Though Musk has largely disappeared from Washington and Trump’s media feeds, his influence lives on. Earlier this month, the acting inspector general at the Department of Defense got a letter asking for a probe into Musk’s lobbying on Golden Dome from 42 congressional Democrats, including the late Representative Gerry Connolly in one of his last acts as the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
This, they said, “raises concerns about whether defense contracts to build a Golden Dome are an effective way to protect Americans or are meant to enrich Mr. Musk and other elites.”
Musk understands that there is a lot of money to be made in missile defense. The program has grown from a relatively modest $3 billion a year, back when Ronald Reagan first started talking it up during the 1980s, to over $30 billion a year for “missile defense and defeat programs” today. Since the development of the first interceptors in 1962, the government has spent more than $531 billion on “multiple ineffective missile defense schemes,” according to Stephen Schwartz, a nuclear budget analyst. Over $453 billion of that was spent in failed efforts launched by Reagan in 1983 to fulfill his fantasy of a shield that could “protect us from ballistic missiles just as a roof protects a family from rain.”
Trump claims that Reagan “didn’t have the technology,” but now we have “super technology” that will provide “close to 100 percent protection” against “hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, and advanced cruise missiles; all of them will be knocked out of the air.” Even better, said Trump, the whole thing will only cost $175 billion and be “fully operational before the end of my term.”
Whether the systems works or not doesn’t matter for the contractors who get rich on contracts to design, develop, and deploy these weapons. That may be why Musk has partnered with two other companies owned by Trump supporters, software maker Palantir and drone builder Anduril, to help design and build the system. Musk’s company estimates that the initial design contracts alone could be worth between $6 billion and 10 billion, according to Reuters.
SpaceX is lobbying the Pentagon to win the contract for the “custody layer” of the proposed system. That would involve launching thousands of satellites into orbit to detect missile attacks. It might also include hundreds or thousands of satellites that would attempt to intercept these missiles as they rise through the atmosphere. Reuters reported that one of the sources familiar with the talks described them as “a departure from the usual acquisition process. There’s an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government.”
There are also reports that SpaceX is pushing for a “subscription model” for Golden Dome, similar to Musk’s Starlink system. Musk would own the satellites and lease them to the government, ensuring lucrative payments for years to come. “A subscription model would also give Mr. Musk unacceptable ongoing leverage over United States national security. Mr. Musk could, as he allegedly did in Ukraine, determine when to provide the U.S. government with access to Golden Dome satellite systems,” say the Democrats.
National missile defense is the longest-running scam in the history of the Department of Defense. Musk didn’t invent it, but he’s about to get a whole lot richer by perpetuating it.
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