A missile shield seven decades in the making, the United States' Golden Dome program, is still not technologically or financially workable, according to a new assessment from War on the Rocks, published this week alongside three other analyses — on bunker-buster stockpiles, Russian drone doctrine and Sudan's drone-saturated civil war — that together sketch one argument: in 2026, offense is cheap, proliferating and asymmetric, and no single country is building defense fast enough to keep up.

A Shield With a Seven-Decade Losing Streak

War on the Rocks traces the pursuit back to the dawn of intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, noting the United States has spent more than $500 billion in 2025 dollars over roughly seventy years on missile defense, with disappointing results each time. Golden Dome, the program now carrying that history forward, is moving ahead regardless of whether the economics add up, according to GIS Reports.

Deep Targets, Shallow Stocks

The imbalance runs the other way too, according to CSIS, which frames the United States' bunker-buster inventory as shallow next to the number of deeply buried, hardened facilities it might need to strike. Golden Dome cannot afford to stop every incoming missile; the arsenal meant to reach an adversary's best-protected targets cannot afford to run out, either.

Drones as Doctrine, Drones as Laboratory

Russia's shift in drone tactics is forcing European planners to rethink air defense, according to debuglies.com. Sudan shows what that proliferation looks like once it escapes any single theater. War on the Rocks reports that commercial flights into Khartoum resumed only in May 2026, more than three years after war broke out in April 2023, and that returning Sudanese now face a drone war spreading over the city — one the piece attributes to backing from Abu Dhabi.

Hypothesis: the common driver across these four cases is cost asymmetry — expensive defenses competing against weapons cheap enough for a civil-war combatant to field at scale, as Sudan illustrates. Supporting this: the stark gap between seven decades of missile-defense spending and the speed at which drone warfare spread into a country with no air force of its own. Against this: none of the source material gives a unit cost for Sudan's drones or Russia's current drone doctrine, so the cost comparison is inferred, not documented.

What to Watch

  • Whether Golden Dome survives a funding fight in Washington despite the infeasibility case made against it.
  • Whether the Pentagon moves to rebuild bunker-buster stocks, and how fast, relative to hardened targets abroad.
  • Whether drone attacks in Sudan disrupt the return of residents to Khartoum now that commercial flights have resumed.