Is America’s $800 Billion Golden Dome Missile Defence Program Viable?

Commenting on the U.S. Armed Forces Golden Dome program to develop a comprehensive air defence capability for the United States mainland, head of the program Space Force Vice Chief of Space Operations General Michael A. Guetlein has provided further insight int he rationales for investing in development. “Our adversaries have become very capable and very intent on holding the homeland at risk,” he warned, adding: “Our adversaries have been quickly modernising their nuclear forces, building out ballistic missiles capable of hosting multiple warheads, building out hypersonic missiles capable of attacking the United States within an hour and traveling at 6,000 miles an hour, building cruise missiles that can navigate around our radar and our defences, building submarines that can sneak up on our shores, and, worse yet, building space weapons.” To respond to this, the Golden Dome is expected to integrate satellites and other space-based technologies with ground and sea based sensors, surface-to-air missile launchers, and electronic weapons to provide a defence against a range of potential threats.

Providing further insight into plans for the Golden Dome program, President Donald Trump on May 20 stressed that the program was “very important for the success and even survival of our country.” “It’s an evil world out there, so this is something that goes a long way towards the survival of this great country,” he added. “This design for the Golden Dome will integrate with our existing defence capabilities and should be fully operational before the end of my term,” the president elaborated, adding:“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space.” The president pledge that the Golden Dome would become a “state-of-the-art system that will deploy next-generation technologies across the land, sea, and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors,” concluding that by developing it: “We will truly be completing the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago, forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland.” This was in reference to the Strategic Defence Initiative announced in 1983. The Cold War era program set the Pentagon back several billion dollars, but never came close to providing anything approaching a viable defence against a medium or large scale ballistic missile attack. The program had been estimated to cost between $69.1 billion and $145.7 billion, or between $210 billion and $443 billion today if adjusted for inflation, with considerable further spending required for subsequent phases.

The Golden Dome is intended to provide a defence against threats that include hypersonic weapons, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones, with the journal of the U.S. Air Force, Air & Space Forces Magazine, observing that these were “threats which the country’s current defences are too piecemeal, too limited in scope or not advanced enough to eliminate.” Although President Trump has claimed that the system will be ready in “less than three years,” the feasibility of this remains highly uncertain, as does whether Congress will agree to finance development. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that the program could cost $831 billion over the next two decades. Chief of Space Operations General B. Chance Saltzman provided a more conservative estimate of over $500 billion. There is a significant possibility that even if the Golden Dome program is financed, cost overruns will render it unaffordable and prevent it from providing the kind of comprehensive defence envisioned.

The U.S. mainland’s missile defences are currently considered insufficient to prevent any of the country’s three potential adversaries with intercontinental range arsenals, China, Russia and North Korea, from launching thermonuclear strikes on the cities across American territory. All three countries have introduced hypersonic glide vehicles for their nuclear armed missiles, making them nearly impossible to intercept, although North Korea’s glide vehicles have yet to be integrated onto missiles capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. The kind of capabilities pledged for the Golden Dome would thus wholly transform the very limited air defence capability the American mainland has today, in particular in the field of anti-ballistic missile capabilities. The size of the territory that needs to be defended, however, as well as the the scale of adversaries’ nuclear arsenals, and the extreme complexity of neutralising targets such as hypersonic glide vehicles, and the strong tendency for such programs to suffer from extreme cost overruns making them unaffordable, raises serious questions regarding the program’s viability.