The whopping $813 billion war budget proposed by the White House on Monday includes $12.3 billion for missile defense programs. Over $9 billion will go to the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). The Pentagon is hoping to deploy more space-based systems next year.
The bulk of the MDA’s budget – $7.9 billion – is for research and development. Some of those projects are space-based sensors meant to detect hypersonic or ballistic missiles. The Pentagon is seeking to spend over $200 million on these programs in 2023.
The spending proposal allocates over $100 million for the Aegis Ashore systems in Poland and Romania. The Aegis systems are capable of launching nuclear-capable tomahawk missiles. Russia demanded the removal of the systems in its December security offer to the US and NATO.
Overall the MDA’s $9.6 billion requests is slightly lower than its FY 2022 budget of $10.4 billion. However, the agency only asked for $8.9 billion. Then Congress added $1.5 billion.
No matter how much taxpayer money gets allocated to missile defense, the military-industrial complex has been unable to produce results. “Despite decades of work and costs totaling more than $350 billion, the United States still has not been able to field a defense that would be able to intercept even a small number of relatively unsophisticated ICBMs reliably and effectively,” said Frederick K. Lamb, chair of the study, physics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
