Andrew Grossman
At a campaign rally in Arizona Sunday (12/22), President-elect Donald Trump promised to build an Iron Dome-style missile defense system across the United States, reiterating one of the military planks of the 2024 Republican Party platform.
The Iron Dome is Israel’s short-range area defense missile system, developed jointly between US and Israeli military firms, with missiles built in large part by US military monopoly Raytheon. The system is meant to intercept and destroy short range threats like the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance’s plentiful rockets. The system is deployed sparingly around areas deemed strategic, for instance population centers and military bases.
Though the Israeli and US government cover up the successes of the resistance forces in the Middle East, Hezbollah in particular has repeatedly thwarted Israel’s multi-layer defense systems by using relatively cheap and plentiful missiles and drones to overwhelm and confuse the Israeli defenses. Yemen’s Ansar Allah has also seen successes striking Israeli targets as has Iran with its True Promise operations.
Gordon Sondland, former US ambassador to the EU, told monopoly media the Iron Dome system will be a small piece of a “much bigger picture” of bulking up the military under Trump’s incoming administration.
The deployment of such a system to cover all of the continental United States would cost an estimated $2.5 trillion, and would only be able to counter short-ranged threats rather than the fast, high-tech long-range missiles with which the US’s imperialist rivals could threaten America.
Against this backdrop, monopoly media analysts and US military figures have largely dismissed the calls as “rhetorical,” and rather signifying a general desire to increasingly focus military spending at home. In this light, the call for a US Iron Dome is a right-populist call to defend America from “bad actors”, unspecified by Trump, appealing to the unpopularity of imperialist war while drumming up backwards support for increased militarization.
The President-elect is careful to repeat that the system would be made in America, parroting Joe Biden’s chauvinist claims that the increased military spending on Ukraine and Israel are good for American workers. In fact, the imperialists ramp up military spending as part of their efforts to counteract their deepening economic crisis of overproduction, leading to the military monopolies swallowing up increasing portions of the economy. Meanwhile, the US military is facing a continuing recruitment crisis as it sinks in the mire of complex wars across the globe, particularly in the Middle East at the hands of the Palestinian and regional resistance forces.
The increasingly bristling arsenals of the imperialists show their weakness, not military strength or economic recovery.
image: An Iron Dome battery fires in Israel, 2021
