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Our ballistic missile defense system sucks actually. We don't have nearly enough defense missiles if we were to actually get into a nuclear conflict. But if we WERE to get into a nuclear conflict that doesn't even matter because we are all just gonna be screwed no matter what
I know what you mean. Also, when your main strategy to avoid being stabbed is to continuously have a knife already at the throat of every potential stabber, it seems like an expesive shield is maybe not a high priority investment.
You can’t possibly know that. Whatever arsenal the U.S. military has is classified, and they’re not going to advertise our capabilities to the enemy. I’d wager the U.S. is *more* than prepared for any threat. There’s a reason conflicts don’t make it to America’s shores.
Once big reason conflicts don't make it here is "why the heck would anyone want to occupy north America??" It's an AWFUL place strategically, which is one of the reasons we have military bases around the world. You can't deploy from the US on any real scale, and the mountains make for one hell of a barricade for any attempts at a ground invasion. We also don't have a ton of natural resources compared to other countries, and most of the people in the world are a huge ocean away in either direction.
Like yeah "really expensive military" probably doesn't hurt, but nobody wants to fight here because there's no point and anyone who tried would be at a severe disadvantage due to the natural landscape. Most attacks on the US are either information campaigns or cyber attacks (because those actually would have an impact on our global presence) and those reach "our shores" constantly.
Not really. The Patriots are portable SAM batteries are designed to intercept aircraft and large-ish missiles at extreme ranges. They are far more effective than the Dome but also astronomically expensive (iirc there were fewer than 500 batteries built for all of the worldwide users?) The US may or may not have enough on hand to cover the entire territory (and many if not most of these are currently overseas.) Israel also has them, and they still needed the Dome anyways.
The Iron Dome has a much shorter range, is not portable, is designed to shoot down unguided, non-maneuvering rocket artillery rockets, and the dome missiles are cheap enough to actually use them against these kinds of barrages. The US absolutely does not have an equivalent, but they hardly need it, especially when it comes to covering all of the mainland territory.
It is worth mentioning that the US also has *some* semblance of true anti-ballistic missile defence. These ground-launched interceptors are few in number compared to how many warheads a proper enemy can deliver, and I don't think they cover all that much territory. They may be effective against an attack from a rogue state like NK or in the immediate future Iran, but not against a rival power.
>Good news, the United States already has many hundreds of Patriot Missile Systems,
Not really. "Many hundreds" is an exaggeration. Patriot systems are great, but not that new. There were only about 1 thousand ever built, and only about half are still functional. Of those 500 or so, half are spread throughout the world, mostly in Europe, Turkey, and Korea. Because of the war in Ukraine, the U.S. has taken back deployment from some places like Japan.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3625683/us-department-of-defense-statement-on-japans-decision-to-transfer-patriot-missi/#:~:text=The%20United%20States%20welcomes%20Japan's,in%20the%20Indo%2DPacific%20region.
https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/integrated-air-and-missile-defense/global-patriot-solutions
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot
Keeping the existence of a defense system secret makes it kinda useless. If your opponent knows/thinks you have no shield they're more likely to attack. If they think you have an indestructible shield that they just didn't know how it works, they won't.
If the US had some unstoppable missile defense system they'd probably want everyone to know it existed, while keeping what exactly it does a secret.
Sort of. The USA would probably not hide the existence of the defense system. But they very well May undersell the effectiveness and some of the capabilities of that system so that if things went hot for whatever reason the enemy would make false assumptions about the best way to attack. For instance underselling the maximum range of a radar.
It would be completely useless, too. The iron dome is for intercepting smaller targets like artillery rounds and rockets. There is no plausible scenario in which the continental U.S. is having to deal with such attacks. What would actually be helpful is Patriot, Aegis, and THAAD style systems to protect from ICBMs and SLBMs.
This is the answer. People are trying to answer the wrong question. We already have an “iron dome” in place that has several components to defend against nuclear attack.
It’s pretty common knowledge that these systems could be over saturated by an attack from Russia, for examples. So the real question is how much would it cost to create a system with so much redundancy that it wouldn’t be over saturated by 2000 nuclear warheads all dropping on the US at once. Probably trillions.
Edit:
Here’s my best guess:
We need to mostly guard from the north and west since the attack would come from Russia or China. But let’s say there is roughly 7000 miles of border we need to be able to cover and let’s reduce that since there are definitely ways to optimize this problem.. so let’s call it 3500 miles to cover.
Just to simplify if we only used THAAD which has a range of 125 miles give or take from the launcher. So that’s a total coverage range of 250 miles. So we need a total of 14 launcher locations to cover the required area.
We know that Russia would never shoot all ~1700 strategic warheads at a single location but let’s assume that a single point of failure would need enough interceptors to be able to handle 1/3rd of all of russias stockpile which would be ~533 warheads.
Let’s assume each rocket they send at us is a 50/50 split of 6 warheads and 6 decoys. So we would need to take out 2x the number of warheads coming at us so 533x2 =1066.
Let’s finally assume we need to shoot 3 interceptors per warhead/decoy to make sure it gets taken out.
Cost= Saudi Arabia purchased 44 launchers for 15 billion in 2017. So .34 billion per launcher.
A THAAD launcher can carry 8 missiles.
Ok so each of our 14 locations need to be able to take out 1066 warheads/decoys. To do this we would need to launch 3198 interceptors.
This would require 400 launchers at each of the 14 locations.
That’s a total of about 5,600 launchers.
That would cost about 1,902 billion dollars.
Or 1.9 trillion. This is incredibly back of the envelope but there you go
True.. but strategic defense is generally public information as a preventative measure. If you don’t think you can touch us AND we can wipe your country off the map then there is no way you pick a fight with us. It doesn’t make a lot of sense that we would have the ability to fully defend ourselves and we wouldn’t shout it from the mountain tops.
But you’re right. Who knows.
Let’s say that the U.S. has 95% confidence that we could neutralize an all-out nuclear attack from Russia. Would it be wise to risk that 5%? All it takes is one nuke landing on Manhattan. We could be extremely confident on our ability to neutralize nuclear attacks based on simulations, but who knows what will happen when it is a real attack; reality is messy and you can’t account for every variable.
Ya this is how I think about it from my line of work. Pretty much any new building system after started up has bugs that need to be worked out. Something installed wrong, controls programming not spot on, a component has a factory defect. You can't put a system this advanced to a full on test before actual use so there are going to be bugs if nukes ever go up in the air. But you can also expect that from the other side, i.e. not all of Russia's nukes will launch or go where intended.
Russia has submarines that fire nuclear torpedoes. They could sail up to a coastal city like san franscisco , new york, LA etc and unleash hell without a single airborne weapon being fired.
[What Are Putin's Nuclear 'Doomsday' Poseidon Torpedoes? - Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/what-are-putins-nuclear-doomsday-poseidon-torpedoes-1759032)
I really rather wouldn’t test that, Russian knows that their main weapons are nuclear so it makes sense that those are the ones that they take seriously. Plus nuclear torpedoes aren’t that far fetched, and are not a high tech piece of equipment. At least compared to a stealth fighter.
You wouldn't want to advertise it because other countries might decide to build even more nukes to counteract it, or invest in other means to sabotage it.
If they're smart, Russia would launch several thousand decoy missiles with the real ones. And I'm sure we'd do the same in an attack. Just fill the sky with noise and even the best air defense system becomes nearly useless.
Ya totally. And you would need 2-4 interceptors minimum per decoy to make sure you get them all. To circle back to the original purpose of this thread… it would be very expensive haha
It could genuinely cost more money than there is in the entire world. I'm still waiting on the math, but my guess is tens of trillions to make a truly impenetrable defense system... minimum.
Here’s my best guess:
We need to mostly guard from the north and west since the attack would come from Russia or China. But let’s say there is roughly 7000 miles of border we need to be able to cover and let’s reduce that since there are definitely ways to optimize this problem.. so let’s call it 3500 miles to cover.
Just to simplify if we only used THAAD which has a range of 125 miles give or take from the launcher. So that’s a total coverage range of 250 miles. So we need a total of 14 launcher locations to cover the required area.
We know that Russia would never shoot all ~1700 strategic warheads at a single location but let’s assume that a single point of failure would need enough interceptors to be able to handle 1/3rd of all of russias stockpile which would be ~533 warheads.
Let’s assume each rocket they send at us is a 50/50 split of 6 warheads and 6 decoys. So we would need to take out 2x the number of warheads coming at us so 533x2 =1066.
Let’s finally assume we need to shoot 3 interceptors per warhead/decoy to make sure it gets taken out.
Cost= Saudi Arabia purchased 44 launchers for 15 billion in 2017. So .34 billion per launcher.
A THAAD launcher can carry 8 missiles.
Ok so each of our 14 locations need to be able to take out 1066 warheads/decoys. To do this we would need to launch 3198 interceptors.
This would require 400 launchers at each of the 14 locations.
That’s a total of about 5,600 launchers.
That would cost about 1,902 billion dollars.
Or 1.9 trillion. This is incredibly back of the envelope but there you go
In reality there are a lot of layers to such a defense. Ironically one of the best defenses against a Russia style mass launch is actually all our empty silos.
The logic goes thusly:
Defeating your opponent's nuclear arsenal is critical to ensuring that you survive the war. It is very hard to know for absolutely certain which silos have missiles in them and which do not. Silos are also hardened, and you'll want to task multiple weapons on each one to ensure a high probability that it is destroyed.
Ergo, building empty silos function as decoys absorbing a large number of warheads that would otherwise target something important.
Addition layers of defense include the midcourse interceptors and Patriot and AEGIS systems as a last ditch defense.
Commander in Chief for 4 years and knows nothing. Here is ranting about catapults on aircraft carriers-
"You know the catapult is quite important. So I said what is this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. He said well, we're going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern \[technology\]. I said you don't use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, "Ah, how is it working?" "Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn't have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam's going all over the place, there's planes thrown in the air." It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it's very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said–and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be–"Sir, we're staying with digital." I said no you're not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it's no good."
Yes, it's a [real quote.](https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a27632779/trump-navy-steam-catapults/)
Biden flubs one word and he’s called demented.
This moron rambles on about crap that not only makes ZERO sense but is utterly baffling. This man literally has a private jet, how could he honestly think the military is still using steam planes and missiles?
There’s no explanation for wanting to lie about a conservation like that, unless he truly thinks he comes out looking like the smart one - which again, just proves how much of an absolute.
The fact that a quote like this isn’t a question to his mental capacities but Biden shuttering or mumbling out a word is really just shows the quality of his fan base.
It does exist. We’ve got dozens of active missile defense systems all over both coasts, even inland in places like Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Ohio, just to name a few.
Trump is just using buzzwords to drum up support. If elected, he’d do nothing and then cite the above as his accomplishment.
We also have an underwater SOSUS warning net. When that idiot went to the Titanic and his sub imploded they picked it up right away and James Cameron knew someone in the Navy who basically told him they heard it and knew it was gone right away. I have no doubt NORAD etc.. things we don't know about are quite powerful.
I'm sure we could have done that in the 80's. I was an officer, we haven't come close to saying what it can really do. Shit we have mini space shuttle drones going up into orbit for months like the X-37B.
Patriot can't hit an ICBM. There's two points to it that prevent a Patriot from hitting a full on ballistic inbound.
The first is that the radar only has a 100km range. ICBMs have a 7km/second reentry speed. That's 14 seconds from detection to detonation. The patroit missile moves at ~1200m/s, meaning that the ICBM is 7/8ths of the way to target before first possible kill. That's just 14 km away. You better hope it's aimed right at you, because that kind of cross range tolerance is yikes.
The second is that the Patroit's software and hardware is simply not set up for handling something moving at *faster than the speed of explosions.* It operates on a hit to kill design, which given the tolerances needed, is absurdly tight.
The difference between SCUD and something like an SS-18 is Mach 5 vs ***Mach 20***.
Aegis is a far superior option. There's two things that swing it in favour. The first is the radar. The Aegis can easily lock the missile from the horizon, then put the missile in a place such that the interceptor is at near maximum engagement range for maximum intercept attempts. However, to further increase effectiveness, Aegis is designed to be networked into early warning systems such as early warning satellites and ground based strategic defence radars such as Cobra Dane.
The second is the warhead type of the Standard Missile. It uses blast fragmentation, giving it a larger effective volume in detonation. The timing is hard, and likely needs a software change to account for the speed of the target, but it's entirely doable.
The final thing in favour of Aegis is simply the launcher capacity. Shipbased VLS could easily ripple eight missiles in an initial volley, whereas patroit might only be installed with a four missile setup.
Excellent post. In addition, I think it is extremely likely that post-Aegis intercept systems are already live, but we don’t hear anything about them. The threat of ballistic nuclear weapons is the only true existential danger the United States faces in an armed conflict, and defense research has certainly proceeded accordingly. The recent Russian emphasis on hypersonic missile technology leads me to think they already believe America has effective countermeasures to traditional delivery systems.
The SM-3, which is what Aegis would generally use for longer range ballistic missiles, is a kinetic warhead. It doesn’t use blast fragmentation, but it doesn’t really need it.
It can use an SM-6 for ballistic missiles too, which does have blast fragmentation, but only for terminal intercepts which are probably not what you’d be doing with Aegis if the goal was homeland defense.
Umm this is not true, an iron dome would be critical on saving Michigan from Canadian extremist militants. Please explain how this is not insanely useful /s
Not even this would be useful since the most plausible scenario for a nuclear attack on the USA (or any other major country) is a high-altitude detonation similar to the Project Starfish Prime detonations in the 1960's.
A single detonation at about 250 miles (400 km) up in could blanket an area about 900 miles in radius with EMP, taking out the US power grid on one coast. Two would probably do the job for the entire USA, and currently the US power grid is so old that it would take months to be restarted.
In those months people would be without basic utilities (clean water, power for refrigeration, hosptials, etc.) The best estimates put the death toll at nearly 90% in major urban areas because urban areas are simply too overcrowded to support the population without power.
And intercepting these missiles would be impossible for numerous reasons, the most important being that they could be made to look like satellite launches or even deorbiting satellites on trajectory for a safe ocean splashdown.
The bottom line is that there is no plausible defence for a Project Starfish Prime type of nuclear attack, and the number of missiles required is ridiculously small.
>THAAD style systems to protect from ICBMs and SLBMs.
Agree, I'd also add XXCH and BCHG to the list. Hell, even AKSH and MCLK would make a lot of sense. Maybe it'd be an overkill to do RRKL as well but now that I think about it QREE and POOP might be needed.
Let’s ignore what an iron dome actually is, and assume we want to build a literal dome out of iron. We‘ll just make a semi-sphere, as an approximation. I know the US isn’t a circle, and you can probably make it more flat. On the other hand I am ignoring construction costs entirely, so I think this is a low estimate still. I‘ll assume the dome to be 10m thick. I’ll ignore if that is stable.
The contiguous US has a diameter of about 4500 km, the surface of a semi-sphere that size has a surface of about 7.2 *10^16 m^2, therefore our 10 m thick sphere has a volume of around 7.2* 10^17 m^3.
One cubic meter of iron costs about 150k USD, therefore the material cost would be about 10^23 dollars. Bargain.
One tiny problem: the global iron ore reserves run out before you're even a millionth of the way there. More iron doesn't magically appear by throwing more money at it, it needs to be used to motivate people to mine for more.
> One cubic meter of iron costs about 150k USD
lolwut? A cubic meter of iron is around 7 tons and scrap steel goes for \~$200 per ton, so nowhere near 150k.
EDIT: I was moronic and used r instead of r^2 before, I redid the calculation with r^2 instead and it got to a ridiculous number:
Now I'm curious how much a literal iron dome would cost, from west coast to east coast is about 4,500,000 metres, this can be our diameter of a theoretical sphere around the US, 4πr^2 is the surface of a sphere, and a dome is half a sphere, so 2πr^2 is the surface area of this dome, where r is 4500000m/2 = 2250000m:
2 x π x 2250000^2 ≈ 3.18x10^13 m^2
Let's assume this iron is about a metre thick to make the math easy, so how much would 3.18x10^13 m^3 of iron cost? Probably alot...
Let’s see.
EDIT: it seems likely - see comments of others below - that I’ve got some errors in my calculations, factor of 1000. I’m too tired to re-check and correct them right now. Take them with a shaker of salt.
1 cubic meter of cast iron = 7300 kgs.
1 metric ton of cast iron: Approximately 1000 US$, using a very low and conservative value, to be on the safe side.
So 28,264,384 times 7300 times 1000 US$ equals 206,330,003,200,000 US$.
So the dome would cost 206,330 billion US$, or more than 200 times the defense budget.
Now for the nitty-gritty details: Cast iron isn’t infinitely strong. Even if we assume that we don’t need a foundation for the dome, from top to bottom it needs to be thicker and thicker to support the growing weight of the iron above. It would be interesting to check if building an iron dome with the thickness of 1 m at the top that wouldn’t collapse under its own weight is even feasible.
As a civil engineer I'm going to guestimate that we don't need to do any maths to know an unsupported dome spanning continental America wouldn't support itself.
It's maybe possible to design a structure that could hold up to the physics (though I really doubt it) but it would be completely infeasible to actually build.
A supported flattened dome would be more feasible as you could segment the dome and support the weight of the segments on vertical towers from the ground and use the neighbouring dome sections to laterally stabilise each other. (Again not at all feasible in reality but moreso for a whole host of reasons)
American here. Can I please come over before you lock it? I am a butcher, a baker, and I took a candle making class once so I could teach others how to do it at an arts and crafts store.
I was trying to guesstimate how many supporting pillars actual iron dome would need and abandoned hundreds of thousands and moved to millions. I guess that you could build part of iron dome that supports itself in meters range, so that distance between pillars would be something like 200 meters.
Another fun thought was those skyscrapers on coasts. What about those? Expand dome to pretty far to sea, make dome to rise in very steep angle or cut skyscrapers?
I love this exchange. I’ve seen a billion level value referred to as a thousand million and it makes sense. But only as a math teacher and not from the American idiom. I had assumed this was the same thing.
Thanks for being mensch!
Some other detail: When we assume that the dome hasn’t to be a half-sphere but instead an elliptical form would also be OK (think about the shape of an egg), we would need less material: We could reduce the height of the dome, and use as one horizontal diameter west-coast to east coast, and from north to south the Canadian border to the south end of Florida. Of course these values need to be adjusted, because we’re speaking about an ellipse and not of a rectangle.
That's also assuming the price of iron doesn't change. If the US government suddenly decides to buy enough iron to cover the entire country (which I'm sure there literally isn't even enough of in the world) then first of all, iron would have to be sourced from different countries with varying prices, and second of all, the prices of iron would soar drastically with scarcity.
My final answer is "very expensive".
If you pressurize the inside, that will hold up the top. I'm bad at math, but that's only about 1 extra atmosphere, right?
And if we install an air conditioner, we can solve global warming (but only for us)
8 tonnes of flat steel (for cars) would be about $5k. But I assume for this thing you’d need reinforced plate or something?
Edit: I assume he’s not talking about an actual dome made of iron/steel though? Like he means a missile defence system surely? The fact I’m not sure about this is worrying.
So 14 million cubic meters would cost roughly 70 billion USD? If we ignore all the facts like how this thing would be practically impossible to support up in the air and how it would basically end all life inside the dome, the funny thing is that this is only about one thenth of US yearly military budget.
yeah but that's just the material, and only part of it. It'd need lots of support, unless we're building in active support systems but that's equally expensive
no he means an dome made out of iron, im pretty sure Israel and the USA already have a deal about the iron dome that reflects rocket and would probably be more cost effective in protecting the USA
I think it would have to be made of unobtanium (the fake element, scientists need to stop naming shit) otherwise it would just immediately collapse on itself
Your plan has a slight problem: satellites are flying at like ~200 km, sometimes even lower; a dome with 2250 km radius will literally collide with everything we have in orbit, and is unbuildable, as we can't even figure out cosmic lift.
For anyone who doesn't understand, an "Iron Dome" is a series of interceptor missile batteries that can stop missile attacks from expected enemy forces.
50k a missile, 3300km East Coast, 2100km West coast
at 50km per missile that's 66 missile batteries on the East coast, 42 on the West. totalling 108.
I think any attacking force could manage 120 missiles at an extreme (considering the USA's Naval strength), so that is 120 missiles per battery * 108 batteries * $50k missiles = $648M
Note: This doesn't cover Alaska or Hawaii, both would need more because they are prone to land-based short range missile attacks, and Hawaii is very open in the ocean so may be impossible to defend. Let's just round to 1B for it.
TL;DR 1Billion Dollars!
EDIT: a few people aren't grasping that I am using an enemy making a reasonable attack. A hidden force somehow evades the US navy and then decides to Blitzkreig through Mexico to shoot subsonics at Utah does not make any sense, no missiles need to be placed there and should not have any basis in a defense budget spending.
I think is important to know that the iron dome can only intercept small subsonic rockets like the qassams and it would be useless against any worthy opponent of the US
Iron dome is the layman's focus because people see it alot and don't understand that patriot missile and other anti missile systems have been able to intersept super sonic missiles for a while.
The US military achieved ludicrous speed in the early 2010’s it’s just highly classified. Recent experiments have been testing missiles that go to plaid
Sorry but $1 billion is far too low to a comical extent.
I couldn’t find Israel’s total budget for its Iron Dome but according to Wikipedia an individual battery costs $50 million (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome). You need a battery to fire the missiles. So you need to add $5 billion to your costs just there.
Even this is far too low.
A few years ago the U.S. appropriated $1 billion just as its own allocation to support Israel’s iron dome ( https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-house-backs-bill-provide-1-billion-israel-iron-dome-system-2021-09-23/) and Israel is the size of like New Jersey.
The U.S. is also spending over $1.5 billion for a missile defense system just for Guam. (https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3326875/department-of-defense-releases-the-presidents-fiscal-year-2024-defense-budget/)
There’s currently a U.S. program to build 30 modern interceptors at a cost of around $500 million each - or $18 billion for the whole program. (https://armscontrolcenter.org/fact-sheet-u-s-ballistic-missile-defense/)
But this is essentially a test program not a full national iron dome. According to the same article the U.S. has already spent *over $200 billion* on missile defense in recent years and we have nowhere near a full “iron dome.”
We can safely conclude that a full iron dome system would cost hundreds of billions at minimum and likely into the trillions before it would really be effective.
Also remember that the Iron Dome specifically is a lot simpler than what the US needs. So it would be cheaper than what the US is already spending, but also not worth bothering with in the first place.
This. A single soldier farting in the direction of the enemy costs about a billion. There's no way a full iron dome air defense system would cost only a single billion. An effective system that's able to defend the entire US from an attack would be insanely expensive. I believe more in your 1 trillion figure.
On the other hand, to make an air defense system capable of handling the current number of 0 missiles attacking the US would be about a billion that would mysteriously disappear into a certain someone's pockets.
>TL;DR 1Billion Dollars!
The cost to prevent a single ballistic missile attack from Iran against Israel earlier this year was estimated to have been well over 1 billion dollars. There is no realistic way an iron dome over the entire US could cost less than that.
That is a bit ... disingenuous way of putting what happened and I will provide multiple sources.
> During an overnight attack in April 2024, Iran launched around 350 missiles and drones towards Israel. The cost of Israel's defensive efforts, including the use of sophisticated defense systems such as the Arrow and David's Sling missiles, was estimated between $1.08 billion and $1.35 billion
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israels-defence-against-iran-attack-overnight-likely-cost-over-1bn
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240414-countering-irans-overnight-attack-costs-israel-1-35b-israeli-media/
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/h16o8qtea
Iron dome is just one of a multi layered missile defense system. You have iron dome and iron beam for short range rockets and mortars, david’s sling for medium-long range rockets and missiles, Arrow 2 for long range ballistic missiles, and Arrow 3 for ICBMs. Putting iron domes on the east and west coast of the US is as stupid as it gets, unless you think the ocean is going to attack. The only place it makes sense is Alaska. Arrow 2,3 and david’s sling absolutely make sense for protecting against long range missiles and enemy aircrafts.
100x the price tho…
Its reasonable to think some drones and stuff could be domestically launched, so short range protection of critical infrastructure and major cities isn't that crazy.
No. Overlapping fields of fire, staggered depth from the coast to the interior and sustainment costs would put the fully burdened rate well over $500B for acquisition cost over 5 years and probably another $300-500B annually to maintain.
You have to calculate saturation of fire into concentrated areas. East coast and west coast both have HVTs that would require hundreds of systems within metropolitan areas to be effective. Don’t forget our interior too, which would have targets to strike as well.
Your baseline 66 W and 42 E would have to be supplemented by increased systems to cover military, industrial, and civilian target areas AND increase footprint to the north because a lot of the missiles will come over the caps… don’t forget our southern border as well. Covering just E and W coast doesn’t create the dome, just bumpers.
So my estimation would be 750 East coast systems, 750 southern systems, 1,500 West Coast systems, and 2,000 to the north.
Again these figures supplement our current AA posture AND take into account the silly notion of creating an iron dome with the same effectivity and coverage as the Israeli version.
Summary:
~5,000 acquisition units
~200 spare units
~15% spares pool (due to complexity, see S400 config)
~50,000 trained personnel (don’t forget the people that have to use it need training)
$500B R&D and Procurement Cost
$300-500B annual sustainment cost
> EDIT: a few people aren't grasping that I am using an enemy making a reasonable attack. A hidden force somehow evades the US navy and then decides to Blitzkreig through Mexico to shoot subsonics at Utah does not make any sense, no missiles need to be placed there and should not have any basis in a defense budget spending.
Lol, there is *no* reasonable attack on the US Mainland, especially using the types of munitions that Iron Dome is designed to intercept.
Nothing. There is no reasonable attack from any enemy that isn't Canada or Mexico.
> Note: This doesn't cover Alaska or Hawaii, both would need more because they are prone to land-based short range missile attacks, and Hawaii is very open in the ocean so may be impossible to defend. Let's just round to 1B for it.
They are prone to land-based short range missile attacks because Hawaii is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean??
I think you mean "immune" to short-range missile attacks because the nearest potential enemy is thousands of miles away...?
Price aside, it’s completely useless. Iron Dome is designed to intercept short range rockets and some artillery shells at low terminal speed. It doesn’t do anything against ICBMs coming at continental US.
>Iron Dome was originally billed as providing city-sized coverage against rockets with ranges of between 4 and 70 km (2.5 to 43 miles), but experts say this has since been expanded.
lets say it has range is 51.962 km
if we use hexagonal pattern, one hexagon will have aprox 7 000km^(2)
USA has 9 834 000km^(2) so that is 1 405 Iron Domes
one iron dome costs 50 000 000 USD (50 millions), so total cost would be 70 250 000 000 USD (70.250 billions)
considering USA military budget is 849.8 billions it is expansive, but ot unreasonably, considering it could be paid over multiple years and cost would go down thanks to economy of scale
I am not economist, but cost going down to 60 billions and payments split over 10 years, it would not even make big dent into USA military budget
The thing is that the iron dome is designed to stop low-tech stuff. It's designed to beat Hamas and Hezzbolah, not China. It can't intercept any decent missiles. It would be pretty damn useless for the US
I believe an effective missile defense would be a perimeter problem, rather than an area one (even though it arguably wouldn’t be a dome). The top comment does the math with that in mind and comes up with the figure $1B
This is a valid point. I suppose one would have to weigh the cost of cruise altitude perimeter protection against low altitude full coverage.
Either way, it’s gonna be expensive.
The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Signed in 1972, was an arms control treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union on the limitation of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems used in defending areas against ballistic missile-delivered nuclear weapons. It was intended to reduce pressures to build more nuclear weapons to maintain deterrence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty
(I can find a propped paper but it's late)
Here’s my best guess:
We need to mostly guard from the north and west since the attack would come from Russia or China. But let’s say there is roughly 7000 miles of border we need to be able to cover and let’s reduce that since there are definitely ways to optimize this problem.. so let’s call it 3500 miles to cover.
Just to simplify if we only used THAAD which has a range of 125 miles give or take from the launcher. So that’s a total coverage range of 250 miles. So we need a total of 14 launcher locations to cover the required area.
We know that Russia would never shoot all ~1700 strategic warheads at a single location but let’s assume that a single point of failure would need enough interceptors to be able to handle 1/3rd of all of russias stockpile which would be ~533 warheads.
Let’s assume each rocket they send at us is a 50/50 split of 6 warheads and 6 decoys. So we would need to take out 2x the number of warheads coming at us so 533x2 =1066.
Let’s finally assume we need to shoot 3 interceptors per warhead/decoy to make sure it gets taken out.
Cost= Saudi Arabia purchased 44 launchers for 15 billion in 2017. So .34 billion per launcher.
A THAAD launcher can carry 8 missiles.
Ok so each of our 14 locations need to be able to take out 1066 warheads/decoys. To do this we would need to launch 3198 interceptors.
This would require 400 launchers at each of the 14 locations.
That’s a total of about 5,600 launchers.
That would cost about 1,902 billion dollars.
Or 1.9 trillion. This is incredibly back of the envelope but there you go
Google “Strategic Defense Initiative,” aka “Star Wars” from the Reagan era.
TL;DR of its history is this: in the end it was all a ruse to get the Soviets to try and match our research spending and thus destabilize their economy/waste money on nonproductive projects. Both objectives were successful.
The range of an Iron Dome interceptor is up to 70km.
The US perimeter including land and sea borders is around 17500km.
Assuming you don't overlap ranges, that gives you 125 batteries to cover the entire perimeter of the USA.
But you want to overlap ranges. An Iron Dome interceptor will "reach* 70km, but it won't *protect* something 70km away. By the time the missile gets there the inbound ordinance will have already landed. Call it 35km protective range to be neat with the numbers, so that's 250 batteries.
Cost is $100m per battery, plus around $50k per interceptor. So that's $25bn on batteries, and if you have 20 missiles per battery that's a other $250m. You'd probably want a lot more than that.
Now, if you want defense in depth rather than just single coverage at the border you start multiplying the problem.
The guy couldn’t build a wall on the southern border but people believe he’d build any kind of dome over the country?!?! Why? He can’t build anything but more grifts and scams for angry disenfranchised people and tax breaks for his buddies. Crazy…
People seriously discussion a literal dome made from iron instead of the defense system iron dome currently employed in isreal is one hell of an indicator that some people need to keep up with politics more. We're more than half a year into an immensely bloody conflict, with massive media coverage, and people still dont know this. truly astounding
We already have an iron dome. It's called having a giant fuck you Navy and being bracketed on both sides by oceans. We also have an ICBM defense system called GMD that covers the whole US against a limited attack. Shorter range missiles don't have the reach to cross oceans. We could expand that system and already are but it is extremely expensive
“Iron Dome” is a reference to Israel’s middle defense system that protect almost the entire country, no a literal iron dome. You’ve embarrassed yourself, or made a bad joke.
To put the size comparison into perspective, Israel is about the size of NJ (their iron dome is 100% necessary).
This buffoon thinks that short-range missile strikes from Canada and Mexico (and possibly Cuba) are a threat? Trump is an absolute idiot—and lies daily to pump us his cult.
Iron dome as in missile defense?
Cost would be a lot but in the long run it would be worth it if we could figure out how to upgrade it to where it's capable of taking out ICBMs
While i assume it’s in reference to an anti air defense system.
I did some math and if it was instead an actual dome of metal around the US i wanted to see how much it would cost.
In total it costs roughly $ 69,696,000 (I’m not joking. That’s the actual cost) before tax to cover 1 sq mile this is assuming we take the median cost of $2.5 per sq ft of sheet metal and 1 sq Mile to have 27,878,400 sq ft (or 5280 x 5280)
Now with America having a total land mass of 3,532,316 miles This is excluding our sea borders off the coasts
We get an astronomical amount of USD$246,188,295,936,000.
This is for only the metal and If it was only laid upon the ground. If we raised it by 1 mile it would add $863,045,568,000 if we take Google for its word that the entire border of the USA is 12,383 miles.
For a total of USD$247,051,341,504,000
OR
MX$4,478,200,846,906,406.50
If he wants Mexico to foot the bill on this too.
Now, this is All for bare metal only. I didnt price the screws/ scaffolding or labor (if we end up paying the workers) so this is literally the bare minimum cost for the sheet metal it’s self.
And if you want to add taxes. They will very upon which state you this the metal will come from. But that’s if they pay the taxes as it is the government it self. (Also one of the reasons they might hire is to get some money back in taxes)
And I did base the price off millennial grey sheet metal as thought it was a good price!
Considering the fact that it would have to be several thousands of miles high in order to be structurally sound, it would take at least a couple million times more iron than we’ve mined since the dawn of history.
We kinda already do. We have a huge fleet of ships with the Aegis system on them (if you don’t know what that is, look it up, it’s really cool) Also I’m pretty convinced we never scrapped the Star Wars project (lasers in space pretty much). All this leads me to believe that the Generals didn’t tell Trump everything that they usually tell presidents
Let me tell you something, it’s gonna be an amazing dome, a beautiful dome, and let me tell you another thing, it’s not going to cost America one cent to build because, and this is the beautiful thing, we are going to get China to pay for it, and you know why? Because, believe me, I’m going to tell China they have to pay for it, because if they don’t , we are going to get very tough with them, tougher than anyone has been in our history, and let me tell you another thing , this amazing dome, this beautiful dome is going to be made of *iron* , and not just any iron, it’s going to built from American iron, because America makes the best iron, and it’s the strongest kind of metal, did you know that? Nobody knew that before, right, and they were going to build it from Chinese steel, and I told them “you shouldn’t use Chinese steel, they’re stealing our jobs. You need to make it using iron from the USA”, and do you know what they said? They said “you’re right Me President, we should make it out of American iron, because it’s the strongest metal on the planet”. Nobody knew that, isn’t that incredible? Won’t cost a penny.
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Yeah we have iron dome at home, I pay best military in the world taxes not second best military in the world.
MOM can I get money for ANTI-BALLISTIC-MISSILE PROTECTION?
We have that too. Several different kinds, in fact.
Mom: *TO PROTECT HOMELAND???*
Our ballistic missile defense system sucks actually. We don't have nearly enough defense missiles if we were to actually get into a nuclear conflict. But if we WERE to get into a nuclear conflict that doesn't even matter because we are all just gonna be screwed no matter what
I know what you mean. Also, when your main strategy to avoid being stabbed is to continuously have a knife already at the throat of every potential stabber, it seems like an expesive shield is maybe not a high priority investment.
MAD is such a messed up system. I think it will work, until it doesn't
You can’t possibly know that. Whatever arsenal the U.S. military has is classified, and they’re not going to advertise our capabilities to the enemy. I’d wager the U.S. is *more* than prepared for any threat. There’s a reason conflicts don’t make it to America’s shores.
Once big reason conflicts don't make it here is "why the heck would anyone want to occupy north America??" It's an AWFUL place strategically, which is one of the reasons we have military bases around the world. You can't deploy from the US on any real scale, and the mountains make for one hell of a barricade for any attempts at a ground invasion. We also don't have a ton of natural resources compared to other countries, and most of the people in the world are a huge ocean away in either direction. Like yeah "really expensive military" probably doesn't hurt, but nobody wants to fight here because there's no point and anyone who tried would be at a severe disadvantage due to the natural landscape. Most attacks on the US are either information campaigns or cyber attacks (because those actually would have an impact on our global presence) and those reach "our shores" constantly.
Don’t worry China will pay for those, like Mexico paid for the wall.
American made iron
Fucking thank you
Not really. The Patriots are portable SAM batteries are designed to intercept aircraft and large-ish missiles at extreme ranges. They are far more effective than the Dome but also astronomically expensive (iirc there were fewer than 500 batteries built for all of the worldwide users?) The US may or may not have enough on hand to cover the entire territory (and many if not most of these are currently overseas.) Israel also has them, and they still needed the Dome anyways. The Iron Dome has a much shorter range, is not portable, is designed to shoot down unguided, non-maneuvering rocket artillery rockets, and the dome missiles are cheap enough to actually use them against these kinds of barrages. The US absolutely does not have an equivalent, but they hardly need it, especially when it comes to covering all of the mainland territory. It is worth mentioning that the US also has *some* semblance of true anti-ballistic missile defence. These ground-launched interceptors are few in number compared to how many warheads a proper enemy can deliver, and I don't think they cover all that much territory. They may be effective against an attack from a rogue state like NK or in the immediate future Iran, but not against a rival power.
>Good news, the United States already has many hundreds of Patriot Missile Systems, Not really. "Many hundreds" is an exaggeration. Patriot systems are great, but not that new. There were only about 1 thousand ever built, and only about half are still functional. Of those 500 or so, half are spread throughout the world, mostly in Europe, Turkey, and Korea. Because of the war in Ukraine, the U.S. has taken back deployment from some places like Japan. https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3625683/us-department-of-defense-statement-on-japans-decision-to-transfer-patriot-missi/#:~:text=The%20United%20States%20welcomes%20Japan's,in%20the%20Indo%2DPacific%20region. https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/integrated-air-and-missile-defense/global-patriot-solutions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot
There's likely more refined versions available the public is not aware of
Keeping the existence of a defense system secret makes it kinda useless. If your opponent knows/thinks you have no shield they're more likely to attack. If they think you have an indestructible shield that they just didn't know how it works, they won't. If the US had some unstoppable missile defense system they'd probably want everyone to know it existed, while keeping what exactly it does a secret.
Sort of. The USA would probably not hide the existence of the defense system. But they very well May undersell the effectiveness and some of the capabilities of that system so that if things went hot for whatever reason the enemy would make false assumptions about the best way to attack. For instance underselling the maximum range of a radar.
Sadly, I think he's talking about an accutal iron dome
Great will never see the sun again. Will that help global warming?
I dunno, but I'll finally experience the wonders of Rickets.
The wonders of living in an actual oven
It's Donald. He probably thinks it's literally a dome made of iron that covers the country, not missile batteries.
[This is the kinda thing he's imagining.](https://giphy.com/gifs/stellifymedia-bbc-stellify-media-ni-EQwiISAUoz649Z3iwM)
So wait the liar is lying again? Never saw it coming...
It would be completely useless, too. The iron dome is for intercepting smaller targets like artillery rounds and rockets. There is no plausible scenario in which the continental U.S. is having to deal with such attacks. What would actually be helpful is Patriot, Aegis, and THAAD style systems to protect from ICBMs and SLBMs.
This is the answer. People are trying to answer the wrong question. We already have an “iron dome” in place that has several components to defend against nuclear attack. It’s pretty common knowledge that these systems could be over saturated by an attack from Russia, for examples. So the real question is how much would it cost to create a system with so much redundancy that it wouldn’t be over saturated by 2000 nuclear warheads all dropping on the US at once. Probably trillions. Edit: Here’s my best guess: We need to mostly guard from the north and west since the attack would come from Russia or China. But let’s say there is roughly 7000 miles of border we need to be able to cover and let’s reduce that since there are definitely ways to optimize this problem.. so let’s call it 3500 miles to cover. Just to simplify if we only used THAAD which has a range of 125 miles give or take from the launcher. So that’s a total coverage range of 250 miles. So we need a total of 14 launcher locations to cover the required area. We know that Russia would never shoot all ~1700 strategic warheads at a single location but let’s assume that a single point of failure would need enough interceptors to be able to handle 1/3rd of all of russias stockpile which would be ~533 warheads. Let’s assume each rocket they send at us is a 50/50 split of 6 warheads and 6 decoys. So we would need to take out 2x the number of warheads coming at us so 533x2 =1066. Let’s finally assume we need to shoot 3 interceptors per warhead/decoy to make sure it gets taken out. Cost= Saudi Arabia purchased 44 launchers for 15 billion in 2017. So .34 billion per launcher. A THAAD launcher can carry 8 missiles. Ok so each of our 14 locations need to be able to take out 1066 warheads/decoys. To do this we would need to launch 3198 interceptors. This would require 400 launchers at each of the 14 locations. That’s a total of about 5,600 launchers. That would cost about 1,902 billion dollars. Or 1.9 trillion. This is incredibly back of the envelope but there you go
Information about the effectiveness of such systems is highly classified. May we never have to find out how effective they are irl.
True.. but strategic defense is generally public information as a preventative measure. If you don’t think you can touch us AND we can wipe your country off the map then there is no way you pick a fight with us. It doesn’t make a lot of sense that we would have the ability to fully defend ourselves and we wouldn’t shout it from the mountain tops. But you’re right. Who knows.
Let’s say that the U.S. has 95% confidence that we could neutralize an all-out nuclear attack from Russia. Would it be wise to risk that 5%? All it takes is one nuke landing on Manhattan. We could be extremely confident on our ability to neutralize nuclear attacks based on simulations, but who knows what will happen when it is a real attack; reality is messy and you can’t account for every variable.
Ya fuck that. I ain’t risking it lol.
Also not telling them that we are confident we could repel it means that they don’t expand their weapon stockpile.
Ya this is how I think about it from my line of work. Pretty much any new building system after started up has bugs that need to be worked out. Something installed wrong, controls programming not spot on, a component has a factory defect. You can't put a system this advanced to a full on test before actual use so there are going to be bugs if nukes ever go up in the air. But you can also expect that from the other side, i.e. not all of Russia's nukes will launch or go where intended.
Russia has submarines that fire nuclear torpedoes. They could sail up to a coastal city like san franscisco , new york, LA etc and unleash hell without a single airborne weapon being fired. [What Are Putin's Nuclear 'Doomsday' Poseidon Torpedoes? - Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/what-are-putins-nuclear-doomsday-poseidon-torpedoes-1759032)
Yeah, if those fucking things work. lol
I really rather wouldn’t test that, Russian knows that their main weapons are nuclear so it makes sense that those are the ones that they take seriously. Plus nuclear torpedoes aren’t that far fetched, and are not a high tech piece of equipment. At least compared to a stealth fighter.
It's not a torpedo, but more an underwater drone with a nuclear warhead afaik
You wouldn't want to advertise it because other countries might decide to build even more nukes to counteract it, or invest in other means to sabotage it.
That’s not an unreasonable take. I could argue either way on defensive capabilities but I still think we generally make that stuff mostly public.
It should give pause that planned routine orbital missions are regularly scrubbed and still have a 1-3% failure rate under carefully timed conditions.
Just post a hot take on the War Thunder forums. You'll get the specs within 2-3 business days.
If they're smart, Russia would launch several thousand decoy missiles with the real ones. And I'm sure we'd do the same in an attack. Just fill the sky with noise and even the best air defense system becomes nearly useless.
Ya totally. And you would need 2-4 interceptors minimum per decoy to make sure you get them all. To circle back to the original purpose of this thread… it would be very expensive haha
It could genuinely cost more money than there is in the entire world. I'm still waiting on the math, but my guess is tens of trillions to make a truly impenetrable defense system... minimum.
Here’s my best guess: We need to mostly guard from the north and west since the attack would come from Russia or China. But let’s say there is roughly 7000 miles of border we need to be able to cover and let’s reduce that since there are definitely ways to optimize this problem.. so let’s call it 3500 miles to cover. Just to simplify if we only used THAAD which has a range of 125 miles give or take from the launcher. So that’s a total coverage range of 250 miles. So we need a total of 14 launcher locations to cover the required area. We know that Russia would never shoot all ~1700 strategic warheads at a single location but let’s assume that a single point of failure would need enough interceptors to be able to handle 1/3rd of all of russias stockpile which would be ~533 warheads. Let’s assume each rocket they send at us is a 50/50 split of 6 warheads and 6 decoys. So we would need to take out 2x the number of warheads coming at us so 533x2 =1066. Let’s finally assume we need to shoot 3 interceptors per warhead/decoy to make sure it gets taken out. Cost= Saudi Arabia purchased 44 launchers for 15 billion in 2017. So .34 billion per launcher. A THAAD launcher can carry 8 missiles. Ok so each of our 14 locations need to be able to take out 1066 warheads/decoys. To do this we would need to launch 3198 interceptors. This would require 400 launchers at each of the 14 locations. That’s a total of about 5,600 launchers. That would cost about 1,902 billion dollars. Or 1.9 trillion. This is incredibly back of the envelope but there you go
Solution will be frickin lasers sooner than later
In reality there are a lot of layers to such a defense. Ironically one of the best defenses against a Russia style mass launch is actually all our empty silos. The logic goes thusly: Defeating your opponent's nuclear arsenal is critical to ensuring that you survive the war. It is very hard to know for absolutely certain which silos have missiles in them and which do not. Silos are also hardened, and you'll want to task multiple weapons on each one to ensure a high probability that it is destroyed. Ergo, building empty silos function as decoys absorbing a large number of warheads that would otherwise target something important. Addition layers of defense include the midcourse interceptors and Patriot and AEGIS systems as a last ditch defense.
That’s a lot more math.
… also, isn’t NORAD already a thing?? Like, I’m positive this already exists.
Commander in Chief for 4 years and knows nothing. Here is ranting about catapults on aircraft carriers- "You know the catapult is quite important. So I said what is this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. He said well, we're going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern \[technology\]. I said you don't use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, "Ah, how is it working?" "Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn't have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam's going all over the place, there's planes thrown in the air." It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it's very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said–and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be–"Sir, we're staying with digital." I said no you're not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it's no good." Yes, it's a [real quote.](https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a27632779/trump-navy-steam-catapults/)
I remember that. That dumb fuck wouldn't understand a rail gun unless it involved a faster way to snort coke.
Biden flubs one word and he’s called demented. This moron rambles on about crap that not only makes ZERO sense but is utterly baffling. This man literally has a private jet, how could he honestly think the military is still using steam planes and missiles? There’s no explanation for wanting to lie about a conservation like that, unless he truly thinks he comes out looking like the smart one - which again, just proves how much of an absolute. The fact that a quote like this isn’t a question to his mental capacities but Biden shuttering or mumbling out a word is really just shows the quality of his fan base.
It does exist. We’ve got dozens of active missile defense systems all over both coasts, even inland in places like Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Ohio, just to name a few. Trump is just using buzzwords to drum up support. If elected, he’d do nothing and then cite the above as his accomplishment.
We also have an underwater SOSUS warning net. When that idiot went to the Titanic and his sub imploded they picked it up right away and James Cameron knew someone in the Navy who basically told him they heard it and knew it was gone right away. I have no doubt NORAD etc.. things we don't know about are quite powerful.
Oh yeah. Wasn't that a pretty big reveal on our tech?
I'm sure we could have done that in the 80's. I was an officer, we haven't come close to saying what it can really do. Shit we have mini space shuttle drones going up into orbit for months like the X-37B.
Patriot can't hit an ICBM. There's two points to it that prevent a Patriot from hitting a full on ballistic inbound. The first is that the radar only has a 100km range. ICBMs have a 7km/second reentry speed. That's 14 seconds from detection to detonation. The patroit missile moves at ~1200m/s, meaning that the ICBM is 7/8ths of the way to target before first possible kill. That's just 14 km away. You better hope it's aimed right at you, because that kind of cross range tolerance is yikes. The second is that the Patroit's software and hardware is simply not set up for handling something moving at *faster than the speed of explosions.* It operates on a hit to kill design, which given the tolerances needed, is absurdly tight. The difference between SCUD and something like an SS-18 is Mach 5 vs ***Mach 20***. Aegis is a far superior option. There's two things that swing it in favour. The first is the radar. The Aegis can easily lock the missile from the horizon, then put the missile in a place such that the interceptor is at near maximum engagement range for maximum intercept attempts. However, to further increase effectiveness, Aegis is designed to be networked into early warning systems such as early warning satellites and ground based strategic defence radars such as Cobra Dane. The second is the warhead type of the Standard Missile. It uses blast fragmentation, giving it a larger effective volume in detonation. The timing is hard, and likely needs a software change to account for the speed of the target, but it's entirely doable. The final thing in favour of Aegis is simply the launcher capacity. Shipbased VLS could easily ripple eight missiles in an initial volley, whereas patroit might only be installed with a four missile setup.
Excellent post. In addition, I think it is extremely likely that post-Aegis intercept systems are already live, but we don’t hear anything about them. The threat of ballistic nuclear weapons is the only true existential danger the United States faces in an armed conflict, and defense research has certainly proceeded accordingly. The recent Russian emphasis on hypersonic missile technology leads me to think they already believe America has effective countermeasures to traditional delivery systems.
The SM-3, which is what Aegis would generally use for longer range ballistic missiles, is a kinetic warhead. It doesn’t use blast fragmentation, but it doesn’t really need it. It can use an SM-6 for ballistic missiles too, which does have blast fragmentation, but only for terminal intercepts which are probably not what you’d be doing with Aegis if the goal was homeland defense.
Unless them uppity Canadians finally have enough with Vermont...
Fireworks from Mexico.
Canada has the US right where they want them.
The dome just got 10 feet higher!
Umm this is not true, an iron dome would be critical on saving Michigan from Canadian extremist militants. Please explain how this is not insanely useful /s
Not even this would be useful since the most plausible scenario for a nuclear attack on the USA (or any other major country) is a high-altitude detonation similar to the Project Starfish Prime detonations in the 1960's. A single detonation at about 250 miles (400 km) up in could blanket an area about 900 miles in radius with EMP, taking out the US power grid on one coast. Two would probably do the job for the entire USA, and currently the US power grid is so old that it would take months to be restarted. In those months people would be without basic utilities (clean water, power for refrigeration, hosptials, etc.) The best estimates put the death toll at nearly 90% in major urban areas because urban areas are simply too overcrowded to support the population without power. And intercepting these missiles would be impossible for numerous reasons, the most important being that they could be made to look like satellite launches or even deorbiting satellites on trajectory for a safe ocean splashdown. The bottom line is that there is no plausible defence for a Project Starfish Prime type of nuclear attack, and the number of missiles required is ridiculously small.
We need the iron patriot
>THAAD style systems to protect from ICBMs and SLBMs. Agree, I'd also add XXCH and BCHG to the list. Hell, even AKSH and MCLK would make a lot of sense. Maybe it'd be an overkill to do RRKL as well but now that I think about it QREE and POOP might be needed.
There is also the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system which probably is the first line against long range ballistic missiles.
And we already have patriot defense systems
Let’s ignore what an iron dome actually is, and assume we want to build a literal dome out of iron. We‘ll just make a semi-sphere, as an approximation. I know the US isn’t a circle, and you can probably make it more flat. On the other hand I am ignoring construction costs entirely, so I think this is a low estimate still. I‘ll assume the dome to be 10m thick. I’ll ignore if that is stable. The contiguous US has a diameter of about 4500 km, the surface of a semi-sphere that size has a surface of about 7.2 *10^16 m^2, therefore our 10 m thick sphere has a volume of around 7.2* 10^17 m^3. One cubic meter of iron costs about 150k USD, therefore the material cost would be about 10^23 dollars. Bargain.
But I think you would get a discount for buying that quantity.
Not with government dollars. You have to add about 175% to the normal price to get the government price.
Then you add in the labor to install this dome and we’re at about 10^100
It would waste so much iron the price woupd increase because the demand increases that much.
One tiny problem: the global iron ore reserves run out before you're even a millionth of the way there. More iron doesn't magically appear by throwing more money at it, it needs to be used to motivate people to mine for more.
and pay on credit card - that's 1% cashback depending on the credit card.
"Let's assume the cow is spherically symmetric"
The only important thing I learned in college as an engineer is that cows are spheres.
How many Kgs of Iron would that be? I wonder if the Earth even has that much in stock?
Around 5 * 10^21 kg. That’s less than 0.1% of the mass of the earth. Earth consists of around 35% iron, so that’s plenty.
> One cubic meter of iron costs about 150k USD lolwut? A cubic meter of iron is around 7 tons and scrap steel goes for \~$200 per ton, so nowhere near 150k.
Iron, not scrap steel. Source: https://www.aqua-calc.com/calculate/materials-price/substance/iron
Sure, if you buy your analysis grade iron from Sigma-Aldrich, 150k sounds about right. Mild steel is 99% iron.
But that would be a steel dome, not an iron dome.
Would a steel some when protect us? I need a iron dome
EDIT: I was moronic and used r instead of r^2 before, I redid the calculation with r^2 instead and it got to a ridiculous number: Now I'm curious how much a literal iron dome would cost, from west coast to east coast is about 4,500,000 metres, this can be our diameter of a theoretical sphere around the US, 4πr^2 is the surface of a sphere, and a dome is half a sphere, so 2πr^2 is the surface area of this dome, where r is 4500000m/2 = 2250000m: 2 x π x 2250000^2 ≈ 3.18x10^13 m^2 Let's assume this iron is about a metre thick to make the math easy, so how much would 3.18x10^13 m^3 of iron cost? Probably alot...
Let’s see. EDIT: it seems likely - see comments of others below - that I’ve got some errors in my calculations, factor of 1000. I’m too tired to re-check and correct them right now. Take them with a shaker of salt. 1 cubic meter of cast iron = 7300 kgs. 1 metric ton of cast iron: Approximately 1000 US$, using a very low and conservative value, to be on the safe side. So 28,264,384 times 7300 times 1000 US$ equals 206,330,003,200,000 US$. So the dome would cost 206,330 billion US$, or more than 200 times the defense budget. Now for the nitty-gritty details: Cast iron isn’t infinitely strong. Even if we assume that we don’t need a foundation for the dome, from top to bottom it needs to be thicker and thicker to support the growing weight of the iron above. It would be interesting to check if building an iron dome with the thickness of 1 m at the top that wouldn’t collapse under its own weight is even feasible.
As a civil engineer I'm going to guestimate that we don't need to do any maths to know an unsupported dome spanning continental America wouldn't support itself. It's maybe possible to design a structure that could hold up to the physics (though I really doubt it) but it would be completely infeasible to actually build. A supported flattened dome would be more feasible as you could segment the dome and support the weight of the segments on vertical towers from the ground and use the neighbouring dome sections to laterally stabilise each other. (Again not at all feasible in reality but moreso for a whole host of reasons)
So less of an iron dome and more of an iron lid
Rest of the world over here staying really quiet while the Americans talk themselves into constructing a giant iron lid for their country
Weld them in!
And then we lock it from the outside! Hehehehehe! :-)
Mexico: actually, we'll help with this one....
American here. Can I please come over before you lock it? I am a butcher, a baker, and I took a candle making class once so I could teach others how to do it at an arts and crafts store.
I was trying to guesstimate how many supporting pillars actual iron dome would need and abandoned hundreds of thousands and moved to millions. I guess that you could build part of iron dome that supports itself in meters range, so that distance between pillars would be something like 200 meters. Another fun thought was those skyscrapers on coasts. What about those? Expand dome to pretty far to sea, make dome to rise in very steep angle or cut skyscrapers?
Isn't the number you wrote, $206 trillion? 12 zeroes/places.
Correct.
Why did you say 206, 330 billion instead of 206.33 trillion? Genuinely asking out of confusion and not ***"REE YOU SAID WORD WRONG"***
Seems my brain is in weekend mode. And I’m too tired to re-check and correct my numbers.
Valid!
I love this exchange. I’ve seen a billion level value referred to as a thousand million and it makes sense. But only as a math teacher and not from the American idiom. I had assumed this was the same thing. Thanks for being mensch!
Some other detail: When we assume that the dome hasn’t to be a half-sphere but instead an elliptical form would also be OK (think about the shape of an egg), we would need less material: We could reduce the height of the dome, and use as one horizontal diameter west-coast to east coast, and from north to south the Canadian border to the south end of Florida. Of course these values need to be adjusted, because we’re speaking about an ellipse and not of a rectangle.
Can we save $$ if we leave Florida out?
Yes.
If it's 1000 per ton, then isn't it $1 per kilo, so $7300 per meter cubed? Aren't you out by a factor of 1000?
That’s “only” 4,466x the cost of using the Iron Dome missile system.
That's also assuming the price of iron doesn't change. If the US government suddenly decides to buy enough iron to cover the entire country (which I'm sure there literally isn't even enough of in the world) then first of all, iron would have to be sourced from different countries with varying prices, and second of all, the prices of iron would soar drastically with scarcity. My final answer is "very expensive".
If you pressurize the inside, that will hold up the top. I'm bad at math, but that's only about 1 extra atmosphere, right? And if we install an air conditioner, we can solve global warming (but only for us)
Didn’t find iron, but they would probably opt for steel anyway. 1 m^3 of steel is around $500 US.
$500 sounds waaaayyyyy too low for 1 m^3 of steel. That's roughly 8 tons of steel.
8 tonnes of flat steel (for cars) would be about $5k. But I assume for this thing you’d need reinforced plate or something? Edit: I assume he’s not talking about an actual dome made of iron/steel though? Like he means a missile defence system surely? The fact I’m not sure about this is worrying.
So 14 million cubic meters would cost roughly 70 billion USD? If we ignore all the facts like how this thing would be practically impossible to support up in the air and how it would basically end all life inside the dome, the funny thing is that this is only about one thenth of US yearly military budget.
yeah but that's just the material, and only part of it. It'd need lots of support, unless we're building in active support systems but that's equally expensive
If we go into details, this would probably also shoot the price of steel up in the sky. Supply and demand and all that.
no he means an dome made out of iron, im pretty sure Israel and the USA already have a deal about the iron dome that reflects rocket and would probably be more cost effective in protecting the USA
I think it would have to be made of unobtanium (the fake element, scientists need to stop naming shit) otherwise it would just immediately collapse on itself
Yeah you’re right. My source was shitty. I’m sorry.
That's the low price for one ton of steel rebar, not of one m3. Actual price in the world is more like 7-800$
The formula for surface of a sphere is with r^2
It should have been fairly obvious when the answer came to only 14 million square metres!
You forgot an r, so its more like 30 trillion square meters. 1 million square meters is only 1 square kilometer.
Your plan has a slight problem: satellites are flying at like ~200 km, sometimes even lower; a dome with 2250 km radius will literally collide with everything we have in orbit, and is unbuildable, as we can't even figure out cosmic lift.
It would double as a space elevator ~~pole~~ ramp
That’s what I came in here thing op was asking
How thick would need to be to not crumble? Also how high would it reach?
For anyone who doesn't understand, an "Iron Dome" is a series of interceptor missile batteries that can stop missile attacks from expected enemy forces. 50k a missile, 3300km East Coast, 2100km West coast at 50km per missile that's 66 missile batteries on the East coast, 42 on the West. totalling 108. I think any attacking force could manage 120 missiles at an extreme (considering the USA's Naval strength), so that is 120 missiles per battery * 108 batteries * $50k missiles = $648M Note: This doesn't cover Alaska or Hawaii, both would need more because they are prone to land-based short range missile attacks, and Hawaii is very open in the ocean so may be impossible to defend. Let's just round to 1B for it. TL;DR 1Billion Dollars! EDIT: a few people aren't grasping that I am using an enemy making a reasonable attack. A hidden force somehow evades the US navy and then decides to Blitzkreig through Mexico to shoot subsonics at Utah does not make any sense, no missiles need to be placed there and should not have any basis in a defense budget spending.
I think is important to know that the iron dome can only intercept small subsonic rockets like the qassams and it would be useless against any worthy opponent of the US
Iron dome is the layman's focus because people see it alot and don't understand that patriot missile and other anti missile systems have been able to intersept super sonic missiles for a while.
psh supersonic, we're up to hypersonic missiles now
Next up: Ludicrous speed!
The US military achieved ludicrous speed in the early 2010’s it’s just highly classified. Recent experiments have been testing missiles that go to plaid
Well its time for Super-ludicrous speeds then ... Better not become enemies with Switzerland!
**J.J. Fad**
Sound must travel a lot slower in Russia. Maybe it's the cold weather?
everything travels slower in Russia, you can only go so fast with bears and unicycles.
TIL Russian sound is different from all other sound, being mediated by circus bears instead of gas action.
*checks notes* *Speed of sound:* a=sqrt(gamma\*R\*T) Yup. This guy physics.
Sorry but $1 billion is far too low to a comical extent. I couldn’t find Israel’s total budget for its Iron Dome but according to Wikipedia an individual battery costs $50 million (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome). You need a battery to fire the missiles. So you need to add $5 billion to your costs just there. Even this is far too low. A few years ago the U.S. appropriated $1 billion just as its own allocation to support Israel’s iron dome ( https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-house-backs-bill-provide-1-billion-israel-iron-dome-system-2021-09-23/) and Israel is the size of like New Jersey. The U.S. is also spending over $1.5 billion for a missile defense system just for Guam. (https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3326875/department-of-defense-releases-the-presidents-fiscal-year-2024-defense-budget/) There’s currently a U.S. program to build 30 modern interceptors at a cost of around $500 million each - or $18 billion for the whole program. (https://armscontrolcenter.org/fact-sheet-u-s-ballistic-missile-defense/) But this is essentially a test program not a full national iron dome. According to the same article the U.S. has already spent *over $200 billion* on missile defense in recent years and we have nowhere near a full “iron dome.” We can safely conclude that a full iron dome system would cost hundreds of billions at minimum and likely into the trillions before it would really be effective.
Also remember that the Iron Dome specifically is a lot simpler than what the US needs. So it would be cheaper than what the US is already spending, but also not worth bothering with in the first place.
So what? Russia and China will pay for it.
They will even staff and control it. Free of charge. As a token of friendship.
The Russians will staff the White House and GOP, and the Chinese will handle the missile system.
This. A single soldier farting in the direction of the enemy costs about a billion. There's no way a full iron dome air defense system would cost only a single billion. An effective system that's able to defend the entire US from an attack would be insanely expensive. I believe more in your 1 trillion figure. On the other hand, to make an air defense system capable of handling the current number of 0 missiles attacking the US would be about a billion that would mysteriously disappear into a certain someone's pockets.
>TL;DR 1Billion Dollars! The cost to prevent a single ballistic missile attack from Iran against Israel earlier this year was estimated to have been well over 1 billion dollars. There is no realistic way an iron dome over the entire US could cost less than that.
That is a bit ... disingenuous way of putting what happened and I will provide multiple sources. > During an overnight attack in April 2024, Iran launched around 350 missiles and drones towards Israel. The cost of Israel's defensive efforts, including the use of sophisticated defense systems such as the Arrow and David's Sling missiles, was estimated between $1.08 billion and $1.35 billion https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israels-defence-against-iran-attack-overnight-likely-cost-over-1bn https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240414-countering-irans-overnight-attack-costs-israel-1-35b-israeli-media/ https://www.ynetnews.com/article/h16o8qtea
Iron dome is just one of a multi layered missile defense system. You have iron dome and iron beam for short range rockets and mortars, david’s sling for medium-long range rockets and missiles, Arrow 2 for long range ballistic missiles, and Arrow 3 for ICBMs. Putting iron domes on the east and west coast of the US is as stupid as it gets, unless you think the ocean is going to attack. The only place it makes sense is Alaska. Arrow 2,3 and david’s sling absolutely make sense for protecting against long range missiles and enemy aircrafts. 100x the price tho…
Its reasonable to think some drones and stuff could be domestically launched, so short range protection of critical infrastructure and major cities isn't that crazy.
For drones a simple AA battery is enough
No. Overlapping fields of fire, staggered depth from the coast to the interior and sustainment costs would put the fully burdened rate well over $500B for acquisition cost over 5 years and probably another $300-500B annually to maintain. You have to calculate saturation of fire into concentrated areas. East coast and west coast both have HVTs that would require hundreds of systems within metropolitan areas to be effective. Don’t forget our interior too, which would have targets to strike as well. Your baseline 66 W and 42 E would have to be supplemented by increased systems to cover military, industrial, and civilian target areas AND increase footprint to the north because a lot of the missiles will come over the caps… don’t forget our southern border as well. Covering just E and W coast doesn’t create the dome, just bumpers. So my estimation would be 750 East coast systems, 750 southern systems, 1,500 West Coast systems, and 2,000 to the north. Again these figures supplement our current AA posture AND take into account the silly notion of creating an iron dome with the same effectivity and coverage as the Israeli version. Summary: ~5,000 acquisition units ~200 spare units ~15% spares pool (due to complexity, see S400 config) ~50,000 trained personnel (don’t forget the people that have to use it need training) $500B R&D and Procurement Cost $300-500B annual sustainment cost
> EDIT: a few people aren't grasping that I am using an enemy making a reasonable attack. A hidden force somehow evades the US navy and then decides to Blitzkreig through Mexico to shoot subsonics at Utah does not make any sense, no missiles need to be placed there and should not have any basis in a defense budget spending. Lol, there is *no* reasonable attack on the US Mainland, especially using the types of munitions that Iron Dome is designed to intercept. Nothing. There is no reasonable attack from any enemy that isn't Canada or Mexico. > Note: This doesn't cover Alaska or Hawaii, both would need more because they are prone to land-based short range missile attacks, and Hawaii is very open in the ocean so may be impossible to defend. Let's just round to 1B for it. They are prone to land-based short range missile attacks because Hawaii is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?? I think you mean "immune" to short-range missile attacks because the nearest potential enemy is thousands of miles away...?
Something don't add up. The cost of one patriot system with 6 (or 8?) launcher alone is one billion.
We already supply weapons to Israel for exactly this. Is Don saying we don’t already have this defense stood up? That would be….concerning
A hidden force destroying Utah sounds like an ally to me
Well, the Maginot Line was so highly effective…..
Price aside, it’s completely useless. Iron Dome is designed to intercept short range rockets and some artillery shells at low terminal speed. It doesn’t do anything against ICBMs coming at continental US.
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>Iron Dome was originally billed as providing city-sized coverage against rockets with ranges of between 4 and 70 km (2.5 to 43 miles), but experts say this has since been expanded. lets say it has range is 51.962 km if we use hexagonal pattern, one hexagon will have aprox 7 000km^(2) USA has 9 834 000km^(2) so that is 1 405 Iron Domes one iron dome costs 50 000 000 USD (50 millions), so total cost would be 70 250 000 000 USD (70.250 billions) considering USA military budget is 849.8 billions it is expansive, but ot unreasonably, considering it could be paid over multiple years and cost would go down thanks to economy of scale I am not economist, but cost going down to 60 billions and payments split over 10 years, it would not even make big dent into USA military budget
The thing is that the iron dome is designed to stop low-tech stuff. It's designed to beat Hamas and Hezzbolah, not China. It can't intercept any decent missiles. It would be pretty damn useless for the US
Didn't it intercept Iranian ICBMs in April?
I believe an effective missile defense would be a perimeter problem, rather than an area one (even though it arguably wouldn’t be a dome). The top comment does the math with that in mind and comes up with the figure $1B
ICBMs travel into space, then fall onto the the target. Unless it can reach the cruise altitude of 200-500km (space), you'll need full coverage.
This is a valid point. I suppose one would have to weigh the cost of cruise altitude perimeter protection against low altitude full coverage. Either way, it’s gonna be expensive.
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Reddit arm chair generals strike again!
The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Signed in 1972, was an arms control treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union on the limitation of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems used in defending areas against ballistic missile-delivered nuclear weapons. It was intended to reduce pressures to build more nuclear weapons to maintain deterrence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty (I can find a propped paper but it's late)
Here’s my best guess: We need to mostly guard from the north and west since the attack would come from Russia or China. But let’s say there is roughly 7000 miles of border we need to be able to cover and let’s reduce that since there are definitely ways to optimize this problem.. so let’s call it 3500 miles to cover. Just to simplify if we only used THAAD which has a range of 125 miles give or take from the launcher. So that’s a total coverage range of 250 miles. So we need a total of 14 launcher locations to cover the required area. We know that Russia would never shoot all ~1700 strategic warheads at a single location but let’s assume that a single point of failure would need enough interceptors to be able to handle 1/3rd of all of russias stockpile which would be ~533 warheads. Let’s assume each rocket they send at us is a 50/50 split of 6 warheads and 6 decoys. So we would need to take out 2x the number of warheads coming at us so 533x2 =1066. Let’s finally assume we need to shoot 3 interceptors per warhead/decoy to make sure it gets taken out. Cost= Saudi Arabia purchased 44 launchers for 15 billion in 2017. So .34 billion per launcher. A THAAD launcher can carry 8 missiles. Ok so each of our 14 locations need to be able to take out 1066 warheads/decoys. To do this we would need to launch 3198 interceptors. This would require 400 launchers at each of the 14 locations. That’s a total of about 5,600 launchers. That would cost about 1,902 billion dollars. Or 1.9 trillion. This is incredibly back of the envelope but there you go
Google “Strategic Defense Initiative,” aka “Star Wars” from the Reagan era. TL;DR of its history is this: in the end it was all a ruse to get the Soviets to try and match our research spending and thus destabilize their economy/waste money on nonproductive projects. Both objectives were successful.
The range of an Iron Dome interceptor is up to 70km. The US perimeter including land and sea borders is around 17500km. Assuming you don't overlap ranges, that gives you 125 batteries to cover the entire perimeter of the USA. But you want to overlap ranges. An Iron Dome interceptor will "reach* 70km, but it won't *protect* something 70km away. By the time the missile gets there the inbound ordinance will have already landed. Call it 35km protective range to be neat with the numbers, so that's 250 batteries. Cost is $100m per battery, plus around $50k per interceptor. So that's $25bn on batteries, and if you have 20 missiles per battery that's a other $250m. You'd probably want a lot more than that. Now, if you want defense in depth rather than just single coverage at the border you start multiplying the problem.
The guy couldn’t build a wall on the southern border but people believe he’d build any kind of dome over the country?!?! Why? He can’t build anything but more grifts and scams for angry disenfranchised people and tax breaks for his buddies. Crazy…
People seriously discussion a literal dome made from iron instead of the defense system iron dome currently employed in isreal is one hell of an indicator that some people need to keep up with politics more. We're more than half a year into an immensely bloody conflict, with massive media coverage, and people still dont know this. truly astounding
Hell, the iron dome has existed since as long as I have memory, it's not like it's a secret that came to light with the war!
We already have an iron dome. It's called having a giant fuck you Navy and being bracketed on both sides by oceans. We also have an ICBM defense system called GMD that covers the whole US against a limited attack. Shorter range missiles don't have the reach to cross oceans. We could expand that system and already are but it is extremely expensive
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“Iron Dome” is a reference to Israel’s middle defense system that protect almost the entire country, no a literal iron dome. You’ve embarrassed yourself, or made a bad joke.
To put the size comparison into perspective, Israel is about the size of NJ (their iron dome is 100% necessary). This buffoon thinks that short-range missile strikes from Canada and Mexico (and possibly Cuba) are a threat? Trump is an absolute idiot—and lies daily to pump us his cult.
Iron dome as in missile defense? Cost would be a lot but in the long run it would be worth it if we could figure out how to upgrade it to where it's capable of taking out ICBMs
He clearly means missile defence and frankly, I think it’s a great idea to take missile defence way more seriously than we currently take it.
While i assume it’s in reference to an anti air defense system. I did some math and if it was instead an actual dome of metal around the US i wanted to see how much it would cost. In total it costs roughly $ 69,696,000 (I’m not joking. That’s the actual cost) before tax to cover 1 sq mile this is assuming we take the median cost of $2.5 per sq ft of sheet metal and 1 sq Mile to have 27,878,400 sq ft (or 5280 x 5280) Now with America having a total land mass of 3,532,316 miles This is excluding our sea borders off the coasts We get an astronomical amount of USD$246,188,295,936,000. This is for only the metal and If it was only laid upon the ground. If we raised it by 1 mile it would add $863,045,568,000 if we take Google for its word that the entire border of the USA is 12,383 miles. For a total of USD$247,051,341,504,000 OR MX$4,478,200,846,906,406.50 If he wants Mexico to foot the bill on this too.
Now, this is All for bare metal only. I didnt price the screws/ scaffolding or labor (if we end up paying the workers) so this is literally the bare minimum cost for the sheet metal it’s self. And if you want to add taxes. They will very upon which state you this the metal will come from. But that’s if they pay the taxes as it is the government it self. (Also one of the reasons they might hire is to get some money back in taxes) And I did base the price off millennial grey sheet metal as thought it was a good price!
Considering the fact that it would have to be several thousands of miles high in order to be structurally sound, it would take at least a couple million times more iron than we’ve mined since the dawn of history.
I'm pretty sure it's not a literal iron dome but more like the one protecting Israel from hamas attacks.
We kinda already do. We have a huge fleet of ships with the Aegis system on them (if you don’t know what that is, look it up, it’s really cool) Also I’m pretty convinced we never scrapped the Star Wars project (lasers in space pretty much). All this leads me to believe that the Generals didn’t tell Trump everything that they usually tell presidents
Let me tell you something, it’s gonna be an amazing dome, a beautiful dome, and let me tell you another thing, it’s not going to cost America one cent to build because, and this is the beautiful thing, we are going to get China to pay for it, and you know why? Because, believe me, I’m going to tell China they have to pay for it, because if they don’t , we are going to get very tough with them, tougher than anyone has been in our history, and let me tell you another thing , this amazing dome, this beautiful dome is going to be made of *iron* , and not just any iron, it’s going to built from American iron, because America makes the best iron, and it’s the strongest kind of metal, did you know that? Nobody knew that before, right, and they were going to build it from Chinese steel, and I told them “you shouldn’t use Chinese steel, they’re stealing our jobs. You need to make it using iron from the USA”, and do you know what they said? They said “you’re right Me President, we should make it out of American iron, because it’s the strongest metal on the planet”. Nobody knew that, isn’t that incredible? Won’t cost a penny.