The Golden Dome missile defense system will cost about $175 billion and be operational “in less than three years” with “a success rate close to 100%,” President Donald Trump declared Tuesday afternoon as he shared new details about his ambitious, very expensive, and controversial missile defense shield for the U.S. homeland. It follows one of the president’s first official acts of his second term, ordering the U.S. military to move forward with plans for a massively enlarged architecture for defeating high-end missile threats.
“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space, and we will have the best system ever built,” Trump stated. His price tag stands in stark contrast to projections of more than half a trillion dollars and raises concerns about the weaponization of space and nuclear proliferation, which you can read more about later in this piece.
The system will be designed to “protect the homeland” from “cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, drones, whether they’re conventional or nuclear,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained during the White House briefing.
The first tranche of funding, $25 billion, will be contained in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a wide-ranging bill to enact his taxation and immigration priorities, Trump noted.
Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, Vice Chief of Space Operations, will lead the effort as “direct reporting program manager for the Golden Dome,” Trump stated. “He has an unmatched background in missile warning technology and defense procurement.”
“Our adversaries have been quickly modernizing their nuclear forces, building out ballistic missiles capable of hosting multiple warheads, building out hypersonic missiles capable of attacking the United States within an hour and traveling 6,000 miles an hour, building cruise missiles that can navigate around our radar and our defenses, and building submarines that can sneak up on our shores, and, worst yet, building space weapons,” Guetlein said. “It is time that we change that equation and start doubling down on the protection of the homeland.”
There were scant details during the briefing about how Golden Dome will actually work.
“We’re the only ones that have this – we call it super technology,” Trump posited. “Golden Dome will integrate with our existing defense capabilities and should be fully operational before the end of my term.”
In our earlier reporting about Golden Dome, we pointed out that this effort will take place in orbital space, at least in part, with the goal of shooting down incoming threats before they reach the homeland, and preferably while still in the boost phase not far from their launch point.
“It’s not just that we want space-based interceptors, we want them in [the] boost phase,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said in March during an interview broadcast online as part of Defense One‘s State of Defense 2025: Air Force and Space Force virtual conference. “We want them to achieve their effects as far from the homeland. So they’ve got to be fast, they’ve got to be accurate.”
The boost phase, as we previously explained, “is where ballistic missiles, as well as highly maneuverable hypersonic boost-glide vehicles that use ballistic missile-like rocket boosters, are moving slowest and are at their most vulnerable. The bright plume of hot gas also makes them easier to spot and track for an intercept attempt. It is also a short engagement window and any such intercept is likely to occur well within an adversary’s territory. This all presents particular challenges for boost-phase missile defense concepts using air, sea, and/or ground-based assets, as you can read more about here.”
In addition, advanced early warning and tracking constellations of satellites will be needed in orbit to enable the Golden Dome concept. Much of this work is already underway, although it will likely be drastically accelerated and grow in scope under the Trump administration’s new initiative. Interceptors and sensors on the surface will be another part of the Golden Dome architecture, including terminal phase and mid-course intercept capabilities for ballistic and hypersonic missile threats. It will also address growing cruise missile and drone threats, according to what Hegseth said today, although in the recent past, the focus has been more associated with ballistic and hypersonic missile defense. Existing and new sensors and effectors will be integrated into the system, according to statements made at today’s presser. It will require leveraging emerging command and control architectures and network capabilities to make it work together as an integrated, densely-layered system, as well.
The Golden Dome system will be open architecture and will not be locked to any single vendor or vendor pool. This will allow rapid integration of new capabilities and a more competitive procurement and sustainment arrangement.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) last week published an unclassified assessment titled “Golden Dome for America: Current and Future Missile Threats to the U.S. Homeland,” designed to depict threats a sophisticated missile defense system for the United States would defend against. The threats come from ballistic, long-range cruise and hypersonic missiles launched from the air, ground, and undersea.
“Missile threats to the U.S. homeland will expand in scale and sophistication in the coming decade,” DIA explained. “China and Russia are developing an array of novel delivery systems to exploit gaps in current U.S. ballistic missile defenses, but traditional ballistic missiles—which are guided during powered flight and unguided during free flight—will remain the primary threat to the Homeland. North Korea has successfully tested ballistic missiles with sufficient range to reach the entire Homeland, and Iran has space launch vehicles it could use to develop a militarily-viable ICBM by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability. The majority of systems presented here have nuclear-capable variants.”
As a partner in the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), Canada wants to be part of the initiative, Trump said.
“Canada has called us, and they want to be a part of it,” Trump stated. “So we’ll be talking to them. They want to have protection also. So as usual, we help Canada the best we can.”
As we previously reported, U.S. Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, the top American military officer overseeing operations in and around North America, has said he would welcome Canadian participation in expanding continental missile defense efforts, including in space.
Golden Dome is not the U.S. military’s first effort to develop and field space-based anti-missile capabilities. However, multiple previous attempts have been abandoned due to technical complexities and high costs. Space-based weapons were a particularly key element of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), infamously dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics, and which never came close to achieving its ambitious goals.
Saltzman in March acknowledged those challenges, but also made clear that he felt they were surmountable.
“I think there’s a lot of technical challenges,” he said. “I am so impressed by the innovative spirit of the American space industry. I’m pretty convinced that we will be able to technically solve those challenges.”
Saltzman recently suggested that Golden Dome could cost in excess of half a trillion dollars.
He made that prediction during a POLITICO event last week when asked if the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) $542 billion estimate for the largely space-based air and missile defense system was too high.
“I’m 34 years in this business; I’ve never seen an early estimate that was too high,” Saltzman replied. “My gut tells me there’s going to be some additional funding that’s necessary.”
The Pentagon had earlier submitted small, medium, and large cost options to the White House for developing Golden Dome, CNN reported.
The Defense Department (DoD) “has developed a draft architecture and implementation plan for a Golden Dome system that will protect Americans and our homeland from a wide range of global missile threats,” Chief Pentagon Spokesman and Senior Adviser Sean Parnell told CNN in a statement. “The Secretary of Defense and other Department leaders have engaged with the President to present options and look forward to announcing the path forward in the coming days.”
As we have previously reported, one of Trump’s first official acts of his second term was to order the U.S. military to move forward with plans for a massively enlarged missile defense architecture. Dubbed, at the time, Iron Dome, it notably included a call for new space-based anti-missile interceptors. The concept was something Trump talked about on the campaign trail and made official in a Jan. 27 executive order. You can read more about what we knew about the plan before Trump signed it into law in our detailed story here.
From our story about the executive order: It calls for a “next-generation missile defense shield” that “shall include, at a minimum, plans for” the following eight components:
- Defense of the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries
- Acceleration of the deployment of the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor layer
- Development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept
- Deployment of underlayer and terminal-phase intercept capabilities postured to defeat a countervalue attack
- Development and deployment of a custody layer of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture
- Development and deployment of capabilities to defeat missile attacks prior to launch and in the boost phase
- Development and deployment of a secure supply chain for all components with next-generation security and resilience features
- Development and deployment of non-kinetic capabilities to augment the kinetic defeat of ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks
The bottom line here is that Golden Dome will be an absolutely massive undertaking fraught with technological and procurement risk. Regardless of what was claimed today, it will take a long time to cobble together, and all its systems will need constant upgrades and developmental evolution to remain relevant, let alone work on a base level.
The price to develop, procure, and field Golden Dome will be just one part of the larger financial picture. Once deployed, the system will need to be maintained, staffed, and constantly evolved as technology moves forward along with the threats it is meant to confront. This is coming at a time when there are competing priorities that the U.S. military does not have the money to pay for, even though they are considered critical, without sacrificing other important programs. Nuclear modernization is among the largest costs the services are struggling to pay for today. So even with an injection of cash to jump-start Golden Dome — which should come in the form of a whopping $25 billion in the 2026 Fiscal Year — and pay for other competing programs, sustaining that funding over many years after a transient ‘sugar high’ is questionable, especially in an era of soaring deficits.
The strategic impact of Golden Dome is also worth examining. Strategic missile defense, especially at large scale, puts into question adversaries’ deterrents. While this sounds good and it is a clear byproduct of such a system, to a degree, the adversary will do whatever it can to work around such a defensive architecture. This can include building many more missiles — and nuclear warheads to go on top of some of them — to simply oversaturate the capabilities of the defensive system.
In other words, the existence of a wide-scale strategic missile defense shield can lead to runaway proliferation. Usually, it is cheaper to simply build more weapons that can be rapidly launched at an enemy than it is to build and deploy intercept capabilities to counter them. This equation could change using space-based directed energy and other exotic systems that do not rely on traditional effectors, but they will be very costly and very risky (if not currently impossible) in a technological sense to develop, as well as maintain in orbit.
The move to bypass strategic defensive systems is already a very real endeavor for Russia and, to a lesser degree, China. This is being done in the face of America’s existing relatively weak strategic missile shield that is only relevant to defending against very low-volume rogue state attacks.
The weaponization of space, including placing kinetic weaponry in orbit, is also something to consider. This precedent will accelerate the already rapidly growing arms race in orbit and will turbocharge the development of counter-space capabilities from America’s most prominent adversaries. While space as a battleground is already increasingly a reality, Golden Dome could make it a much more dangerous one than it is today.
The fear and suspicions these missile defense systems trigger in adversaries have historically prompted overreactions, which is unhelpful. Building strategic weapons that circumvent established strategic defensive capabilities is a form of new proliferation that is very challenging to counter. Russia’s Status-6 nuclear-armed torpedo-drone and nuclear-powered cruise missile are a couple of examples of this, as are fractional orbital bombardment concepts, among others. Actually staging warheads in orbit is another, which Russia appears to be actively exploring. If a traditional avenue of nuclear warhead delivery is countered or even significantly threatened, another will be sought, which can throw off strategic predictability and makes defending against a nuclear attack even more costly.
The video below depicts a notional intercept involving various current and future missile defense capabilities, including GPI and HBTSS.
Earlier this month, China and Russia issued a joint statement that, in part, condemned Golden Dome.
“First of all, this means a complete and ultimate rejection to recognize the existence of the inseparable interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms, which is one of the central and fundamental principles of maintaining global strategic stability,” it read. “The project also provides additional impetus to the further development of kinetic and non-kinetic means providing for the left-of-launch defeat of missile weapons and the infrastructure that supports their employment.”
The situation “is further aggravated by the fact that the ‘Golden (Iron) Dome for America’ program also directly envisages significant strengthening of the arsenal of means to conduct combat operations in space, including the development and orbital deployment of interception systems, turning outer space into an environment for placing weapons and an arena for armed confrontation.”
Some will also argue that spending the hundreds of billions of dollars it will take to field this system on other conventional and strategic capabilities would be far more effective at deterring attacks before they happen than a massive static missile defense shield.
On the other hand, the world is clearly in a very tumultuous period where old adversaries are reanimating and a new superpower is accelerating its nuclear proliferation into warp speed. At the same time, rogue actors are becoming far better equipped than ever before, with North Korea now a full-on nuclear state with many potential nuclear warhead delivery systems and fears continue to grow that Iran could be next.
If there are any clear winners when it comes to Golden Dome, it’s the defense industry. This is an absolutely massive undertaking that will require gobs of ‘new money’ to even attempt to realize. This was not on the docket before Trump took office, so we are talking about a whole slew of new programs that will cost many billions of dollars both in research and development and procurement that simply did not exist prior.
U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) offered a glimpse of contractors that might be interested in Golden Dome.
“When you look at the system that you’ve laid out, the idea of your executive order of a layered defense,” he said during the White House briefing on Tuesday. “So you have initial ground-based missile interceptors, which are made by some of the big defense companies, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, but the beauty of your vision, Mr. President, is that it’s layered, it’s open architecture, and it goes up into space. So this is going to be some of the new defense tech companies that are very interested in it, and can bring missile defense at a cost that I don’t think you said, Mr. President, is unimaginable in terms of how much lower the cost is. So it’s all across the board in terms of companies.”
More specifically, “Elon Musk’s SpaceX and two partners have emerged as frontrunners to win a crucial part” of Golden Dome, Reuters reported. “Musk’s rocket and satellite company is partnering with software maker Palantir and drone builder Anduril on a bid to build key parts” of the effort.
Finally, there is also the possibility that just the idea that the U.S. is going to attempt to construct such an elaborate strategic defensive ecosystem could push foes to the strategic arms reduction negotiating table. We have seen steady degradation in existing treaties that worked to limit nuclear weapons proliferation among major powers. The threat of Golden Dome becoming a reality could spur not just Russia, but especially China, which has been a missing element of potential future strategic agreements, to participate. It’s also worth noting that Trump has constantly brought up his fear of nuclear weapons and his wish to significantly reduce the risk of a nuclear armageddon via a grand strategic arms reduction deal.
At this time, at least we know more about what is at least being presented as the administration’s Golden Dome plan. Whether it becomes anything approaching a reality will take years to be seen.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com