Does the US need a Golden Dome air defense system?

USA Today

7 hours ago

On a special episode (first released on June 23, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: How might the Golden Dome missile defense system proposed by President Donald Trump protect the US from missile strikes? Tom Karako with the Center for Strategic & International Studies joins The Excerpt to discuss air defense systems.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. In May, President Donald Trump shared his vision for protecting the US from the threat of nuclear strikes by drones and ballistic cruise and hypersonic missiles. The idea, a Golden Dome, which would cover the country with three layers of air defenses following the launch of missiles in Iran. The idea of having a robust defense system here at home is getting more attention. Here to share his insight on missile defense and nuclear deterrence is Tom Karako, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thanks for joining me, Tom.
Tom Karako:
Great to be with you.
Dana Taylor:
What is the architecture of a national missile defensive system or Golden Dome look like? Would this be primarily space-based technology or is there more to it than that?
Tom Karako:
Yeah, there's certainly more to it than that. And again, it's important to keep in mind that we have a handful of systems already in place today to defend the United States against, especially the rogue state ICBM threat in particular. That's called the ground-based midcourse defense system. But you specifically asked about the architecture, so I think it's important to recognize there that there's a number of sensors, there's space sensors, there's lots of ground-based radars, and the very beginning of the kill chain here is the first, the detection of a missile launch. The tracking of that, the figuring out, is this a threat and where is it going, that's primarily a sensor and computing a problem. Then figuring out, okay, we have certain interceptors, how does one create a fire control solution? How does one tell them where to go at what moment to be at a particular point in space to kill this thing?
And then of course, we have the ground-based interceptors up in Alaska that are there to kill this. But as you note, this is not just about the rogue state ballistic missile threat. As we've seen in Ukraine and the Middle East, there's all kinds of other threats. So I would say that the Golden Dome Initiative that was in that executive order from January is long overdue. These are weapons of choice, as we see again on a daily and weekly basis in these various global conflicts, and so the cruise missiles, the forthcoming, and really the present, hypersonic missile threats and other things perhaps space to ground fires, lots of these things in addition to the UAVs that are plentiful and proliferated, all of these things are threats that we have become accustomed to seeing over there.
But these are things that are going to unfortunately be coming to a theater near you to us in our homeland as well. And so the operation Spiderweb thing that Ukraine did, putting things into Russia, we have to imagine it's not going to take a whole lot of imagination to imagine those kinds of attacks applied to, for instance, our military bases or our ports, our airfields, things like that. So everybody has to look up. We can't take air superiority for granted anymore and so it's going to be a spectrum air and missile defense capabilities to contend with this spectrum of air and missile threats.
Dana Taylor:
I was going to ask, are there specific current or projected threats that justify the need for a Golden Dome missile shield?
Tom Karako:
I think we see them in the headlines every day. The very robust, say Russian and Chinese, first and foremost, cruise missile threats, ballistic missile threats. Why are we concerned about them? Why can't we just rely upon nuclear deterrents? The answer is the availability of non-nuclear strategic attack, the kinds of things that a country might think they can get away with short of a nuclear reprisal. That's a big problem now and again, the last several national defense strategies for both the Biden Administration and the previous Trump Administration identified China and Russia as our principle challenges. We're not dealing with the rogue states first and foremost. Counterterrorism is not our top priority at the moment. It is fundamentally the major peer, near peer threats from the bigs, that we have to worry about. And again, missiles are weapons of choice. They're not a boutique problem, they're not a future problem. It's very much a today problem.
Dana Taylor:
The idea of mutually assured destruction rose during the Cold War between the US and Russia. The theory that should either side strike first, they too would be annihilated proved to be effective. How much of a deterrent is American might?
Tom Karako:
The paradigm that I think serious defense planners, again on a bipartisan basis, really over the past decade plus, have come to is that while it's important to have that deterrence by punishment, whether nuclear punishment or otherwise, that the threat again of that non-nuclear strategic attack is so significant based on the supply and the demand globally for these precision guided munitions that can have very serious effects without any nuclear weapons at all. That problem set also requires the prospect of deterrence by denial, which is to say, denying an adversary their objectives, not just blustering or threatening to respond if they should attack.
Dana Taylor:
We've recently seen the limitations of Israel's Iron Dome. Some Iranian missiles have successfully pierced Israel's air defense systems. Can you break down how the Iron Dome works, what went wrong, and if the proposed Golden Dome can mitigate those risks?
Tom Karako:
So I think you're probably talking about the many, many hundreds of missiles that have been coming in to Israel in the first instance over the past week, but also of course, those really big attacks on April 14 and in October of 2024. No weapons system is perfect, no weapons system is non-finite in its capacity in its numbers. So I think the beginning of wisdom here is to recognize that there will always be a leaker. That's just in the nature of things. There's no perfect tactical aircraft. There's no perfect sidearm that is not going to fail occasionally. What I would say actually is that in the 400 or so ballistic missiles that have been fired in the last week here in June of 2025, it's been remarkably good shooting. It's been astonishing to me that so few have gotten through.
Then likewise on April 14 of last year, when something like 550 plus projectiles coming at Israel simultaneously from multiple trajectories from Yemen, and from Iran, from other places, UAVs, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles all designed to arrive simultaneously. It was, I think, nothing short of a miracle that as many were intercepted last year as they were. So what I would say is that Israel's layered defense, of which the Iron Dome system is just one layer, in fact, the lowest layer, most of the big things are either going to be caught by the family of interceptors, they are 2 Arrow 3 or David's Sling for some of the medium range stuff.
The Iron Dome system, per se, is not going to be engaging the long-range threats. It's also important to note that the United States has been engaged in the Red Sea operations and in the direct defense of Israel. The United States has two THAAD batteries deployed in Israel right now, and they have been busy. They have been busy shooting down a number of these threats so it's a very much a combined operation between the United States and Israel in terms of taking out these longer range threats.
But you're right. There was a couple weeks ago, I think, at least one major missile that got through before the current kerfuffle. And again, I see that as primarily in the nature of things. Nothing is perfect. The good news is, of course, that we're talking about the non-nuclear attack as opposed to nuclear attack and so that's, I think, is important to put that in context.
Dana Taylor:
To what impact could the creation of a missile shield have on our relationships with both our allies and adversaries or their takeaways here from Israel's Iron Dome?
Tom Karako:
Yeah. Here again, I think it's important to contrast, especially the caricatures of the Cold War about, let's just say, Reagan's aspirations on SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative. In that context, there were some allies that were hypothesizing, well, what if the United States comes up with some impenetrable shield? What's their interest and commitment going to be on an extended deterrence level for coming to the aid of say, the European allies?
Well, there's a couple of problems with that. One is nothing is perfect, and I think those kind of assumptions get way ahead of the capability gap. What I would say is, in practice, the prospect of even a limited degree of protection, say for the US homeland is first and foremost bolstering American and allied broad defense and deterrence commitments. If you're able to be blackmailed, if you're able to be coerced, if you're able to have your military forces decapitated because you don't have any deterrence by denial act of missile defenses, that's a problem. hat's a problem for your deterrence and extended deterrence commitments globally.
This is why the demand signal for active air missile defense, this is no longer an American idiosyncrasy by any means, putting in addition to the Russian and the Chinese significant investments here. Just take a look at what all of our allies are doing. There's a massive rush for air missile defense capability in Europe led by Germany called the Skyshield Initiative, but to Poland, Sweden, the Swiss, and probably the United Kingdom here soon as well. So it's not an American idiosyncrasy. Everybody kind of realizes that you need to have some kind of defense, albeit limited, to slow things down, because ultimately it contributes to deterrence. It contributes to nuclear deterrence, it contributes to conventional deterrence so that the bad guys don't get an idea pop into their head, that they can come up with something like a fait accompli and get away with it very easily. So it raises the threshold for aggression by making it harder for them to do something at a lower level.
Dana Taylor:
As you know, the President has set an ambitious timeline. Trump has said the system, "...should be fully operational before the end of my term," which would be in 2029. Is that realistic?
Tom Karako:
Here's where I am going to make a comparison to SDI and to Reagan, which was that Reagan said that this is something that might not be accomplished in his lifetime. And yay verily, we are over 40 years later now, and it has yielded very significant results, but it has taken time. So I think that it's important to see the Golden Dome Initiative, not as a program, not as a system, but rather as an umbrella for a lot of initiatives and a lot of efforts to get after these various weapons of choice. And so it's going to be an ongoing thing.
You'll probably see them snap the chalk line and say at the end of the term that there's some kind of defensive capability. Some things can be accomplished in the near term, I think they will be. But there's going to be a lot of things that are going to take longer, and that's okay.
Dana Taylor:
I want to turn now to the price tag. In May, a report from the Nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that a bare-bones version capable of intercepting one or two ballistic missiles would cost at least $161 billion over two decades. How much might a fully realized Golden Dome cost, and do you see this as a good allocation of available defense spending?
Tom Karako:
So I think it's real important to understand what the Congressional Budget Office report did and what it didn't do. They were not tasked to cost the Golden Dome Initiative at all. What they were asked to do by Congress was to update a previous estimate of what a particular set of assumptions for space based interceptors might be. And so that is a particular component, a particular piece of a potential future architecture for Golden Dome, and there's a number of different assumptions in terms of what the interceptors cost on that. The only variable that they updated on that was the launch cost. The good news is that launch costs have come down dramatically for space. That's why you see thousands of Starlink satellites and lots of other companies, Amazon, et cetera, that have thousands of satellites and so that's the number, that's the scope that one might need for a space-based interceptor layer, an overlayer, as it were for the other things. But I think it's real important to understand what those numbers are and what they're not, and that that's probably not the best guide to what we're going to be spending on this.
The president said in his Oval Office remarks... He threw out the number 175 billion, but the question is over how many years? That could be over 10 years. If it was over five years, that would be 35 billion a year and it just depends on what is being counted and what is not. So I think it's real important to take a look at what Congress is actually authorizing and appropriating and not kind of, I would say, pie-in-the-sky numbers that don't necessarily correspond with reality. The good news is you can do a lot for $25, $35 billion a year. $25 billion is the number that's in the reconciliation bill working its way through Congress. And you can do a lot for that to address all these disparate threats, and frankly, we should be.
Dana Taylor:
Finally, we live in a world with increasing threats running the gamut from pandemics to foreign disinformation campaigns. Do you have any concerns that a Golden Dome may give Americans a false sense of security?
Tom Karako:
First of all, we're not going to be able to defend everything, and it's going to require senior military and political leaders to be upfront about the fact that the threat is so wicked. The threat is so difficult that you're not going to have a perfect Astrodome to defend everything. And it's about picking and having a preferential defense. Think about the Super Bowl. Every year, the Super Bowl gets a special bubble of air defense over it. And I think what I would say is that where we're heading is a handful domes over a handful of places persistent throughout the year as opposed to just for the big game.
So keeping expectations in check is going to be important, and again, as we see on a daily and weekly basis in the headlines, these are weapons of choice. These are what our adversaries and frankly we reach for first in a conflict is long-range standoff capability. And so I think understanding that is going to help to make sure that we don't have a false sense of security because it's a tough world.
Dana Taylor:
It's good to have you on The Excerpt, Tom. Thank you.
Tom Karako:
Thank you.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks for our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistant. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts at Usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor, Taylor Wilson, be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.