Trump and the Golden Dome Fleece

A little something I put together. Full-size (3.5Mb) available for download here.

I had other possible titles for this:
The Latest Greatest Money Pit: It’s gonna be Yuge!
OR:
How Trump Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Military Industrial Complex.

But I chose the Golden Fleece because I’m being optimistic.

I apologize in advance if this post is not to your liking. Once or twice a year I seem to do something like this: more free-form and less focused. More like a “reaction” video on Jew Tube than the usual “connect the dots” that I prefer to do. Typically, I approach a topic in an almost academic fashion: Start with a premise; pull together the relevant facts; and formulate a well-founded conclusion based on those facts. I believe that, generally, facts speaks for themselves when properly organized and presented to an open mind. If that is more your cup of tea, then I humbly suggest reading a previous post, or circle back next week when I’m sure we will be more on form. But today I have no conclusions, only speculation, bewilderment, and a little bit of fear.

You see, I felt a disturbance in the Force, if you’ll excuse the expression, and I wanted to share it, if for no other reason than for catharsis.

On May 20 of this year, our self-declared Orange Master announced his desire to create a “Golden Dome” over the United States. I assume the “Golden” part of the program refers to the untold national treasure that will be poured into the project. But this is not a post solely about another ridiculous way the monied Elite will find to line their pockets with a bridge-to-nowhere, or more aptly, a pie-in-the-sky scheme. That’s the low-hanging fruit. The real devil is partly in the lack of details, and partly in the possibility of Armageddon.

First, we start with what The Donald said:


Thank you very much, and thank you for being here in the Oval Office, [one of] the great places of the world, as we make a historic announcement about the Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield. That’s something we want. And Ronald Reagan wanted it many years ago but they didn’t have the technology. But it’s something we’re going to have. We’re going to have it at the highest level.

So, right out of the gate, note the eloquence of the real estate developer. What the hell does “We’re going to have it a the highest level” mean anyway?

He goes on to thank a number of people and remind voters that he promised to build a missile defense system for the United States, but at the time it was referred to as an “Iron Dome”, modeled after the one we, that is to say Raytheon, built for Israel. I guess the price has gone up. Now it’s gold.

But the “Golden Dome” is not your daddy’s missile defense system, and the only thing it has in common with the Iron Dome are many of the same defense contractors:


Today, I’m pleased to announce that we have officially selected an architecture for this state-of-the-art system that will deploy next generation technologies across the land, sea, and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors…and should be fully operational before the end of my term. So, we’ll have it done in about three years. Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if the are launched from space…hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, and advanced cruise missiles — all of them will be knocked out of the air.

Note the term “next generation” technologies. We’ll be coming back to that.

He goes on to praise the United States Space Force (which he created in his last term), giving them control of the project and appointing General Guetlein as head of the program, praising his ability to think offensively. We’ll be coming back to that, too. Interesting side note: there are only two countries in the world with a designated Space Force: us, and China.

He also states that at $175 Billion, it’s a heck of a bargain, and it will all be done in two or three years.

Analysis

First, there’s the obvious: It’s a government program: it’s not going to be done in two to three years, and it’s going to cost a hell of a lot more than $175 Billion. When has a government project ever come in on time and at budget? They can’t build a bridge or widen a freeway in less than three years, and they’re going to construct a virtual dome over the whole US landmass? That means one of two things: they’ve already been working on it and that is where some of the untold, and unaccountable, billions of DoD budget dollars have been going for years (cf. UAPs below), or they are lying. The Congressional Budget Office puts the price tag closer to $831 Billion.

Second, the United States isn’t Israel (geographically speaking anyway). The Iron Dome, for them, makes a sort of sense: Israel’s enemies are literally right next door, use conventional rockets, and can launch and land an attack very quickly with little warning.

Our neighbors are not going to launch missiles at us. Mexico prefers using a land-invasion strategy of sending generally unarmed migrants over the border, and Canada’s weapon of choice is to point fingers and whine. If they get really upset, they might cut off our supply of maple syrup. The only real missile threats are intercontinental ballistic, and only two countries in the world can reach us: China and Russia. And we can probably take Russia off the table: their inability to decisively beat a smaller neighbor to the south more-or-less rules out their attacking the last remaining Cold War super-power. That leaves China. So the Golden Dome is designed to protect us from China.

Thirdly, he forgot to mention that he already signed a Royal Decree…er…Executive Order on January 27th, establishing the creation of an “Iron Dome” for the US. In that decree, he maybe said more than he intended, and certainly more than he shared when he announced the Golden Fleece, er, Dome: “The architecture shall include, at a minimum, plans for: …Development and deployment of capabilities to defeat missile attacks prior to launch and in the boost phase…[and] Development and deployment of non-kinetic capabilities to augment the kinetic defeat of ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks.”

As I see it, there are really on two possibilities: It’s bullshit. Or it’s real.

It’s Bullshit

Given we are talking about funneling vast sums of money to shadowy defense contractors, my first inclination is to believe the former: It’s bullshit. With the wars overseas ostensibly winding-down, the War-Profiteers Cabal of Corporations (WPCC) need a new well to suck dry. I speculate that the attempts on Trump’s life were possibly instigated by the WPCC because they feared he would shutdown the giant money-makers in the Ukraine and Middle East (as a point of comparison, see Kennedy’s threat to pull out of Vietnam and how that played out).

But now that he’s found a new stream of unlimited spending for them, the WPCC couldn’t be happier. After all, they don’t actually need a working system, they just need the receipts it takes to try and build one. Lockheed Martin is so excited that, even though they technically don’t have the contract yet, they’ve created a wonderful and glitzy website just for their lobbyists to show around Washington. Like they’re not going to get a piece of the pie… pleeease!

Todd Harrison, former senior vice president for military contractor Metrea and director at the Defense Budget Analysis and the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted the following:


Intercepting missiles in flight is the most technically challenging part of Golden Dome—like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet—[and] will require many more interceptors than the US military currently has or is planning to buy…the issue with space-based interceptors is not the technology; it’s how it scales with the threat. The physics of space-based interceptors mean that they inherently have an absenteeism problem—each interceptor spends the vast majority of its time each orbit out of range of any missiles it could intercept. According to my calculations and using fairly generous assumptions for the performance of each interceptor, it takes about 950 interceptors spread out in orbit around the Earth to ensure that at least one is always in range to intercept a missile during its boost phase. If an adversary launches ten missiles in a salvo, it requires some 9,500 interceptors in space to ensure at least ten are within range to intercept all of the incoming missiles…Given that China has about 350 ICBMs and Russia has 306, not including their sub-launched ballistic missiles, scaling a space-based interceptor system to meet the threat quickly becomes impractical. In peacetime competition, this means an adversary can build missiles faster and more affordably than we can build the space-based interceptors needed to counter them.

So, the Dome is quite possibly the goose that lays the golden defense contractor egg for the foreseeable future.

It’s Real

But it is the second possibility— this is real and actually going to happen— that is the more frightening scenario, for three reasons:

First, it is an abandonment of a strategy that has worked to prevent nuclear-war since the 1950s: the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The best way to prevent intercontinental missiles from hitting the United States isn’t playing “wack-a-mole” from orbit. It’s making sure our enemies don’t launch them in the first place. For those readers that didn’t grow up during the Cold War, be sure to watch Fail Safe (the 1964 version. It’s a Jewish production, but it’s not bad and gives you some idea of the thinking of the time.) Essentially, the strategy is centered on a solid “second strike” capability: the enemy knows that if they strike first, they too will be nuked back into the stone-age. Thus the cost of launching a first-strike is too high to be a viable option. To this end, the United States currently deploys fourteen ballistic missile submarines (the most of any country in the world), capable of nuking any country, anywhere, at any time. It’s a secret how many are stationed off the Chinese coast on any given day, but I’d be willing to bet it’s more than one. We also have approximately 450 land-based ICBMs sitting in silos waiting to be launched.

But now, with the ability to strike first and prevent a second strike with our shiny new “Golden Dome”, the MAD doctrine goes out the window. It can’t be just a coincidence that while we are now officially and publicly developing this Dome technology, we are also replacing our Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) Minuteman III ballistic missiles with the latest and greatest Sentinel missiles. (As an aside, it’s interesting that the missile replacement contracts are going to Boeing and Northrop Grumman, while the Dome contracts will likely be going to Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, and RTX (formerly Raytheon), as well as a plethora of smaller companies you’ve never heard of staffed by the revolving door at the Pentagon. Gotta spread that money around.)

The second reason this is frightening hits closer to home: It’s one thing for Big Brother to be watching and listening (and if you don’t think they are, talk around your phone for a while about how great it would be to have a new pair of golf clubs, then, while surfing the web or visiting your preferred social media, notice how many ads start to appear for golfing accessories). But it’s quite another thing for Big Brother to be able to gun you down from orbit, anywhere, any time. That’s the technology they are ultimately trying to implement. Exploding pagers are so yesterday. That’s the part that Trump let slip in the January announcement when he said they would be able to strike “prior to launch” and with “non-kinetic” weapons.

The third reason is timing: With the ever increasing clamor for disclosure about UAPs (UFOs) and black-budget programs, isn’t it interesting that we are now going to be spending, officially, untold billions on a clandestine space program? Again, I think the cat was inadvertently let out of the bag:

On May 22, Gen. Stephen N. Whiting, head of the United States Space Command was speaking at a Council on Global Affairs event when he said, “Now countries like China and Russia have fielded what we call hyper-glide vehicles. Instead of launching and being very predictable, these things now can turn wildly, they can fly much longer than expected.”

That sure sounds an awful lot like the description of UAP behavior. It is becoming increasingly clear that our Military-Industrial Complex has been testing this “next-generation technology” in our own airspace, and now that they can no longer hide it, are finding it best to walk the program out to the public over the next year or two.

Conclusion: Bad or Worse

What does this have to do with National Socialism, which of course is what this blog is generally about? Well, that’s easy: think of what the trillions of dollars spent, and to be spent, could do for the average American worker: lower taxes, better roads, better schools, affordable healthcare- heck, free health care- etc. Instead, the usual cast of corporate characters are going to make absolutely ungodly profits. The American people have been sold a Golden Bill of Goods, shaped like a doughnut: all around the plump outside of the project the wealthy laugh and make bank while the American people sit in the center with a hole in their wallet.

So, it’s definitely a boondoggle, and maybe something much, much worse.

Don’t try this at home.

Now, I’m all for protecting the homeland. But to do that, we need to be ready to fight the next war, not regurgitate neo-con doctrines from the 1980s. The modern battlefield looks a lot more like World War I than Starship Troopers: inexpensive and easily deployable drones flit about the landscape, ready to knock-out tanks and destroy troops bold enough to leave their trenches. The most effective weapon to date against them has been the shotgun.

I don’t think the Golden Dome will protect us. I think it will bankrupt the nation. At best, it is nothing more than another tool for the richest money-mangers in the world, using their military proxies, to siphon more money from the American worker. Again, that’s being optimistic: If it’s a scam, that’s the good news.

But I fear there’s something more here; something I just can’t quite put my finger on. That disturbance in the Force. It’s a feeling or a thought lurking in the subconscious that has yet to find the words.

My gut tells me this is bad. I don’t mean the standard reverse-Robinhood bad we usually see where money is taken from the poor- that is to say, the average American worker- by cutting benefits and raising taxes and healthcare costs while corporate profits bounce year-over-year to all time highs, and CEO bonuses are handed out like candy at Halloween; or the “bad” of unlimited and unaccountable defense spending; or the “bad” of defense contractors that have spreadsheets posted on their office walls that directly correlate body-counts to profitability.

The “bad” I feel here is different. This is not about protection. I fear this is the first step to a circumvention of the imperfect MAD doctrine that has forestalled nuclear war on more than one occasion since the end of the Second World War. Recall Trump’s praise of General Guetlein’s offensive thinking noted above? That should give one pause. Without much imagination, it is easy to see the “Golden Dome” as a first strike weapon that rains unmitigated terror from above, or provides a false sense of security to the presidential moron-of-the-day that has his finger poised over the ICBM launch button. In the hands of rabid neo-cons and the handlers of inept presidents, the “Golden Dome” could be the goose that lays eggs in the shape of mushroom clouds.

Thank you for your indulgence. I would like to say I feel better for having shared my concerns. Sadly, I don’t.

Amerika Erwache!

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5 responses to “Trump and the Golden Dome Fleece”

  1. Dan Schneider Avatar
    Dan Schneider

    So, they say they’re giving America a Golden Dome. Sounds more like we’re getting a Golden Shower. The government is pissing all over us, as usual.

    I grew up during the Cold War. Most of the time, I didn’t give it a second thought. To me, that’s how things were. We accepted the situation. Besides, what could we do about it? Even as a child, I was smart enough to realize that a nuclear war was unlikely as long as stayed current with the other superpowers. If they tried to nuke us, we’d get ours launched before theirs hit their targets. Anyone would have to be insane to order a first strike.

    Here’s something else to consider. The United States owes China $775 Billion of our national debt. We also buy a lot of their cheap plastic crap. Dead men pay no bills or buy stuff.

    Also, Comrade Rhein is quite correct when he points out government projects rarely, if ever come in on time and under budget. It’s always late and always costs more than originally quoted – just like when you take your car to the shop. We all know what that’s like!

    1. Johann Rhein Avatar

      “The United States owes China $775 Billion of our national debt.” You know, I didn’t even think to mention that. That’s probably the biggest deterrent their is. As a point of comparison, the new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines cost in the $10 to $20 Billion range. Between those two facts (what we owe China, and how much cheaper a shiny new ballistic missile submarine is compared to the Golden (Shower) Dome), explain the need for the Dome again?
      Yeah, growing up with it was something. When I first joined the Army the catch phrase in NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) training was “Ass to the Blast”: meaning if you saw the flash/mushroom cloud, turn and drop to the ground. About half-way through my service, they changed it to dropping down with your head to the blast. I asked why and was told that the pencil pushers in the Pentagon had decided that we could benefit from the “shadow” effect (like the ones you see in Hiroshima) caused by our helmets (these were steel pot helmets, not the fancy new kevlar). To a man, including the instructors, we looked at each other and laughed: everything below our necks would be vaporized, but at least our heads would still be intact. That’s the military.

  2. M Avatar
    M

    Third option, it’s esoteric in nature and connected to the red heifer and the restoration of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. That name “golden dome” is too specific. The hegemons don’t waste those kinds of opportunities.

    1. Johann Rhein Avatar

      That’s brilliant! I don’t know why I didn’t make the “Golden Dome” connection. Well spotted!

    2. A.J. Avatar
      A.J.

      Glad I’m not the only one that thought the same thing. Note that if Israel sacrifices the red cow doesn’t mean that the temple has to be built the same day. Then again everything Donald Trump owns including his toilet is made of gold.

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