The Pentagon is expected to submit architectural plans for a “Golden Dome” to U.S. President Donald Trump sometime this week. He had given it about 60 days to do so when he signed an executive order on January 27, exactly a week after assuming office for the second time.
Predictably, Trump’s idea has evoked mixed reactions from the American strategic elites regarding its viability and advisability. While the proponents of the idea are excited that it would enhance the scope of U.S. theater and homeland missile defense systems, skeptics have termed it cost-prohibitive, ineffective, and destabilizing the global strategic balance.
Trump’s executive order had said that he wanted a plan that would keep the U.S. homeland safe from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.” Although no “enemy countries” were named as such, they were understood to be Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
The executive order explicitly endorsed two satellite programs, the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) and the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA).
Incidentally, the country’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) launched the HBTSS program in 2018 to develop satellites capable of providing fire-control-quality missile tracking data for interceptors. It was designed to augment the U.S. military’s ability to defeat hypersonic threats. The first two HBTSS satellites were launched in February 2024, and more are planned for deployment this year.
The PWSA is the Space Development Agency’s broader multi-purpose military space constellation program, which envisions hundreds of smaller sensing (“tracking”) and information relay (“transport”) satellites in low-earth orbit working to support the Department of Defense’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) system.
Trump’s executive order states that the PWSA should also deploy capabilities to perform the “custody” function—keeping track of enemy targets with enough precision for friendly forces to destroy them.
The executive order also endorses the creation of an “underlayer and terminal-phase intercept capabilities.” Apparently, the idea here is to develop a supplemental missile defense system that can “underlay” a higher-level defense, such as the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, providing additional interceptor shots at a target.
Besides, the executive order said that along with the submission of the plan on Golden Dome, “the Secretary of Defense shall direct a review of theater missile defense posture and initiatives to identify ways in which the United States and its allies and partners can:
(a) Increase bilateral and multilateral cooperation on missile defense technology development, capabilities, and operations;
(b) Improve theater missile defenses of forward-deployed United States troops and allied territories, troops, and populations; and
(c) Increase and accelerate the provision of United States missile defense capabilities to allies and partners”.
It is said that Trump’s 60-day deadline for his Defense Secretary to produce a “reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements, and an implementation plan” is intended to ensure that the results can be included in the next Presidential budget request, which is expected to arrive at Congress’ doorstep in May.
Reportedly, the MDA has contemplated multiple delivery timelines for Golden Dome, with the earliest capabilities expected by December 31, 2026, and additional capabilities phased through 2030 and beyond.
The Pentagon has received more than 360 secret and unclassified abstracts about ideas for planning and executing the system, and its analysts are studying them as they rush to devise a workable program.
In any case, the MDA is supposed to engage with the industry leaders and major defense contractors in Alabama from April 30 to May 2. They include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX.N (formerly Raytheon), and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. They are expected to submit proposals outlining technological approaches and deployment strategies for space-based interceptor systems, sensors, or control systems.
It may be noted that the idea of shooting down enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles as they lift off is not new. The late President Ronald Reagan talked of it way back in 1983. It was then termed the Strategic Defense Initiative(SDI), better known as “Star Wars.” It was said to have scared the Soviet Union so much that many analysts considered it led to the eventual collapse of the USSR.
Ironically, that happened even before the U.S. deployed a single interceptor. In fact, despite the initial enthusiasm and research, the U.S. had not developed a single interceptor. The program faced significant technological challenges and met a silent death.
So, will Trump do what Reagan did not or could not? After all, unlike the SDI, which remained a concept, the Golden Dome has to demonstrate that it can deter enemy missiles and systems. Here, the challenges are said to be formidable if experts are to be believed.
To begin with, critics are not impressed with the theory that if Israel has succeeded in protecting itself with its “Iron Dome,” which has done a great job shooting down Hamas rockets and Iranian missiles, the U.S. can also do a better job.
For them, Israel is “tiny,” the size of New Jersey, and therefore it is feasible for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system to protect against short-range threats. But, the same cannot be repeated in a continental-sized United States.
“That’s a massive amount of territory to cover, and the system would need to identify, track, and destroy nuclear weapons, drones, and other objects moving at high speed,” opponents of the Golden Dome point out.
According to Laura Grego, a Senior Research Director of the Global Security Program at the Union for Concerned Scientists, defending against a sophisticated nuclear arsenal is “technically and economically unfeasible.”
His argument is that America’s current ballistic missile defense is designed to thwart a small number of missiles from a rogue state such as North Korea or Iran. The system relies on the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD), which has failed nearly half of its tests, rendering it incapable of stopping a major attack from Russia or China.
Trump’s Golden Dome idea calls for a far more complex and robust system – space-based interceptors capable of downing a target moments after it launches. Such a system would require thousands of interceptors in low-earth orbit to intercept even a single North Korean missile launch, if one goes by the American Physical Society (APS), which has studied the feasibility of ballistic missile defenses for years and brought out a study that was released on March 3.
The study says that a single interceptor in orbit is almost never at the right place and time to rapidly intercept a ballistic missile launch, so exponentially more interceptors are needed to ensure adequate coverage. Many consider this study to be “the most comprehensive, independent scientific study in decades on the feasibility of national ballistic missile defense,” and it is not positive on projects like Golden Dome.
Creating a reliable and effective defense against the threat posed by even a small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs remains a daunting challenge, the study says, based on calculation that a constellation of about 16,000 space-based interceptors would be needed to defend against a ten-salvo launch of the Hwasong-18, a newer solid-fueled missile that is not even the most advanced ICBM North Korea is developing.
The study also considers boost-phase missile intercept systems, which would attempt to intercept ICBMs during their first few minutes of flight, while their rocket motors are firing. It has concluded that Trump’s executive order would likely give primacy to the boost-phase missile intercept system based in space.
Here, the idea is to intercept the missiles instantly, the moment they are launched (in the boost phase), rather than waiting until they close in on their targets (in the terminal phase). The Golden Dome’s space-based interceptors, not its ground-based theater systems, would be optimized for boost-phase intercept.
However, the APS study finds that all these systems would face very difficult technical challenges. After careful analysis, it concludes that systems of this type would be unable to defend the entire continental United States.
At best, a particular system could theoretically defend part of the U.S. against some of North Korea’s ICBMs. However, it says the system would be costly and vulnerable to anti-satellite attacks.
The study finds that creating a reliable and effective defense against the threat of even a small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs remains a daunting challenge.
“The difficulties are numerous, ranging from the unresolved countermeasures problem for midcourse-intercept to the severe reach-versus-time challenge of boost-phase intercept. Few of the main challenges have been solved, and many of the hard problems are likely to remain formidable over the 15-year time horizon the study considered. The costs and benefits of such an effort, therefore, need to be weighed carefully”.
No wonder why for analysts like Joseph Cirincione, the retired president of the Ploughshares Fund and a former Congressional staffer, “While we can intercept short-range missiles such as those used in the Middle East or Ukraine, there is zero chance we can intercept long-range missiles that span the oceans. We have spent over $400 billion since 1983 on nothing. Future expenditures will just be throwing money down a rat hole. This is the mother of all scandals.”
Critics have another important point against the Golden Dome project, and that is not based on its perceived technical or budgetary limitations but on the strategic, diplomatic, and policy issues the system’s deployment will raise.
The argument here is that between 1972 and 2001, global strategic stability depended heavily on the agreement between Washington and Moscow to limit their strategic missile defense systems through the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.
It prevented open-ended competition to build more or new offensive weapons to overcome defenses that the other might deploy to try to stop incoming missiles in the event of a nuclear war. It helped pave the way for bilateral treaties limiting Soviet and U.S. strategic offensive forces.
However, in December 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the ABM Treaty, arguing that Washington and Moscow no longer needed to base their relationship on their ability to destroy each other.
For Bush, the U.S. withdrawal was the only path toward permitting the country’s development of defenses against possible terrorist or “rogue-state” ballistic missile attacks in general and threats from North Korea in particular.
But Trump’s Golden Dome could enlarge the scope of this policy, angering Russia and China, much more powerful than Iran or North Korea. It may force them to go for accelerated programs to develop stronger nuclear missiles/weapons to penetrate the shields like the Golden Dome.
That would result in the U.S. responding with its own offensive weapons, thus making the world in this syndrome of action-reaction-action-reaction a deadlier planet to live in without an effective nuclear deterrence.
But then Trump has myriad supporters like Jonathan Moneymaker, the CEO of BlueHalo, a defense company working on Golden Dome adjacent tech, who argues that “Golden Dome should not be seen merely as a missile defense system because it’s a broader mission than that.
“When a nation can get aligned around an objective, whether that’s Star Wars or Golden Dome or sending someone to the moon, when you have a unity of mission, a lot of things can happen.”
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
- CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com
