Trump orders ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense for US
US President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to develop a plan for a new integrated missile shield, arguing a potential sophisticated long-range aerial attack remains the “most catastrophic threat” to the country.
Trump on Monday tasked the defense secretary with creating the system in an executive order, dubbed ‘The Iron Dome for America.’
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth now has 60 days to hatch the plan to protect the US from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries” and envision the new multi-layered missile shield.
“Over the past 40 years, rather than lessening, the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex with the development by peer and near-peer adversaries of next-generation delivery systems and their own homeland integrated air and missile defense capabilities,” the executive order reads.
The directive mandates the creation of various features of the proposed missile shield, including the “development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors,” capable of shooting down incoming ballistic missiles during their boost phase, bolstering of the “underlayer and terminal-phase intercept capabilities,” as well as unspecified “capabilities to defeat missile attacks prior to launch.”
Trump has repeatedly promised to create an Israeli-style integrated missile defense shield, yet it remains to be seen how exactly such an approach would work for the US, a country immensely larger than Israel.
While the order implies the plans should be incorporated into the next year’s budget, it does not provide any cost estimates on the ambitious program. Nor does it provide a timeframe on when exactly the missile shield should materialize.
Israel’s Iron Dome system is primarily designed to intercept small crude unguided rockets, drones and artillery shells, while other weapons provide capabilities against other threats, such as sophisticated long-range ballistic and cruise missiles.
I can see the need for an iron dome around Washington, DC, and maybe NYC, and some military bases, but the cost of covering all the coasts and borders of America would be insane.
Having said that, Trump knows very well that if he doesn't order things that keep America's War Industry getting filthy rich, he will never live to see the end of his term. Consequently, the Iron Dome scheme, the raising of NATO spending to 5% of GDP, etc.
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Germany rejects Trump’s military spending demand
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has said that Berlin simply cannot afford to spend 5% of its GDP on the military, as US President Donald Trump is demanding from NATO member states.
The need to invest more in defense is “undisputed,” but there are limits to what Germany can do, Pistorius pointed out in an interview with Tagesspiegel newspaper on Saturday.
He explained that “5% of our GDP would correspond to 42% of the federal budget. That would be almost every second euro spent by the federal government, €230 billion. We could neither afford that nor spend that.”
“The competition for even higher percentages distracts from the actual issue at hand. It is crucial that we explain to our citizens what threats we face and show them the best possible way to protect ourselves,” the minister argued.
However, he acknowledged that “Germany will have to spend more on its defense in the future, even more than the 2% of its GDP now achieved by this government.”
Trump, who has long criticized Washington’s European allies for not contributing enough to NATO, voiced the idea of raising the bloc’s spending goal during a press conference in early January, before his inauguration.
“They can all afford it, but they should be at 5%, not 2%,” he insisted, expressing frustration that “Europe is in for a tiny fraction of the money that we are in” when it comes to investment in defense.
But Donald, most of that money comes back to the US War Industry. Surely you must understand that!
Previously, Trump warned that under his leadership, the US would not defend NATO countries that fail to meet their financial commitments.
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda fully backed the US President’s 5% goal during an interview with Newsweek on Thursday.
“You can never feel safe living in this part of the world because we have this neighbor and we will still have it after one hundred or two hundred years,” Nauseda said, referring to Russia.
The more you build up militarily, the less safe you should feel.
Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected allegations his country was planning aggression against NATO as “nonsense” and “utter rubbish.” Such claims are made by Western politicians to deceive their constituents and justify increased spending on defense and aid to Kiev amid the conflict with Moscow, in his view. “In Ukraine, we are just protecting ourselves,” Putin insisted.
Don't dismiss that last sentence as absurd even though it sounds that way. NATO moving into Ukraine is a serious threat to the security of Russia. It's also a broken promise and a deliberate provocation of war.
Danish citizens increasingly see US as a ‘threat’ – poll
Almost half of Danes surveyed consider the US a “threat” to their country, a YouGov poll has suggested.
And they don't even read my blog...
The YouGov survey, the results of which were published by the Guardian on Friday, was undertaken amid growing tensions between Copenhagen and Washington over US President Donald Trump’s proposal to make Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, part of America.
According to the poll, 46% of Danes consider the US to be either “a very big threat” or “a fairly big threat.”
The figure suggests that people living in the NATO and EU member state are more concerned about the US than they are about North Korea or Iran, deemed a threat by 44% and 40% or respondents, respectively.
However, Russia continues to top the list of the fears of the Danish public, with 86% of those surveyed calling it a danger to their country.
As part of the same poll, 78% of respondents said they would oppose Greenland being sold to America, with 72% insisting that the decision about joining the US should be made by the 57,000 residents of the Arctic island rather than Denmark.
Another survey conducted by the Danish pollster Verian earlier this week suggested that only 6% of Greenlanders want to become Americans. It contradicted the results of an earlier study by the US company Patriot Polling, which claimed that 57% of the people on the island supported joining the US.
One or both of those polls have a very large margin of error!
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview on Sirius XM’s The Megyn Kelly Show on Thursday, that Trump’s aspiration to acquire Greenland is “not a joke.”
“I know it is a delicate topic for Denmark, but it is again a national interest item for the US,” he said.
I don't think it's a national issue!
The Arctic region will become “critical” for shipping in the coming years and Washington needs control over Greenland in order to prevent China from establishing itself on the world’s largest island, he claimed.
It is the world's biggest island, but I'm thinking 99% of it is uninhabited.
