Opinion - The actual cost of a US ‘Golden Dome' could be staggering

Yahoo

16-05-2025

Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, the joint program officer for the Guam Defense System, testified at a Senate hearing this week that the cost of providing an integrated air and missile defense system — in effect a miniature 'Golden Dome,' for Guam — would total approximately $8 billion. These funds would cover the cost of placing sensors and launchers, as well as the command-and-control systems that would link them.
All these systems either already exist or are in later stages of development; no new development would be involved.
Responding to Rasch's cost estimate, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) extrapolated the $8 billion figure to account for the 779 cities in the U.S. that are equal to or greater than Guam's population. According to his calculation, a Golden Dome over all of America would total $6.2 trillion.
And King's figure was a bit too low; applying the same methodology results in a total cost of $6.4 trillion.
Whether that $6 trillion figure is even remotely accurate is far from clear. Extrapolating the cost of defending Guam to the continental U.S., but calculating not on the basis of the number of cities to be defended but rather on the island's area in square miles relative to the mainland, yields a ratio of 14.86, which results in the far lower cost of $119 billion.
Golden Dome will not replicate the system currently planned for Guam by 2031. President Trump's Jan. 27 executive order calls not only for current capabilities to be upgraded over time but also emphasizes the central role of space-based assets.
Among the elements of the executive order relating to space are '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; development and deployment of a custody layer of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture; and development and deployment of capabilities to defeat missile attacks prior to launch and in the boost phase.'
These are all new capabilities that have yet to be developed. If the cost of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, which provided the inspiration for Golden Dome, is any indicator, the sums to be expended on Trump's proposal will certainly exceed $119 billion.
In the 25 years after Reagan first announced his plan for a missile shield over America — which critics derisively labeled 'Star Wars' — the U.S. spent $120 billion ($235 billion in 2025 dollars) on the program. Since then, it has spent billions more on the program's offshoots, such as the missile defense system at Fort Greely, Alaska. None of these expenditures resulted in an operational space-based missile defense system.
In late April, the House Armed Services committee included $24.7 billion in the $150 billion reconciliation package for fiscal year 2025. Even if annual costs for this program were to remain fixed at that level, a 25-year program, similar to that of the Strategic Defense Initiative, would total nearly $620 billion.
The House figure is only a small down payment, however. The program will certainly call for far greater funding as it develops over time. It might well reach the total cost of $2.5 trillion that some analysts have estimated.
Golden Dome will also generate opportunity costs in terms of other defense programs being either underfunded or entirely terminated unless the defense budget can sustain major annual growth rates over a period of two decades or more. That projection flies in the face of historic defense budget growth, which has varied sharply over time and with successive administrations, and has suffered from unanticipated inflation and cost growth.
In the event that budgets do not show significant annual growth, the impact on other defense programs could be severe. In that regard, it is noteworthy that without the one-year $150 billion reconciliation package — which has yet to pass Congress — the next budget actually shows a slight decline in real terms. That does not bode well for other programs that would compete with Golden Dome for defense funds.
The Strategic Defense Initiative experiment included plans for space-based capabilities that took a variety of forms — none of which ever materialized. Technology certainly is far more advanced today than when Reagan launched his initiative, but the viability of a space-based missile defense system has yet to be proven.
Given its immense costs, and its effect on available funding for other defense programs, Golden Dome for America will call for cautious, careful and consistent congressional oversight and scrutiny for many years to come.
Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.
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