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By Anna Rahmanan
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Washington has always had a weakness for shiny objects. Give it a basement with a leaking pipe and a sky full of lasers, and you can guess which meeting gets the PowerPoint. After all, the heavens promise dominance, deterrence and the future while the basement offers inspection schedules, staffing tables and loose bolts.
This week, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink supplied the shiny object: He acknowledged that the United States has “on-orbit space control weapons” capable, in his description, of defending American forces against hostile action. The details remain classified, but the significance is plain enough: the United States is no longer merely using space to communicate, navigate and watch. It has placed military weapons there.
That revelation arrives amid Washington’s enormous new appetite for military space. The administration’s fiscal 2027 proposal would give the Space Force about $71.1 billion, up from roughly $32 billion this year—an increase of about 120 percent. The proposed Golden Dome account would receive another $17.1 billion, including $4.5 billion for space programs.
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Pentagon officials have described Golden Dome as a roughly $185 billion undertaking over a decade. The Congressional Budget Office, unable to assess a still-secret architecture, estimated that a more comprehensive national missile-defense system could cost about $1.2 trillion over 20 years.
Meanwhile, back in the basement, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is moving in the other direction.
The NRC, the independent regulator charged with protecting the public from risks at civilian nuclear facilities, has requested $892 million for fiscal 2027—$79 million, or 8.1 percent, less than this year. Its workforce would shrink by 196 full-time positions, or 7 percent. The proposed one-year increase for the Space Force alone is about 44 times the NRC’s entire annual budget.
Money is only part of the contrast. The NRC is also reducing the time devoted to baseline security inspections at nuclear plants from 287 annualized hours to between 149 and 170, a cut of roughly 41 to 48 percent. Eight of 11 security inspection procedures will be retired and their most important elements consolidated into two. Cybersecurity inspections will move from every two years to every three. Material-control and accounting inspections will shift from once every three years to “as needed.” Like we said, heavens over basements.
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Most strikingly, the NRC plans to phase out agency-led force-on-force exercises after 2028. In these mock attacks, trained adversaries test whether a plant’s defenses can withstand an assault. They have been conducted at every nuclear plant on a three-year cycle. Under the new arrangement, plant operators will conduct an exercise while NRC personnel observe.
The NRC argues that the nuclear industry’s strong record permits leaner, more targeted oversight. It is not abandoning inspections, and plant operators will remain legally responsible for security. But independence is the point of independent testing: a regulator watching a company run its own test is not quite the same as a regulator choosing the surprises and deciding whether the defenders passed.
This might all feel like a bureaucratic argument were it not for Barksdale Air Force Base.
In March, Barksdale experienced several unauthorized drone incursions. The base is home to nuclear-capable B-52 bombers and plays a central role in nuclear command and control. An internal briefing obtained by media outlets described waves of 12 to 15 drones flying over sensitive areas between March 9 and 15, sometimes for around four hours a day. The aircraft reportedly used long-range control links and resisted jamming. It also appeared to test the base’s response.
The Air Force said operations continued unabated and temporarily deployed additional counter-drone capability. It is nevertheless unsettling that relatively inexpensive drones could repeatedly enter restricted airspace over a nuclear bomber base while the country contemplates constellations of orbital interceptors and adds billions of dollars to that way-above-ground budget.
The lesson is not that America should surrender space to China or Russia, or that every dollar intended for Golden Dome should instead purchase a nuclear-plant inspection. Meink’s announcement also does not prove that America has placed a purely offensive weapon overhead; “space control” systems may serve offensive or defensive purposes.
The lesson here is more about strategic attention. Washington is exceptionally good at imagining the next technological frontier and funding programs commensurate with its grandeur, but it is less enthusiastic about maintaining the quiet institutions that inspect procedures and expose vulnerabilities before an adversary does.
And since national power is not only measured by how high a country can reach but by whether its foundations hold, perhaps a rethinking might be necessary. Let’s not confuse spectacle with security.
By all means, arm the heavens if the threats require it. But someone should still check the basement.
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