America Needs Stronger Missile Defenses Against Expanding Enemy Arsenals
Our enemies fear the strategic edge Golden Dome would give us and are desperate to stop it before it starts.Our enemies fear the strategic edge Golden Dome would give us and are desperate to stop it before it starts.Memo to Hegseth: Stop the next ‘Macheteros’ before they launch
While California Army National Guard troops handle lawless protests sparked by legal immigration enforcement, the California Air National Guard faces a far more dangerous vulnerability — one that demands immediate attention from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
It’s time to remember January 12, 1981. That day, Puerto Rican independence militants breached Muñoz Marin International Airport in Carolina, cut through the fence, and destroyed nearly $50 million worth of A-7 Corsair and F-104 Starfighter jets. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $162 million. Boom! Gone just like that.
Security forces could stop ground-based attacks, sure. But drones? Not a chance.
Jump ahead four decades to Los Angeles, where supposedly “spontaneous” mass protests feature factory-made signs in English and Spanish, freshly printed six-foot Mexican flags, and crowds of anonymous demonstrators. No IDs. No accountability.
Where does the funding for these instant flash mobs originate? According to a dynamite report by Jennifer Van Laar at Red State, much of the money appears to come from our own tax dollars! But let’s not rule out the Mexican cartels whose trafficking and smuggling operations Trump’s policies have severely disrupted. If so, what’s to stop them — or their proxies — from lashing out at the National Guard next?
What’s to prevent a replay of the Macheteros’ sabotage in 1981 — or something far worse?
Soft target in plain sight
Consider Moffett Field near Palo Alto. One side of its perimeter sits flush against Highway 101. Any outsider with a drone and a grudge has a clear shot.
Air Guard security might intercept intruders with enough warning. But drones don’t need to sneak past a gate. They can launch from a public park and cross 200 yards in seconds. For $500 and a payload of cheap explosives, a first-person-view drone could obliterate a $77 million HC-130J.
No active defense exists for drone attacks in densely populated urban areas. The U.S. Air Force knows this. Just ask about the 17-day drone overflight in 2023 — uninterrupted, unchallenged, and deeply embarrassing.
Federal law restricts counter-drone actions except over designated “sensitive” areas. But what happens if a missile interception sends debris raining onto adjacent neighborhoods? What if an electromagnetic pulse knocks out every pacemaker, microwave, and computer within a mile?
Wide open in Fresno, too
At the Air National Guard base in Fresno, things look just as bad. F-15s sit beneath open-sided shelters only 75 yards from the highway.
Security forces could stop ground-based attacks, sure. But drones? Not a chance. The only current defense is a few warning signs nailed to perimeter fences. That’s not security — that’s wishful thinking.
What’s the Air Guard’s plan to intercept drones without endangering civilians across the street? Paintball guns? Slingshots? Hula hoops?
Rethinking drone defense before it’s too late
The solution isn’t to ban drones or launch missiles over neighborhoods. It’s to rethink how to disrupt their precision.
RELATED: Dark thoughts about the New Jersey drones
Drones don’t rely on brute force. They rely on pinpoint accuracy — what the military calls “circular error probable." In World War II, a B-17 had a CEP of 1,200 feet. Today’s FPV drones, guided by first-person cameras, hit tank hatches with a CEP of just one foot.
That’s the bad news.
The good news? You don’t need to shoot down a drone to neutralize it. You just need to disrupt its accuracy.
Drones are fragile. A baseball bat will shatter one. Their video cameras bloom under bright light. Their inertial sensors lose calibration under unpredictable aerodynamic stress. Their rotors must stay perfectly balanced, or else guidance systems wobble and fail.
By attacking the CEP instead of the drone itself, the Air Guard can protect its assets without risking civilian casualties.
Cheap insurance, massive payoff
Practical countermeasures exist — right now, off the shelf. Iso-luminescent light sources. Targeted atmospheric aerosols. Forced inertial failures. Even decoys.
These aren’t billion-dollar Pentagon programs. They’re cheap insurance policies against an increasingly likely airborne threat.
If protest organizers or cartel affiliates can rent drones and buy fireworks, what’s stopping them from mounting small explosive charges? Nothing — unless the Air Guard rethinks its strategy.
Failing to prepare for the next wave of attacks is no longer an option. If the military won’t defend its own runways, someone else will take the shot.
A brutal wake-up call from America’s most powerful banker
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase — one of the most powerful financial institutions on earth — issued a warning the other day. But it wasn’t about interest rates, crypto, or monetary policy.
Speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California, Dimon pivoted from economic talking points to something far more urgent: the fragile state of America’s physical preparedness.
We are living in a moment of stunning fragility — culturally, economically, and militarily. It means we can no longer afford to confuse digital distractions with real resilience.
“We shouldn’t be stockpiling Bitcoin,” Dimon said. “We should be stockpiling guns, tanks, planes, drones, and rare earths. We know we need to do it. It’s not a mystery.”
He cited internal Pentagon assessments showing that if war were to break out in the South China Sea, the United States has only enough precision-guided missiles for seven days of sustained conflict.
Seven days — that’s the gap between deterrence and desperation.
This wasn’t a forecast about inflation or a hedge against market volatility. It was a blunt assessment from a man whose words typically move markets.
“America is the global hegemon,” Dimon continued, “and the free world wants us to be strong.” But he warned that Americans have been lulled into “a false sense of security,” made complacent by years of peacetime prosperity, outsourcing, and digital convenience:
We need to build a permanent, long-term, realistic strategy for the future of America — economic growth, fiscal policy, industrial policy, foreign policy. We need to educate our citizens. We need to take control of our economic destiny.
This isn’t a partisan appeal — it’s a sobering wake-up call. Because our economy and military readiness are not separate issues. They are deeply intertwined.
Dimon isn’t alone in raising concerns. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has warned that China has already overtaken the U.S. in key defense technologies — hypersonic missiles, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence to mention a few. Retired military leaders continue to highlight our shrinking shipyards and dwindling defense manufacturing base.
Even the dollar, once assumed untouchable, is under pressure as BRICS nations work to undermine its global dominance. Dimon, notably, has said this effort could succeed if the U.S. continues down its current path.
So what does this all mean?
RELATED: Is Fort Knox still secure?
It means we are living in a moment of stunning fragility — culturally, economically, and militarily. It means we can no longer afford to confuse digital distractions with real resilience.
It means the future belongs to nations that understand something we’ve forgotten: Strength isn’t built on slogans or algorithms. It’s built on steel, energy, sovereignty, and trust.
And at the core of that trust is you, the citizen. Not the influencer. Not the bureaucrat. Not the lobbyist. At the core is the ordinary man or woman who understands that freedom, safety, and prosperity require more than passive consumption. They require courage, clarity, and conviction.
We need to stop assuming someone else will fix it. The next crisis — whether military, economic, or cyber — will not politely pause for our political dysfunction to sort itself out. It will demand leadership, unity, and grit.
And that begins with looking reality in the eye. We need to stop talking about things that don’t matter and cut to the chase: The U.S. is in a dangerously fragile position, and it’s time to rebuild and refortify — from the inside out.
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3 stories that scare the living DAYLIGHTS out of Glenn Beck
Even though hope has come in the form of Donald Trump, Americans still face a nightmarish reality.
Glenn Beck shares three current stories that terrify the living daylights out of him.
1. “The United States government has lost trillions of dollars, and they don't know what happened to them.”
For example, “the White House can't find $6.2 billion sent to Ukraine,” and the U.S. Treasury is “unable to track $5 trillion just from the pandemic spending,” says Glenn.
“How much of that is just in people's pockets? … How many people have done things that they should not have done?” he asks, pointing to “the intelligence agencies, the FBI, the Department of Justice,” “the pharmaceutical companies, [and] just plain old business people” as likely culprits.
“It is a cesspool,” says Glenn, who predicts that with the changes Trump has promised to bring, “it's going to get very, very, very dangerous,” considering how powerful and influential many of these agencies and individuals are.
2. “Australian lab reports losing 323 deadly virus samples.”
If you took COVID-19 out of the equation, this information would be disturbing. However, after the way our government handled the pandemic, the news is downright terrifying — especially when whispers of this mysterious “disease X” have already begun to circulate.
The World Health Organization has been using the term as a placeholder for a hypothetical pathogen that could kick-start another pandemic.
But after COVID, “no one's even going to believe a disease X threat if it happens,” says co-host Stu Burguiere.
3. “In a war against China, the U.S. runs out of missiles in a matter of weeks, according to the House Committee.”
“I think personally that this is … one of the things Ukraine is about — depleting our missiles, depleting our ability to defend ourselves,” says Glenn, noting that “they never refilled the strategic oil reserve.”
However, it could also be because we’re trying to get rid of outdated technology before we rebuild.
“Today’s aircraft carriers are the horses of WWI,” says Glenn, explaining that after WWI, Europe’s horse population was nearly exterminated because the four-legged creatures didn’t stand a chance against tanks and machine guns.
Similarly, in a modern war, “aircraft carriers are going to be swarmed by drones.”
“Everything that we have is outdated,” says Glenn. “I'm wondering if part of this — in a positive way — is, ‘Let's get rid of all of this stuff because we have to rebuild.”’
“There is a possibility that that's what we're doing because the next war that is going to be fought is … going to involve artificial intelligence; it'll probably involve robotics — actual on-the-ground robots and drones in the sky,” he predicts. “It will be terrifying.”
To hear more on each story, watch the clip above.
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Trump: ‘Liz Cheney Is A Stupid Warhawk’
'All she wants to do is shoot missiles at people,' Trump said of the former Wyoming congresswoman who campaigned with Kamala Harris Thursday.Biden-Harris admin considering move that Putin says would put NATO 'at war' with Russia
The Biden-Harris administration is considering the possibility of committing the U.S. and other NATO countries to a direct shooting war with Russia — assuming Russian President Vladimir Putin is not bluffing about what for him constitutes a red line.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy met with Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Wednesday in Kyiv, discussing the country's supposed progress toward NATO and EU membership as well possible escalations in its defensive war against Russia.
Extra to announcing more than $700 million more in assistance for Ukraine and speaking of "Ukraine's success, Ukraine's victory," Blinken signaled possible support for the embattled nation employing Western long-range weapons to strike targets deep within Russia.
The U.S. has up until now blocked the use of such weapons over fears of escalation.
The Times (U.K.) indicated, however, that American and British governments have been under mounting pressure to relax such restrictions, including by former elements of the military-industrial complex, NATO, and European political establishment.
Ukrainian foreign minister Andrii Sybiha indicated at a joint press conference Wednesday that he had emphasized to Blinken and to Lammy that it was necessary to "remove all the obstacles and limitations with the use of British equipment, American equipment in the territory of Russia against military targets."
Blinken said that he was going to raise the matter with President Joe Biden who is meeting Friday with Britain's leftist prime minister, Keir Starmer, in Washington, D.C.
A reporter subsequently asked the trio about the use of American supersonic tactical ballistic missiles, which have a range of up to 190 miles, and the British-made Storm Shadow missiles, which have a range of roughly 155 miles. Ukraine already has the latter but is only allowed to use them within its own territory.
'It would mean that NATO countries, the US, European countries, are at war with Russia.'
The reporter asked further whether the Blinken and his counterparts were still worried "about managing escalation with Russia."
"We discussed long-range fires, but a number of other things as well. And as I said at the outset, I'm going to take that discussion back to Washington to brief the president on what I heard," said Blinken.
Blinken intimated, however, the U.S. is open to lifting its restrictions, stating, "Just speaking for the United States, from day one, as you heard me say, we have adjusted and adapted as needs have changed, as the battlefield has changed, and I have no doubt that we'll continue to do that as this evolves."
Regarding fears of escalation, Blinken said, "Of course that's one of the factors that we always consider, but it's certainly not the only factor and it's not necessarily a dispositive factor."
According to the Agence France Presse, Putin said Thursday that an easing of the restrictions on long-range weapons would "in a significant way change the very nature of the conflict."
"It would mean that NATO countries, the US, European countries, are at war with Russia," added Putin, whose nation has over 5,000 nuclear warheads and boasts a supersonic missile with a range of 625 miles. "If that's the case, then taking into account the change of nature of the conflict, we will take the appropriate decisions based on the threats that we will face."
Putin characterized the decision to ease restrictions as a matter of choosing "whether NATO countries are directly involved in the military conflict or not."
Citing British government sources, the Times (U.K.) noted that the Biden-Harris administration might shift its position prior to the gathering of global leaders at the UN headquarters in New York later this month.
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