgraded to mach 5.