Trump's Golden Dome anti-missile system outlined

The Golden Dome, Donald Trump's grand Reagan-style vision of an all-embracing missile defence system on land, at sea and in space, was formally unveiled by the president in the Oval Office although the actual details remain unknown. The most dramatic claim made by Trump was that the system would be up and running before he completes his presidency in about three and a half years' time. He said it will cost $175 billion. It's a big ambition and a lot of money, but Trump seemed super-confident that the military will be able to produce aqd deploy the system in this short timescale. At the moment there is an already pretty robust layered system which involves silo-based interceptors in California and Alaska, space-based sensors and warships armed with Standard missiles capable of shooting down medium-range missiles. But this system was designed to deal with the perceived ballistic-missile threat posed by North Korea and Iran, not Russia and China. Now Trump wants to protect the US homeland from every type of missile threat, including the longest-range ballistic missiles (with nuke warheads), cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles and even long-range drones from wherever they come from. That's a pretty tall order even though technology has advanced significantly since Ronald Reagan first came up with the idea of a perfect shield protecting the US from missile attack. It was swiftly called his Star Wars programme. Much of it was based on the idea of having lasers and other Star Wars-style weapons up in space. It never happened. It was unaffordable. Now Trump reckons it is affordable and $25 billion has already been set aside for the first phase of the new layered defence. Will this mean that, after all, the US is going to havespaced-based lasers and particle beam weapons and goodness knows what else protecting the US homeland? There's a long time to go before that is going to happen I suspect.