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In nuclear era, it has proven cheaper to build offensive weapons than play defense.
Lawmakers, industry, and the public are seeking details about the proposed Golden Dome missile defense shield. Credit: Parsons
One thing that's evident about President Donald Trump's proposal for the Golden Dome missile defense shield is that designing, deploying, and sustaining it will cost a lot of money, at least several hundred billion dollars, over the course of several decades.
Beyond that, it's really anyone's guess. That doesn't sit well with some lawmakers, but the Republican-controlled Congress committed $25 billion in July as a down payment for new missile-defense technologies.
The White House stated in May that Golden Dome will cost $175 billion over three years, but a new study from a center-right think tank concludes that it is simply not enough to develop the kind of multi-layer shield Trump described in a January executive order. It's also clear that it will take longer than three years to implement the full spectrum of defense capability envisioned for Golden Dome.
"The capabilities this level of funding can buy fall far short of what the president promised, creating a multi-trillion-dollar gap between rhetoric and reality," wrote Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
In announcing Golden Dome, the White House said the program must defend the US homeland against many types of aerial threats, including ballistic, hypersonic, and advanced cruise missiles, plus "other next-generation aerial attacks," a category that appears to include drones and shorter-range unguided missiles.
A program with few parallels
Harrison's paper, titled Build Your Own Golden Dome, provides a framework for understanding the costs, choices, and tradeoffs facing the Pentagon as officials decide what exactly a homeland missile-defense shield will entail. And there are a lot of decisions to make as defense officials begin to define Golden Dome.
"Its cost hinges on the level of geographic coverage, the types and numbers of threats it must address, and the degree of resilience it is expected to achieve," Harrison writes. "As this analysis shows, even slight changes in these parameters can alter costs by hundreds of billions of dollars.
"To date, the administration has provided few specifics about what Golden Dome’s capabilities will include," Harrison continues. "As long as these requirements remain undefined, it is fair to say that Golden Dome can cost as much or as little as policymakers are willing to spend."
These two presentation charts on the Golden Dome missile shield have appeared at several White House events in recent months. So far, they are the only official representation of the Golden Dome architecture. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Gen. Michael Guetlein, who took over development of Golden Dome this summer, has completed a blueprint for the program, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. But the Pentagon declined to give any details on its scope or cost. That's a change of tone from two months ago, when Guetlein said he would talk about his plan for Golden Dome once he met a 60-day deadline to complete the framework, according to Bloomberg.
In March, Guetlein said Golden Dome will require a "concerted effort" and "national will," adding that the missile shield is "on the magnitude of the Manhattan Project," referring to the World War II initiative to develop the first atomic bomb.
For now, the best estimates of Golden Dome total costs come from independent studies like the latest report from the American Enterprise Institute. All of the cost estimates, even the $175 billion price tag announced by the White House, far exceed the $35 billion cost of the Manhattan Project (adjusted for inflation).
Cost projections for all but the narrowest Golden Dome architecture also surpass the total cost of the Apollo Moon program.
Searching for answers
Harrison assessed six possible Golden Dome architectures, ranging from a low-end design that provides "limited tactical defense" to a more expansive option offering a "robust all-threat defense" to the US homeland. The bottom line is that these architectures come with a wide range of estimated costs over the next 20 years.
The least-expensive option would cost an estimated $252 billion (in fiscal-year 2026 dollars) beyond the Pentagon's current budget but would lack a key element explicitly spelled out in Trump's executive order calling for a multi-layer homeland missile-defense system: space-based interceptors.
Instead, the $252 billion option would include additional Patriot missile batteries and air-control squadrons, dozens of new aircraft, and next-generation systems to defend against drone and cruise missile attacks on major population centers, military bases, and other key areas.
At the other end of the spectrum, Harrison writes that the "most robust air and missile defense shield possible" will cost some $3.6 trillion through 2045, nearly double the life cycle cost of the F-35 fighter jet, the most expensive weapons program in history.
"In his Oval Office announcement, President Trump set a high bar for Golden Dome, declaring that it would complete 'the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago, forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland and the success rate is very close to 100 percent,'" Harrison writes.
The numbers necessary to achieve this kind of muscular defense are staggering: 85,400 space-based interceptors, 14,510 new air-launched interceptors, 46,904 more surface-launched interceptors, hundreds of new sensors on land, in the air, at sea, and in space to detect incoming threats, and more than 20,000 additional military personnel.
SpaceX's Starship rocket could offer a much cheaper ride to orbit for thousands of space-based missile interceptors. Credit: SpaceX
No one has placed missile interceptors in space before, and it will require thousands of them to meet even the most basic goals for Golden Dome. Another option Harrison presents in his paper would emphasize fast-tracking a limited number of space-based interceptors that could defend against a smaller attack of up to five ballistic missiles, plus new missile warning and tracking satellites, ground- and sea-based interceptors, and other augmentations of existing missile-defense forces.
That would cost an estimated $471 billion over the next 20 years.
Supporters of the Golden Dome project say it's much more feasible today to field space-based interceptors than it was in the Reagan era. Commercial assembly lines are now churning out thousands of satellites per year, and it's cheaper to launch them today than it was 40 years ago.
A report released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in May examined the effect of reduced launch prices on potential Golden Dome architectures. The CBO estimated that the cost of deploying between 1,000 and 2,000 space-based interceptors would be between 30 and 40 percent cheaper today than the CBO found in a previous study in 2004.
But the costs just for deploying up to 2,000 space-based interceptors remain astounding, ranging from $161 billion to $542 billion over 20 years, even with today's reduced launch prices, according to the CBO. The overwhelming share of the cost today would be developing and building the interceptors themselves, not launching them.
Lawmakers, industry, and the public are seeking details about the proposed Golden Dome missile defense shield. Credit: Parsons
One thing that's evident about President Donald Trump's proposal for the Golden Dome missile defense shield is that designing, deploying, and sustaining it will cost a lot of money, at least several hundred billion dollars, over the course of several decades.
Beyond that, it's really anyone's guess. That doesn't sit well with some lawmakers, but the Republican-controlled Congress committed $25 billion in July as a down payment for new missile-defense technologies.
The White House stated in May that Golden Dome will cost $175 billion over three years, but a new study from a center-right think tank concludes that it is simply not enough to develop the kind of multi-layer shield Trump described in a January executive order. It's also clear that it will take longer than three years to implement the full spectrum of defense capability envisioned for Golden Dome.
"The capabilities this level of funding can buy fall far short of what the president promised, creating a multi-trillion-dollar gap between rhetoric and reality," wrote Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
In announcing Golden Dome, the White House said the program must defend the US homeland against many types of aerial threats, including ballistic, hypersonic, and advanced cruise missiles, plus "other next-generation aerial attacks," a category that appears to include drones and shorter-range unguided missiles.
A program with few parallels
Harrison's paper, titled Build Your Own Golden Dome, provides a framework for understanding the costs, choices, and tradeoffs facing the Pentagon as officials decide what exactly a homeland missile-defense shield will entail. And there are a lot of decisions to make as defense officials begin to define Golden Dome.
"Its cost hinges on the level of geographic coverage, the types and numbers of threats it must address, and the degree of resilience it is expected to achieve," Harrison writes. "As this analysis shows, even slight changes in these parameters can alter costs by hundreds of billions of dollars.
"To date, the administration has provided few specifics about what Golden Dome’s capabilities will include," Harrison continues. "As long as these requirements remain undefined, it is fair to say that Golden Dome can cost as much or as little as policymakers are willing to spend."
These two presentation charts on the Golden Dome missile shield have appeared at several White House events in recent months. So far, they are the only official representation of the Golden Dome architecture. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Gen. Michael Guetlein, who took over development of Golden Dome this summer, has completed a blueprint for the program, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. But the Pentagon declined to give any details on its scope or cost. That's a change of tone from two months ago, when Guetlein said he would talk about his plan for Golden Dome once he met a 60-day deadline to complete the framework, according to Bloomberg.
In March, Guetlein said Golden Dome will require a "concerted effort" and "national will," adding that the missile shield is "on the magnitude of the Manhattan Project," referring to the World War II initiative to develop the first atomic bomb.
For now, the best estimates of Golden Dome total costs come from independent studies like the latest report from the American Enterprise Institute. All of the cost estimates, even the $175 billion price tag announced by the White House, far exceed the $35 billion cost of the Manhattan Project (adjusted for inflation).
Cost projections for all but the narrowest Golden Dome architecture also surpass the total cost of the Apollo Moon program.
Searching for answers
Harrison assessed six possible Golden Dome architectures, ranging from a low-end design that provides "limited tactical defense" to a more expansive option offering a "robust all-threat defense" to the US homeland. The bottom line is that these architectures come with a wide range of estimated costs over the next 20 years.
The least-expensive option would cost an estimated $252 billion (in fiscal-year 2026 dollars) beyond the Pentagon's current budget but would lack a key element explicitly spelled out in Trump's executive order calling for a multi-layer homeland missile-defense system: space-based interceptors.
Instead, the $252 billion option would include additional Patriot missile batteries and air-control squadrons, dozens of new aircraft, and next-generation systems to defend against drone and cruise missile attacks on major population centers, military bases, and other key areas.
At the other end of the spectrum, Harrison writes that the "most robust air and missile defense shield possible" will cost some $3.6 trillion through 2045, nearly double the life cycle cost of the F-35 fighter jet, the most expensive weapons program in history.
"In his Oval Office announcement, President Trump set a high bar for Golden Dome, declaring that it would complete 'the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago, forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland and the success rate is very close to 100 percent,'" Harrison writes.
The numbers necessary to achieve this kind of muscular defense are staggering: 85,400 space-based interceptors, 14,510 new air-launched interceptors, 46,904 more surface-launched interceptors, hundreds of new sensors on land, in the air, at sea, and in space to detect incoming threats, and more than 20,000 additional military personnel.
SpaceX's Starship rocket could offer a much cheaper ride to orbit for thousands of space-based missile interceptors. Credit: SpaceX
No one has placed missile interceptors in space before, and it will require thousands of them to meet even the most basic goals for Golden Dome. Another option Harrison presents in his paper would emphasize fast-tracking a limited number of space-based interceptors that could defend against a smaller attack of up to five ballistic missiles, plus new missile warning and tracking satellites, ground- and sea-based interceptors, and other augmentations of existing missile-defense forces.
That would cost an estimated $471 billion over the next 20 years.
Supporters of the Golden Dome project say it's much more feasible today to field space-based interceptors than it was in the Reagan era. Commercial assembly lines are now churning out thousands of satellites per year, and it's cheaper to launch them today than it was 40 years ago.
A report released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in May examined the effect of reduced launch prices on potential Golden Dome architectures. The CBO estimated that the cost of deploying between 1,000 and 2,000 space-based interceptors would be between 30 and 40 percent cheaper today than the CBO found in a previous study in 2004.
But the costs just for deploying up to 2,000 space-based interceptors remain astounding, ranging from $161 billion to $542 billion over 20 years, even with today's reduced launch prices, according to the CBO. The overwhelming share of the cost today would be developing and building the interceptors themselves, not launching them.
