Geostrategy-Direct
By Richard Fisher
President Donald Trump is determined to upend the existing strategic nuclear balance by decreasing the utility of China’s and Russia’s investment in nuclear superiority over the United States, by building a National Missile Defense for Americans that will press China and Russia also to build missile defenses, which over time could neutralize nuclear weapons competition.
Now there are two levels of “price” for advancing President Trump’s vision, formerly called Iron Dome, but now called Golden Dome.
The first is the cost in U.S. national treasure.
On May 20 President Donald Trump announced that he had selected a design for his Golden Dome national missile defense system and that it could be completed for $175 billion by the end of his term in 2029.
Earlier on May 5 the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that Golden Dome could cost between $160 and $542 billion.
Then there is the cost in terms of security, or of failing to defend Americans and their allies — as stipulated in Trump’s Jan. 27 Executive Order on Iron Dome — from the growing threat of Chinese, Russian and North Korean nuclear missiles.
On May 14, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) issued a one-page document providing a very rare public future projection of the missile threats facing the United States out to the year 2035, to help justify the Trump Administration’s Golden Dome project.
This is unusual for the DIA, which prefers to offer current or past assessment of foreign strategic and military threats, and rarely offers projections of future threats, most likely to deny enemies insights into U.S. intelligence agency sources and methods.
So, like other DIA and intelligence agency documents, the annual China Military Power Reports, this latest DIA document does not reveal all that the U.S. understands or assesses about the future missile threat.
But over the last 25 years, it has been this analyst’s observation that the failure to provide future threat analysis has detracted from the U.S. public policy debate over U.S. military budgets and military preparations.
For example, if there had been a debate over the projection of China’s future military threats from the year 2000 onward, it is likely that there would have been an earlier U.S. political consensus by the mid-2010s to build a more robust U.S. military deterrent capability.
However, the DIA is beginning to make up for lost time in its May 14 missile threat projection — which goes far to make clear that Americans require defense from a growing nuclear missile threat.
The DIA document offers five projection categories: Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs); Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs); Boosted Hypersonic Weapons; Land Attack Cruise Missiles; and Fractional Orbital Bombardment Systems (FOBS).
What follows are graphic summaries of the DIA’s assessment and some commentary.
DIA’s assessment of the future ICBM threat is sobering; by 2035 there could be up to 1,210 ICBMs threating Americans, and the DIA does not provide estimates regarding the number of warheads to be carried by these ICBMs.
It can be expected that new Chinese, Russian, North Korean, Iranian and possible Pakistani (not mentioned) ICBMs will all be multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) warhead capable; by 2035 if all of China’s modernized ICBMs can carry at least 5 warheads, that may account for 3,500 Chinese warheads alone aimed at Americans.
Full Text . . . . Current Edition . . . . Subscription Information
Free Press International
