The Golden Dome for America is US President Donald Trump’s vision of an impenetrable shield protecting the entire United States from land, sea, air, and space against short- and long-range weapons armed with nuclear warheads or conventional munitions. It may not survive the Iran war. Regional missile defenses deployed by the US and Israel have failed at times. The Golden Dome relies on their success.
A year and a half and $25 billion since the president announced the Golden Dome, plans still remain classified, and the White House has backed off of the claim it will be virtually impenetrable.
Experts and congress members eyeing the $1.5 trillion defense budget — an additional $17.5 billion for the Golden Dome in a separate reconciliation bill, and an estimated $100 billion for the war on Iran — are now rethinking missile defense.
In March, the Cato Institute warned that the Golden Dome, “modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome and air and missile defense (AMD), rests on a system now showing clear vulnerabilities.” The think tank cited several instances of Iranian attacks breaking through Israeli defense systems. “If Israel’s shield can be tested this way, the lesson for the United States is clear: a similar effort risks wasting vast time, money, and resources on a promise that may not hold.”
The Congressional Budget Office estimates it could cost $1.2 trillion to build missile defenses that still couldn’t fully defeat a smaller salvo of missiles. A more robust (though still penetrable) dome might cost $3.6 trillion. The US Space Force says it will cost only $185 billion.
The best the Golden Dome could perform, even at the $3.6 trillion price tag, is an 80% interception rate, one report concludes, though it notes that is an unrealistically optimistic scenario. If Russia launched its nuclear arsenal with this Golden Dome in place, and 20% of their missiles evaded thousands of space-based interceptors, at least 75 million Americans could perish immediately. Some 1.4 billion would likely die globally in the ensuing famine and climate disaster within two years.
In May, US Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told a press conference on Capitol Hill that the Golden Dome was a “vanity project” for Trump that would cost Americans at a time when economic insecurity is rife. “We’ve got 48 million people in the United States of America, the richest country in the history of the world, who are food insecure or hungry,” McGovern said. “When you start going down this road of a new arms race, where there’s no end in sight … we’ll have nothing for anything else.”
Laura Grego, a research director at the Union for Concerned Scientists, suspects the Golden Dome is doomed like its progenitors. “I think we’ll spend a lot of money before we get there,” Grego told Inkstick.
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics were among the 12 companies selected to develop space-based missile interceptors, the costliest and most technically daunting piece of the Golden Dome. Each manufacturer has current missile defense systems operating on US bases and in Israel. These extraordinarily expensive systems of sensors and interceptors have repeatedly failed while the US and Israel waged war on Iran, and throughout Israel’s war in Lebanon.
Inkstick asked each company how they could guarantee a workable missile defense system in space when their weapons in conventional war failed. None responded.
Elsewhere, Lockheed Martin’s CEO has predicted the next few years will be a feast for contractors. Anduril’s CEO said the defense industry is more energized than ever.
Money is one motivation for pursuing the Golden Dome, Grego says, but there are also true believers in missile defense who take its enormous financial cost as proof of its legitimacy. It should and will work because the US has spent $500 billion on it.
Since the US first left the anti-ballistic missile treaty, government officials have claimed to currently own working defenses to “fix the problem of nuclear war.”
“My worry is that the people who should know better believe it,” Grego said.
Just this year, the Missile Defense Agency’s Lieutenant General Heath Collins testified to Congress that the ground-based midcourse defense system had “made the impossible possible, hitting a bullet with a bullet.” By its own evaluation, the program has a 55% intercept rate in highly scripted and uncomplicated tests.
In this and past wars, the Pentagon has exhibited a tendency to mislead the public on the efficacy and maturity of its weapons. Golden Dome details have been concealed, even to Congress, despite its members approving $25 billion toward it last year.
In May, General Michael Guetlein, the manager of the Golden Dome, claimed he had spoken to 400 potential defense contractors about the project. He said he expected the Golden Dome to be completed on time.
Elsewhere, concerns are mounting. Speaking in Congress in June, US Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois, argued that the Golden Dome should be investigated for large-scale fraud. “The people getting federal taxpayer money for this have been caught repeatedly lying to Congress and to the public about what the technical status of those [weapons] are,” he said.
The backbone of the Golden Dome, a tranche of data relay and early warning satellites, has already been launched into low Earth orbit. It’s over-budget and behind schedule. The Government Accountability Office has urged the Space Development Agency to be more transparent about its progress.
Companies awarded contracts for the tranches of satellites were allowed to self-report on the technical readiness of their own products. They gave themselves high scores, inaccurately, GAO wrote in one assessment, potentially derailing the entire program in the process.
The bulk of the Pentagon’s request for an additional $17 billion in Golden Dome funding relies on another reconciliation bill that might never materialize. House Republicans recently drafted a supplemental bill with $60 billion earmarked to offset the cost of the war and cover immediate defense priorities.
US Representative Jodey Arrington, a Republican from Texas, blasted Democrats in July over reconciliation. He insisted that Democrats should support the bill in order to “support our troops in time of conflict.” He claimed it was about providing the armed forces with “baseline readiness — not Star Wars and Golden Dome and transformative modernizing of the military — just the bombs, bullets, and battlefield readiness for our men and women in uniform to finish the fight successfully and return home safely.”
In a recent hearing on missile defense, US Representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, questioned the logic of the Golden Dome when regional systems were falling apart. “What I don’t want to be doing is getting bogged down in a war in the Middle East that we’re losing while also spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars here at home” on the Golden Dome, he said.
Congressional appetite for the Golden Dome is flagging in the face of a more than $100 billion war. Iranian missiles have resulted in costly damage to American bases and military equipment across the Middle East, and recent reports have revealed that the US stockpile is dwindling fast. “There are lots of relatively cheap ways to circumvent a system or make it obsolete right away,” Grego explained.
A country could increase the number of its salvo, make its missiles faster, shoot decoys, attack sensors and interceptors. These are basic measures that would drive up requirements and costs of the Golden Dome.
In April and October of 2024, Israel claimed it intercepted 99% of projectiles fired by Iran. Trump subsequently praised Israel’s missile defense capabilities and, while announcing the Golden Dome, insisted that the US “is entitled” to the same kind of protection. Independent analysis, though, estimated that Israel’s interception rate was closer to 80 or 85%. Israel was able to destroy so many targets before impact because Iran’s missiles were relatively unsophisticated, armed without countermeasures, and aimed at less populated areas in a country 470 times smaller than the United States.
Two years later, with simple technological adjustments to its missiles and drones and defensive strategy, Iran has broken through American and Israeli defense systems time and again, often forcing US and Israeli forces to use costly interceptors against cheap and replaceable missiles and drones.
In March, Israel claimed it had destroyed 70% of Iran’s missile launchers and 70% of Iran’s steel production capabilities. Israel is reportedly rationing its interceptors, which are at critically low levels after years of war.
Meanwhile, critics say the US has compromised its own strength on the battlefield, in large part due to the severely degraded stockpiles. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently put it, a “major regional conflict” would likely require munitions that “exceed current stockpiles,” adding that a Taiwan Strait conflict would see “some long-range precision-guided munitions potentially exhausted in less than a week.”
The Iron and Golden Domes can’t be compared on matters of scale and ambition, Grego explained, although they share the risk of providing a sense of false security. A country believing itself invulnerable to attack is likelier to aggress others. “We’re chasing a technical fantasy,” she added. “What we need to do is the very hard work of diplomacy and arms control.”
The US will “reap the strategic blowback of trying to build a system like this,” Grego went on. “Even if you don’t ever build it, you’re going to change what’s possible in terms of arms reduction and nuclear risk reduction.”
