I had to read this a few times to make sure I understood properly, but the Trump admin wants to spend a metric fuckton of money on a group of IoT systems that will keep space missiles pointed at basically every country on earth (including the US). Aside being the stuff of cartoon villains, once this is begun in earnest why on earth wouldn’t every other nation do the same? And what’s stop stop hackers from penetrating any one of the “system of systems” used to make this thing work and launch a missile or two?
To be fair, you don’t need it to perfectly counter China and Russia to have value. There are other countries that have nuclear capabilities or ambitions, who don’t have thousands of ICBMs. Those countries are also less likely to have anti-satellite capabilities, as well.
North Korea is the only one that could fall under that category. It just seems like a ton of resources to throw behind a tiny fraction of the nuclear threat to the US. Couldn’t we station boost-phase interceptors in South Korea and/or Japan for a whole lot cheaper? An anti-satellite capability is much easier to get than a nuclear ICBM. If they can make a nuke, they can take out a satellite.
Ultimately, Golden Dome is a wunderwaffe. The Trump administration is excited about it for the same reasons the Nazis were excited about their military vanity projects. It’s hard to discuss it purely in it’s own merits without also considering the reason it is being pursued. It isn’t being pushed by top people in the military or Pentagon. It’s pushed because some high up fascists saw the Israeli Iron Dome and were like “we gotta have one of those, but BIGGER, and make it GOLD”. It’s an aesthetic marketing halo project for MAGA fascism.
I agree 100%, I’m not arguing it’s a good idea, these are just other arguments than “in order for it to be useful it needs to be able to counter Russia and/or China, otherwise it would be strategically useless and economically infeasible”.
In the status quo, I still don’t think that’s true; India and Pakistan are both nuclear-equipped, but with moderate-to-low warhead counts that could potentially reach the US. Western European countries have nukes (France and UK), though they both tend to favor SLBMs over land-based ones. If you’re planning to make any of them enemies, it could absolutely be useful.
That has not been true so far. There are more countries with nukes than ones with anti-satellite missile systems. Only the US, Russia, China, India, and the UK have demonstrated anti-satellite capabilities.