Perspectiva económica: Doug Casey

During the recent Iran–Israel war, the US used up to 20% of its global stockpile of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile interceptors, each costing over $18 million. THAAD isn't effective against hypersonic missiles, which both Iran and even Yemen's Houthis now possess.

War, in the long run, is a matter of economics. If you can't afford to fight a war, you'll lose the war. Missiles are now the preferred weapon for taking out enemy targets, and the only effective counter is anti-missile missiles. The problem is that both are brutally expensive. Can the costs be kept down, so war is more… affordable?

Generals, politicians, and "defense" contractors, however, love expensive high-tech toys. But if you're going to afford a war, the most cost-effective weapon is an ignorant teenage boy—something the Third World, especially the Muslim world, is awash in. They're cheap and stealthy delivery systems, far more effective than multi-million-dollar missiles. There's an endless supply of them, and they can be employed in a myriad of ways. From an economic point of view, it makes no sense for technologically advanced countries (like the US) to use ultra-expensive weapons to attack primitive countries, as we've done for the last 75 years.

Regardless of the weapons used, the thing to remember is that war amounts to setting wealth on fire. Missiles are about taking real goods, manufactured at great expense, and using them to blow up other real wealth; there can be a perverse logic to it. However, despite their rhetoric to the contrary, I'm not sure governments are too concerned about lots of young men dying. A surplus of unemployed young males is destabilizing, especially in poor countries.

Even a large country like the US will eventually collapse under the weight of war. That's much more true of Ukraine. And vastly truer of Israel. Israel will further bankrupt itself shooting down missiles with ultra-expensive anti-missiles. With a gigantic debt load, enormous war expenditures and losses, living on welfare from the US, and no prospect of things getting better, the prognosis isn't good. About a million (it's said) of Israel's seven million Jewish citizens have recently made the chicken run, and those who remain aren't allowed to leave. I think Israel has a near-insoluble problem. Giving them more money and missiles won't help.

Almost every major weapons system ends up fighting the last war, and that will be true of the so-called Golden Dome. It strikes me as a criminally stupid idea, further ensuring the bankruptcy of the US government and the US itself, while serving no real useful purpose. If you want to attack the US, you don't want to use missiles.

First, we don't have a major military threat. The US is insulated from hostile powers by two very large oceans. Should someone launch a nuclear missile attack—which is what the Golden Dome is supposed to defend against—we would know exactly where those missiles came from. The enemy could expect massive retaliation from the American nuclear triad, which makes the attack pointless. That alone makes the Golden Dome redundant and unnecessary. Apart from that, if an enemy wanted to launch a nuclear attack, it would be more effective with pre-positioned nukes, or nukes delivered surreptitiously with cargo ships and planes.

Nuclear war via missiles scared everybody 70 years ago. But today it's not a practical threat. The likely threats, I think, are from more subtle areas—cyber war, bio war, or a new type of guerrilla war.

WW3 will have a huge cyber element. Everything runs on computers: the banking system, the monetary system, the electrical grid, the communications grid, the transportation grid, and utilities. A successful cyber-attack would turn almost everything we use or need into a brick overnight. It would be cheap and effective, cause widespread chaos and mass casualties, without kinetically destroying very much.

If the enemy is really serious, though, they'll use bioweapons. Viruses and bacteria can zero in on, or exclude, certain populations. Why have a nuclear war when you can neatly kill the people who are the real problem? And both cyber and biowar offer a great deal of plausible deniability.

The third option was demonstrated on September 11, 2001. The attack with commercial airliners was ultra cheap, super effective, and hard to counter. I suspect we'll see numerous mutations of that theme. It's a new type of guerrilla war. Millions of military-age males—cheap teenagers—have infiltrated the US over the last decade or so. For all we know, many may be organized as informal guerrilla armies to be activated whenever. They could surreptitiously wreak havoc.

There's no real defense against these types of attacks.

But the real enemy is not some foreign power, but the fact that the US has turned into a dysfunctional multicultural domestic empire, which is likely to suffer serious financial, economic, social, and political problems over the next years.

Spending a trillion dollars on a useless Golden Dome is an insane distraction. Who comes up with these idiotic ideas?