The Challenge of Golden Dome

The “Golden Dome Project,” announced by President Trump in May 2025, is advertised to be a multi-layer defense system for the United States, designed to safeguard the homeland from various aerial threats, including ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise weapons.

There is an allure to this, especially considering Israel’s remarkable anti-missile record over the past two years. Invulnerability to a missile attack? What could be more desirable, and what foolishness it would be to not achieve the timely completion such a wonderful thing. Here, finally, is the realization of the promise made by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, when he proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

Today, while global thermonuclear war seems far less of a threat than it did in 1983, it remains a ghastly possibility. Yet even if the desire to shield the nation from existential attack exists, the other issues that haunted SDI into an early grave remain. As was the case in the 1980s, the technology required to make the Golden Dome a reality is not nearly here, and much of that technology remains little more than theoretical. Moreover, even if the US should decide to shoulder the burdens necessary to mature the required technologies, the cost to field a capable system will certainly reach into the trillions.

Yet, there are compelling reasons to pursue this Golden Dome, despite cost and challenge. First, the primary strength of the United States military lies in the significant technological edge it retains since the 1980s over all commers. American systems dominate on the battlefield because they are, in many cases, a full technological decade, or more, ahead of the systems fielded by countries like Russia and China. Problematically, that edge is being eroded, not only by China, which has stolen its way to what might be imagined to be parity in many systems, but also by the fact that to maintain this edge, a technological leap – a major and costly one – will have to be made by the United States.

This leap must be a revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, jump in technology. However, the necessary jump is understood by few of those in the offices of the Pentagon, who are swamped by the mundane nature of their day-to-day efforts. Neither is the nature of the task fully grasped by the nation’s senior leadership, either in government, the military, or in the defense industry. In toto, the necessary concepts exist in bits and pieces, but the connective tissue necessary to make it a reality simply isn’t there. Not yet at least. And that makes the prospects for the Golden Dome little more than a science fiction fantasy, today.

Still, the truth is that the full realization of the Golden Dome is an utter necessity. Without it, the United States military will soon fade into parity with any number of peer competitor nations. To achieve this jump, the President will not only need to sell the true concept to the American People who will have to bear the long-term fiscal burden, but a new Manhattan Project-level effort, that will lash together the effort, top-to-bottom, will have to be undertaken.

Simply put, Golden Dome concept speaks to a multi-layered air-defense system, intended to engage and destroy airborne threats of every type. Each layer aims to attrite a different sort of aerial system, ranging from the most complex, including Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) and hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), to the most mundane, like low-mix cruise missiles and rockets. Further, the system will engage these threats across their flight timeline, from “boost phase,” which in the case of ballistic missiles, speaks to the period from launch to exit of the atmosphere – the period of greatest vulnerability for that missile – to mid-course, where the threat is cruising on its longest leg to the target area, either outside the atmosphere (exo-atmospherically), or within the atmosphere (endo-atmospherically), to terminal phase, where the threat is in the final phase of flight, just prior to impact.

“Effectors” are those weapons used to kill those air threats, and since the 1950s effectors have primarily been surface-to-air missiles of various sorts. Having said that, the Golden Dome will not only rely upon missiles to do the job. Many new and evolving threats are simply beyond the capability of defensive missiles. To face down the most complex threats of today, a new generation of effectors; that is, “directed energy weapons” will be needed. Specifically, lasers will be an absolute necessity.

Further, Golden Dome will require the inclusion of space-based capabilities, not only to detect and analyze launches, worldwide, but to kill threats in boost phase when they are most vulnerable. Importantly, this would be the first time space weapons will be maintained in orbit, and while the weaponization of space is not specifically banned by treaty, this promises to represent a metaphoric mounting of an unruly horse, which will certainly take us all in directions unintended and unforeseen.

Least “sexy” but perhaps most importantly, these sensors and effectors will need to be stitched together by a global communications system, run by artificial intelligence, and operating in real time; that is, instantaneously, regardless of distance.

As was the case in the 1980s, it is fair to say that this effort will be expensive, and stunningly so. The project is estimated by the Trump Administration to cost $175 billion and take three years to build, with completion targeted by the end of 2029. However, some experts question the feasibility of this figure and point to the potential cost overruns which typically attend programs that include a heavy element of research and development (R&D). The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated the cost of the space-based components of the system, alone, could reach $542 billion over 20 years.

Frankly, even the CBO’s is surely the grossest of underestimates, and it speaks only to the space element of the overall system. To bring the system to fullest fruit will ultimately cost, quite literally, trillions of dollars, and take perhaps dozens of years, even presuming that a maximal effort is bent to the task.

Ultimately, to make the Golden Dome more than a failing handout to the defense industry, a profound and sustained cross administration, national commitment will be required.

On January 27, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order entitled, “The Iron Dome for America.”  Plainly, the Golden Dome was inspired by Israel’s remarkable Iron Dome system. The Iron Dome is an Israeli mobile air defense system designed to detect, track, and intercept short-range rockets, artillery shells, and mortars. In recent years, the fame of the system is predicated upon what the Israelis advertise to be up to a 96% kill rate against the rockets launched by both Hamas and Hezbollah.

It is, however, a misapprehension to believe that Israel’s air defense system is the Iron Dome, alone. Rather, Iron Dome is a single element of a multi-layer Israeli system, each part of which is intended to defend against a different kind of threat. In this hierarchy, Iron Dome exists at the lowest tier of threat range and sophistication. Above Iron Dome in terms of capability and capacity lies “David’s Sling,” a missile defense system designed to intercept medium- to long-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones, including Iranian Scuds, and Hezbollah’s Fateh-110. Beyond David’s Sling lie the Arrow 2 and 3 systems. Arrow 2 is intended for medium- and long-range ballistic missiles in the upper atmosphere, or endo-atmospheric region. Arrow 2 is capable against, for example, the Iranian Shahab ballistic missile. Finally, at the top of the Israeli air defense food chain lies Arrow 3, designed to engage long-range ballistic missiles while still in space (exo-atmospheric). Arrow 3 exists to intercept Iranian ICBMs armed with nuclear warheads.

It is also worth mentioning that the Israelis are actively working on even more sophisticated systems. “Iron Beam” is an advanced directed-energy weapon being developed to augment Iron Dome in the destruction of short-range threats, using lasers. Arrow 4 is the next-generation ballistic missile interceptor being jointly developed by Israel and the United States. It is intended to replace or augment Arrow 2 and enhance whole system capabilities against evolving and future threats including maneuverable reentry vehicles, evolved hypersonic missiles, and advanced ballistic missiles.

In short, while the executive order speaks to an American Iron Dome, it must be understood that this is a gross over-simplification, and essentially a marketing gimmick. The actual, unofficial nickname for the entire Israeli, multi part air defense capability, including all these fielded systems, is “Homa” or “The Wall.”  One would presume that the White House felt that “The Iron Dome for America,” sounded better than “The Wall for America,” which could only be confusing considering the President’s desire to build a different sort of wall.

There is more than inspiration here, though. Analysis suggests that more than half of the technologies employed in the Iron Dome system, and particularly the Tamir interceptor, were developed and manufactured in the United States. In fact, virtually every one of these Israeli systems has been built in partnership, and with cooperation from, not only the US defense industry, but the US government, itself. Arrow 3, for example, is built by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the Boeing Company, and the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA).

This is not to say that the US does not already have sophisticated missile defense capabilities, but Israel’s Homa is the first, permanent, multi-tier system designed to cover the universe of air defense threats aimed against an entire, national population. It is an operational template for emulation, even if Golden Dome will be, if only by dint of the area to be protected, enormously more difficult to affect.

The geographic area of the continental United States is 3.12 million square miles. With the inclusion of Alaska and Hawaii, that area grows to 3.81 million square miles. As for Israel, the entire nation encompasses 8,000 square miles. Israel’s land mass is .2% of America’s.

The Israeli system works because Israel is a relatively tiny nation and the Russian nesting doll that is Homa only needs to defend a small geographic area. During the June 2025 Iranian missile attacks, most of the Iranian ordnance was aimed at Tel Aviv. Jerusalem, which is twice the size of Tel Aviv in terms of population was largely spared for any number of reasons, certainly including the presence of major Muslim holy sites. In any event, it is only 80 miles from Haifa in the north, to Ashdod in the south: a relative postage stamp. The United States is unimaginably larger, and would require, many domes, of various sizes, to do the job in a meaningful way.

A point defense system is a military defense system designed to protect a very specific, localized target — such as a military base, ship, aircraft, or missile launcher — from incoming threats like missiles, rockets, artillery, drones, or aircraft. Iron Dome is a point defense system.

An “area defense” systems is intended to protect a broad region or multiple assets within a defended zone. David’s Sling is an area defense system. So is the US Army’s THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system, which uses an AN/TPY 2 radar, along with a system-unique KKV effector.

While area defense protects specific regions, like a city, “strategic defense” systems aim to protect the entire country from long-range attack, primarily by killing the threat during its midcourse flight. Arrow 3 is the Israeli exemplar of a strategic system, while in the US, a small part of a broader strategic system is represented by the Navy’s Aegis BMD (Ballistic Missile Defense) system along with the SM 3 Block IIA missile. However, while Arrow can defend Israel, Aegis BMD can only cover a relatively fractional area of the American coast, because to engage a threat in midcourse, the effector must effectively be located somewhere along the threat’s flight path.

Regardless, these three sorts of systems are intended to complement one another in a layered missile defense system, and while a microcosm of this is demonstrated in Homa, Golden Dome will multiply this complexity geometrically, and if the entire United States is to be equally protected, this speaks to a defense system far exceeding “strategic” size in fact, if not in name. 

It is difficult to either describe or imagine how stupendously hard it is to “shoot a bullet with a bullet.”  This is a phrase commonly used in the missile defense world to describe how weapons aimed to engage threats like ICBMs and HGVs work. Systems like the US Army’s THAAD or the Navy’s SM-3 are likened to this metaphor. A “bullet” called a Kinetic Kill Vehicle (KKV), which literally maneuvers in flight to bodily strike a threat warhead, is fired against another “bullet,” in this case one moving at speeds up to Mach 10 during that threat’s midcourse phase. Is this difficult? Mach 10, like “a trillion,” seems almost ungraspable until you recognize that bullet moving at Mach 10 is travelling at a rate of 3,430 meters per second, or 7,673 mph. At Mach 10, you could fly from New York to London in under 30 minutes. It all adds up to a super-fast bullet shooting at the world’s fastest bullet.

Another problem is the location of the ground-based interceptor. Our missile systems, while not fixed, are very difficult to move, quickly or otherwise. If you are not located essentially under the path of the threat missile, it is likely that the effector will only end up in an impossible tail-chase of the threat. This is why ships provide an important element of the solution. It is easy to park a cruiser under the likely flight paths from North Korea to Tokyo. But a THAAD system protecting Minneapolis will have zero capability in defending Omaha. The effector would simply fall into a pointless tail chase as it tried to catch up to a Mach 10 threat from a 90 degree offset angle, and from hundreds of miles away.

But it is far more complicated than a simple speed versus speed problem. It is easy to imagine that a missile travelling in the clean, clear “low space” region, fast or not, would make a tidy and obvious target. This is not the case, at all. During the midcourse phase of an ICBM's flight, when missile is coasting through space on a predictable ballistic path, even identifying the actual warhead among all the nearby "junk" is one of the biggest challenges for missile defense systems. The designers of ICBMs aim to envelop their warhead in a penumbra of clutter, masking the actual warhead’s location from those who would engage it. Here are but a few examples of what an ICBM can deploy to confuse defensive targeting; decoy warheads (lightweight balloons shaped like warheads), thermal decoys, chaff, radar reflectors, and buses [a post-boost vehicle (PBV), carrying either multiple warheads (MIRVs) and/or more decoys].

It is important to remember that in the vacuum of space, any deployed item travels at the exact same speed as the ICBM warhead that ejected it until it is peeled off by atmospheric resistance upon reentry. So, beyond the designed clutter creation, whenever any of these tools are employed, another cloud of even smaller junk, like nuts and bolts and fluid drops, is created. It all becomes more of case of shooting a bullet at another bullet, but now that other bullet is hiding in a swarm of bees.

Once the warhead does enter the atmosphere, only a very time remains to engage. The terminal phase may only be 30 seconds in duration. At this point, the warhead is accelerated to speeds up to six or seven kilometers per second (sic). Moreover, from the engaging system’s perspective, it is travelling straight down, presenting a virtually microscopic radar cross section. In good news, all the junk has been shed, but in other news, the intense heat of reentry now surrounds the warhead with a cloud of plasma, presenting yet another challenge in “seeing” the warhead.

Finally, there is the relatively new hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV). While HGVs are capable of carrying nuclear warheads, like ICBMs, their primary mission is quick, strategic strike. For example, the greatest threat to the US aircraft carrier forces in the South China Sea is rapidly becoming Chinese HGVs. These weapons are already deployed today by both China and Russia. Not only do HGVs travel at extraordinary speed (greater than Mach 5), but because they travel at the edge of space, rather than in space, they remain below the radar horizon of ground-based systems for much longer. Worse, because they travel in the atmosphere, albeit the thinnest of atmospheres, and at such high speeds, not only do they skip off the atmosphere, making their path impossible to predict, but in some cases, they can maneuver themselves in flight. Systems like THAAD and Aegis SM-3 were designed for predictable ballistic trajectories, not for a threat that maneuvers unpredictably.

While HGVs in flight are easy to “see” from space, owing to the high heat signature, they create by their high-speed friction with the atmosphere, it is also true that, today, there is no defensive system that can kinetically engage an HGV in flight. You need to kill them is the boost phase to get the job effectively done, and in the case of China, that means attacking the mainland, which is understood to be a permission for China to then strike the US mainland in retaliation. They try to sink an aircraft carrier defending Taiwan, and to prevent that, we strike HGV launch sites in China. It’s Pandora’s Box, and it helps explain the complexity of defense of Taiwan, if nothing else.

This description of the target, and all that it brings to the fight, says nothing of the challenge a KKV has in finding a target in this cloud of high-speed junk. Nor does it talk to how there are very few radars able to work with sufficient granularity to even attempt find and track these threats, let alone develop a “map” of a dense, closely located target field, thousands of miles away. Fortunately, the US does have such a radar – The AN/TPY-2 – but only 13 of these exist, and one of these “Tippy 2s” is already deployed in the Negev Desert in support of the Homa system. How many will be needed for Golden Dome is another question, and at a cost of $200 million dollars per unit, one can easily see why a price tag of $175 billion seems little more than a guess.

Yet even if you can detect and track the threat, another problem is evolving to the point of insolubility. Physical missiles, even the most sophisticated either in existence or contemplated, are rapidly losing the race to the threat. Today, there are already several threats, not limited to HGVs, that are beyond a missile’s ability to effectively engage. These threats are too fast, too mobile, too stealthy, and too complex for traditional missiles. And it’s not just ICBMs and HGVs. There are threat cruise missiles that maneuver so severely in their terminal phases that defensive missiles simply cannot defend against them. Problematically, directed energy weapons are the only answer for these now proliferating threats, and these lasers are far from realization.

Despite the advertisements made during the Star Wars/SDI era, particle beam weapons remain little more than theoretical. A particle beam weapon (PBW) fires high-energy particles, such as electrons, protons, or neutral atoms, at near-light speeds. PBWs have never been developed and to this date they exist only in the conceptual or experimental realm. As for lasers, a few useful versions have reached the point of actual demonstration as defensive systems. However, currently insurmountable problems persist, greatly complicating further development. Foremost amongst these, laser weapons require massive power for operation.

This power problem is in no way belied by the fact that there are defensive laser systems already in development today. These are a class known as high-energy lasers (HELs), designed to be theoretically effective primarily against drones, rockets, mortars, and in the near-term, some unsophisticated cruise missiles. HELs require various power levels, up to 300 kW, depending upon the threat. The Navy has several HEL systems in development, but these are primarily “dazzlers,” requiring lower power, and they are only effective in blinding threat systems employing optical sensors.

For example, the HELIOS (High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance) system is being experimented with in USS Preble (DDG 88). However, it is important to note even with further development and up-powering, HELs will only be capable against subsonic anti-ship missiles and a few basic air-to-ground missiles, in addition to rockets, mortars, and drones.

For the complicated threats contemplated by Golden Dome, much greater laser power is required. To kill an ICBM in boost phase a laser with perhaps 1 MW of power is needed. This capability has been demonstrated: In 2010, a YAL-1A – a Boeing 747 with a 1 MW chemical laser – successfully engaged a test missile in boost phase. However, the program was cancelled in 2011 for several reasons, including, but not limited to, the fact that the range of this type of laser, which is limited by the aircraft’s capability to carry a sufficient power source, is at best several hundred kilometers. In other words, the aircraft would be required to quite literally be airborne over the hostile country at threat launch. This complication also applies to space-based lasers. Even the lowest flying military satellite operates at a minimum altitude of 200 km. So, the required 1MW power deemed necessary to destroy the missile notwithstanding, like the airborne laser, space lasers face a similar problem of distance. This is not to say that a constellation of laser armed satellites could not engage threats in midcourse, but killing threats in boost phase seems a problem without solution, today. That is, unless space lasers can be significantly up-powered, or these satellites are armed with classic missiles.

As for a missile in midcourse phase, a ground-based laser powered by a 10 MW source is needed. To generate 10 MW, an entire, fixed, ground-based power plant is required. Beyond that, other major problems remain, including development of the AI necessary to aim and operate these systems. More vexing, issues with atmospheric effects on ground-based lasers are currently unsolved. Peculiarities created by an ever and unpredictably changing atmosphere profoundly effects laser aim.  

With all the considerations of required power versus distance versus size of the power source versus space-based, airborne, or ground-based versus the necessary AI versus unpredictable atmospheric effects, lasers have a long way to go to do more than “dazzle.”

While the 1967 Outer Space Treaty specifically bans the deployment of nuclear and other Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) to space, conventional weapons are not specifically enjoined. Though Golden Dome wouldn’t require WMDs, there are issues, not the least of which would be a space arms race, as other nations realized that their nuclear deterrent would be rendered obsolete. 

Certainly, the US deploys an entire galaxy of military satellites, already, but these are largely communications and sensor devices, and while they will prove a vital element in Golden Dome, without the necessary effectors, the entire systems would seem badly suboptimized. As to the type of effector, there are two likely options. Anti-missile missiles of a new type, as was originally proposed for SDI, and space-based lasers. Again, lasers require enormous amounts of power to be effective, which suggests space-stations rather than satellites. As for missiles, they would face similar problems as those experienced by ground-based missile systems.

The true advantage of space-based weapons is this:  They can kill the threat in boost phase. Satellites in geosynchronous orbit over an adversary nation would be able to kill threat launches at their most vulnerable phase of flight. From launch to arrival in space or near space, threat missiles are slow and vulnerable and quite lacking the advantages they enjoy in mid-course and terminal phases.

In the future, the air-defense battlefield will be described as an agnostic network of widely dispersed sensors and effectors, tied together by real-time, or near-real-time communications capable of sharing massive amounts of data across vast distances. In other words, any sensor, anywhere in the network, can be tied to any effector, anywhere in the network, to achieve the most efficient and effective engagement of any given threat. For example, in this vision, if a ballistic missile lifts off from North Korea, air or space borne sensors will “see” the target, and this information will be shared to the sensors most capable of detecting and tracking the threat with the granularity necessary to enable the use of defensive weapons.  So, for example, a missile launched by North Korea is detected by a space-borne sensor, and that information is sent to the AN/TPY-2 radar in Shariki, Japan, where a precise track is further developed. This track information is then sent to USS Shiloh (CG 67) in the Sea of Japan, because the ship is ideally located to intercept the threat missile. It is also shared with air and ground-based laser systems. All of this happens seamlessly, without time-consuming operator intervention, allowing for a successful consummation of the engagement.

We are already fantastically far from realizing this vision. The current ability to transfer large amounts of data, in virtually real-time, over long distances is a mere shadow of that which will be required for the Golden Dome. Satellites don’t possess the necessary capability and capacity, today. Further, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) required to seamlessly make these complex decisions, across the disparate elements in the grid, doesn’t exist, yet. The necessary weapons don’t exist in the number required.

Also, the idea that combat-operations might occur without lengthy, human, checks and affirmations is anathema to the military. Intra, and inter-military parochialism is real. Telling the Navy captain at sea that a land-based Army officer, assigned as an Air Defense Commander (ADC) is going to cause missiles to leave his ship, without any element of the engagement being the choice of that ship is what is called a “religious issue” in the military.  Religious issues strike at the very heart of each service’s perceived prerogatives and traditional raison d'être. For example, the U.S. Air Force strongly promoted the idea that intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) could make other military services — especially the Army and Navy — less relevant or even obsolete during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Neither the Army nor the Navy has ever forgotten this outrage.

We are so far from realizing this vision – the vision that would be the base description of Golden Dome – that to get there, we would need to undertake a modern “Manhattan Project.”  $175 billion and three years is so ridiculous a number and timeframe that it amounts to a rank affront to not only the American People, but reality.

Having said that, there is a microcosm of this vision currently in effect in the US military. In the Navy, there is a system called CEC, or Cooperative Engagement Capability. CEC effectively allows one ship to use another ship’s radar to employ its own missiles. The shooting ship need never even see the target. CEC is, however, limited by several factors.

First, it is only effective when the various CEC-equipped ships and aircraft are in “line-of-site” with one another. Satellites cannot carry the vast amount of data necessary to effectuate these engagements.

Second, there is a very powerful “not invented here” dynamic that exists in the military’s system commands. These system commands are huge bureaucracies responsible for procuring the Navy’s systems. CEC came out of a civilian laboratory (JHU APL) and despite the enormous revolutionary potential, the Navy bureaucracy consistently seeks to minimize CEC because it competes with a different, much less effective Navy system, which was “invented here,” called Link 16. If the Navy can’t get out of its own way with CEC, then what is the likelihood that this can be done across multiple services and at enormous scale?

In the late 1970s, the United States recognized it could not match the Warsaw Pact tank-for-tank or soldier-for-soldier in Europe. Harold Brown, the Secretary of Defense during the Carter Administration made a strategic decision that changed everything in terms of our ability to defeat enemies in the field. Instead, of attempting to match the Soviets in terms of numbers of tanks, submarines, and aircraft the US would instead move to open a ten-year technological gap over the Russians. This became the “Second Offset Strategy” of the 1980s, in which the focus shifted from numbers to new concepts like stealth, precision-guided munitions (PGMs), intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance (ISR), and networked command and control. The Second Offset Strategy was decisively validated in the 1991 Gulf War, during which American arms completely dominated the Russian military technologies employed by Iraq.

We are now in the age of the “Third Offset Strategy” developed by Secretary of Defense Robert Work, during the Obama Administration. This is essentially a continuation of the Second Offset Strategy in which the aim is to continue to develop and integrate the most cutting-edge technologies and operational concepts, and particularly, those aimed at anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) environments. In other words, technologies that would allow the US to operate effectively in extremely hostile environments like the South China Sea, in the event of war.

Defense spending has been essentially flat in "real" and GDP-share terms since the end of the Cold War. Maintaining the current military, with its own highly expensive systems, has eroded our country’s ability to maintain the critical edge against a pacing threat like China, which is pouring vast amounts into developing a military able to compete with the US, peer-to-peer. While China is not there yet, they are gaining and wearing away the American edge.

And that’s why we need to undertake this ridiculously underestimated challenge. We need to continue to technologically beggar the rest of the world in terms of technology with a Fourth Offset. A Fourth Offset that would not only render the United States impervious to the threat of nuclear annihilation but would provide other salutary technological and cost-saving implications for all of society.

And it is time to at last banish the threat of nuclear Armageddon.

To make Golden Dome a reality, the United States will need to field an enormous, multi-tiered (point, area, and strategic) air defense system, which is capable against targets ranging from rockets, to HGVs and ICBMs, and able to intercept these threats from boost phase to terminal phase using interceptors ranging from PATRIOT to lasers to space-based weapons.  All these systems will need to be linked together to exchange massive amounts of data, in real time, employing an agnostic Command and Control System, informed by the most sophisticated AI available.

One hundred seventy five billion dollars? Three years? Consider the GAO projects that the lifetime cost of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program to exceed $2 trillion. This includes the cost of research, development, procurement, and sustainment of the aircraft for all three branches of the US military. How much more costly will Golden Dome be since many of the integral systems required for an effective system don’t even exist. Many of them are little more than theoretical. Space-based weapons? Lasers that do more than dazzle optical sensors? The ability to transfer terabits of information, across vast distances, in real time? Artificial Intelligence of the sort to meaningfully connect the countless nodes, including intelligence, weather, what ordinance and of what sort is in any given launcher at any given time, the state and mode of every sensor on earth and in space…in real time?

What needs to be understood is that we can do this. We can. If only we address the problem with a clear eye and complete honesty. To get there from here, billions of dollars will be needed for the Manhattan Project-level effort required to develop and prove the necessary technology beyond a shadow of a doubt. In this effort, most of the work, and all of the research and development (R&D) - as was the case in August 1942 - will have to be affected by non-profit government laboratories, which are already populated by brilliant engineers and scientists. Accordingly, government labs need to grow, join, and do the work in a nonprofit fashion.

Short of that, Golden Dome will remain not only a bridge too far, but an unforgivable money pit that leads to nowhere.

Captain Eyer is a retired Surface Warfare Officer who served on active duty for 27 years. He deployed in seven cruisers and commanded three Aegis cruisers: USS Thomas S. Gates (CG 51), USS Shiloh (CG 67), and USS Chancellorsville (CG 62). Captain Eyer completed tours on both the Navy Staff and the Joint Staff and attained a master’s from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tuft’s University. He was the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings Author of the Year in 2017.