The 'Iron Dome for America' Boondoggle

The only things that the U.S. would get from massively expanding its missile defense systems is a lot more debt and arms races with other nuclear weapons states.

The White House sent out a new executive order that calls for chasing after the fantasy of a missile defense system to defend “against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.” The administration has chosen to call this “Iron Dome for America,” but what they are proposing would be far more ambitious and vastly more expensive to build even if it were technically feasible. Trying to build such a system would perversely make the U.S. less secure by pushing other states to expand their missile forces so that they could overwhelm whatever defenses the U.S. might create.

The only things that the U.S. would get from massively expanding its missile defense systems is a lot more debt and arms races with other nuclear weapons states.