President Trump says his lofty “Golden Dome” missile-defense project will cost $175 billion and be ready in just three years, but experts said those cost and schedule projections were likely far too low.
The project will involve “next-generation technologies across the land, sea, and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors,” Trump said Tuesday in televised remarks from the White House. The latest known concept for Golden Dome combines various existing systems—ground-based missile Patriot and THAAD interceptors, ship-fired Standard Missiles—as well as an extensive constellation of satellites bearing sensors and new space-based weapons, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports.
Threats, illustrated: The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency last week released a graphic showing “Current and Future Missile Threats to the U.S. Homeland,” (PDF) even though it mixes up Hawaii and Alaska at one point, as nuclear weapons scholar Jeffrey Lewis pointed out after reviewing DIA’s illustration.
Industry forecast: The project will likely involve many defense contractors; already the Pentagon has fielded more than 360 responses from numerous firms. Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, RTX, Boeing, Palantir, Anduril, L3Harris Technologies, and others are all hoping for a piece of the $175 billion-plus pie.
Just launching the satellites could cost between $161 billion and $542 billion, the Congressional Budget Office warned two weeks ago. Both estimates were based on the old SDI proposal; Golden Dome will likely require more satellites and more money for costs that could rise to $831 billion over two decades.
That did not deter hawks on Capitol Hill. “What’s exciting about this is it makes it available to everybody to participate, to compete,” North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer said Tuesday at the White House. “The new autonomous space-age defense ecosystem is more about Silicon Valley than it is about” America’s largest defense contractors, he added.
Trump: “This design for the Golden Dome will integrate with our existing defense capabilities and should be fully operational before the end of my term. So we’ll have it done in about three years,” the president predicted Tuesday.
Expert reax: It’ll probably take 10 years, Tom Karako of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told Reuters.
Rewind: In March, a defense official said it would take at least five to seven years to develop Golden Dome’s space-based weapons, though some work might be done earlier, such as integrating existing sensors and interceptors. After speaking with several defense and industry officials, Tucker described the program as “the most ambitious missile-defense project in history.”
Rewind that VHS tape even further: The concept was initially drawn up near the end of the Cold War, but was ultimately abandoned by the Reagan administration over its technological complexity and exorbitant costs. Read more about that project at How Stuff Works, here, or at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, here.
Today, America’s ballistic missile defense system is largely concentrated in Alaska, and it has never achieved 100% success in tests. Because such a system is intended to protect against nuclear-armed ballistic missiles from nations like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, any penetration of missile defenses could be unspeakably consequential.
Space Force vice chief Gen. Michael Guetlein will lead a new office dedicated to creating Golden Dome, Trump said Tuesday. That office will likely include near-term goals—such as improving the accuracy and effectiveness of ground-based missile interceptors—that can be completed before the 2026 midterm elections, enabling the White House to claim some quick success. More ambitious efforts are likely to take at least five to seven years to arrive, like satellites that track, analyze, communicate about, and destroy incoming missiles, Tucker writes.
Q. Did military commanders ask for this system? A reporter posed the question to Trump Tuesday at the White House.
“I suggested it, and they all said, ‘we love the idea, sir,’” Trump replied. “That’s how it’s gotta be.”
Movie trivia: You may recall the 1987 scifi film “Robocop” revolved around a future U.S. rife with crime and insecurity, paving the way for defense firms to pitch the titular robot as a promising solution. You may not recall that this film also included the Reagan-era “Star Wars” missile defense system that, in reality, experts ultimately rejected. The film’s audience catches glimpses of the missile-defense system in recurring TV news segments, which progress from comical to horrifically tragic by the end of the movie, as clips (here and here) from YouTube show.
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Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1881, the American Red Cross was established in Dansville, New York.
Around the Defense Department
The U.S. Army’s first armored Transformation-in-Contact unit is integrating 3D-printed drones for greater “massing of effects,” Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported Tuesday. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team is working its way through its fourth training rotation as a TiC brigade, at the Army’s Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany.
On Wednesday, the brigade will test a new configuration: first-person viewer unmanned aerial vehicles with forward observers and other anti-tank elements. “And we think that this team is going to produce a lot more massing of effects than maybe a larger team would,” Col. Jim Armstrong, 1st ABCT’s commander, told reporters Tuesday. “So that’s our thesis. We’re going to test it against the enemy tomorrow. And it’s really been helpful, thinking, living, breathing, opposing force to go to fight with at scale, to do more than a prototype test, and really see how these things impact us across our warfighting functions.”
The drones, designed by the division’s Marne Innovation Center and 3D-printed on site, help solve the problem of defending M1 Abrams tanks from drone swarms, a new issue both sides are dealing with as Ukraine beats back Russia’s invasion.
The brigade has also integrated a second electromagnetic warfare platoon, and it’s testing new tech provided by industry partners. That includes a software-defined radio counter-UAS system, which has followed the brigade through multiple training rotations. Read more, here.
Developing: SecDef Hegseth ordered the creation of a panel to review a tragic bombing during the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Pentagon chief announced Tuesday. Once the full panel is formed, Hegseth’s current plan is for them to “reexamine previous Abbey Gate investigations conducted by U.S. Central Command during the Biden Administration,” he said in a statement.
Hegseth’s close friend, Sean Parnell, will join Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, who was placed in the brig after being accused of “wilfully disobeying a superior commissioned officer, failure to obey an order, conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, and showing contempt toward officials,” Task & Purpose reported when Scheller was released from confinement after Trump’s inauguration. Jerry Dunleavy, “who helped lead the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s investigation into the Afghanistan withdraw[al], will serve on the Special Review Panel” with Scheller and Parnell, Hegseth’s Defense Department said Tuesday.
According to Hegseth, “Sean and his team will look at the facts, examine the sources, interview witnesses, analyze the decision making, and post-mortem the chain of events that led to one of America’s darkest moments.”
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Trump 2.0
Trump’s plan to detain migrants at Guantanamo Bay cost $100,000 per person every day, Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters said Tuesday. “We’re spending $100,000 a day to keep someone at Guantanamo,” Peters said. “We keep them there awhile, then we fly them back to the United States, or we could keep them here for $165 a day. I think that’s kind of outrageous.”
Context: “The White House has requested a huge increase in funding for immigration enforcement as it tries to achieve Trump’s goal of mass deportations,” Reuters reports. “The administration asked Congress this month for an additional $44 billion for the Department of Homeland Security in fiscal year 2026, which begins on Oct. 1.”
Update: U.S. intelligence analysts were ordered “to edit an assessment with the hope of insulating President Trump and [Director of National Intelligence Tulsi] Gabbard from being attacked for the administration’s claim that Venezuela’s government controls a criminal gang,” the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing email traffic from the concerned officials.
Background: “The New York Times reported last week that [Gabbard aide Joe] Kent had pushed analysts to redo their assessment, dated Feb. 26, of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and the gang, Tren de Aragua, after it came to light that the assessment contradicted a subsequent claim by Mr. Trump. The disclosure of the precise language of Mr. Kent’s emails has added to the emerging picture of a politicized intervention.” More, here.
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