Golden Dome Defense System Unveiled As America Continues Long Tradition Of Solving Problems By Building Larger Objects
LONDON (PRAT.UK DATELINE) — The United States has announced plans for the Golden Dome missile defense system, a project described by the Pentagon as “a generational leap in defensive capability” and by everyone else as “a very expensive umbrella for a country that has historically preferred to deal with problems by making them bigger, louder, or more structurally ambitious.”
A Brief History Of America Solving Things By Building Something Enormous
The Golden Dome joins a distinguished lineage of large American solutions to complex problems. There was the Interstate Highway System, which solved the problem of needing to drive places by building 48,000 miles of road that also created traffic. There was the Strategic Defense Initiative of 1983, which proposed to shoot down Soviet missiles with space lasers, generating such enormous quantities of PowerPoint that the Cold War ended simply to make the briefings stop. And of course there is the current tradition of building aircraft carriers the size of several football pitches to project power in situations that ultimately require a phone call.
What The Golden Dome Is, Technically
The system proposes a layered national missile defense grid integrating ground-based interceptors, space-based sensors, and — in its more ambitious versions — directed-energy weapons positioned in orbital platforms. The Department of Defense has indicated the programme will require multi-year appropriations running into the hundreds of billions, a figure the Congressional Budget Office noted would fund every school lunch programme in America for approximately forty years, a comparison the Pentagon described as “not a helpful framing.”
British Reaction: Admiring, Baffled, Slightly Envious
Britain, a nation whose own missile defense posture consists largely of strongly-worded UN statements and hoping NATO is in a good mood, responded to the announcement with the complex emotions of a country that once had an empire and now has a very good museum about it.
“It’s magnificent, obviously,” said a former MoD official from a leather chair in a St James’s club. “Completely absurd, possibly unworkable, almost certainly going to cost twice what they’ve said. But magnificent. We would never do it. Partly because we couldn’t afford it. Partly because the planning permission alone would take thirty years.”
Will It Work
Physicists, arms control experts, and the forty-year precedent of missile defense research all suggest the answer is: “partially, in ideal conditions, against limited attacks, probably.” This is roughly the same answer that has been given since Ronald Reagan first suggested shooting things in space, and it has not appreciably dimmed American enthusiasm for the concept, which is, one must admit, a kind of optimism.
— Prat.uk Defence Correspondent, Cowering Responsibly Under A Modest British Umbrella
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