The Challenges – and Opportunities – of a ‘Golden Dome’ Defense System

The Golden Dome project was inspired by Israel’s “Iron Dome” shield, which the U.S. helped build, and which has proved essential for that country’s defense against rocket fire from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and in last year’s unprecedented Israeli exchange of fire with Iran. But Israel is roughly the size of New Jersey, and experts say the U.S. will have to make choices about which areas of the country to protect, what elements to use in the system, and how much it can afford to spend to build it. 

Experts also note that the nature of the threat is very different from what Israel is up against; here the risk is less from close-range rockets and missiles, and more from highly sophisticated long-range missiles that might come from China, Russia, or North Korea. 

Chief Pentagon Spokesman and Senior Advisor Sean Parnell told The Cipher Brief this week that the Department of Defense "has developed a draft architecture and implementation plan for a Golden Dome system that will protect Americans and our homeland from a wide range of global missile threats." He added that the department "has gathered the brightest minds and best technical talent available to review a full range of options that considers current U.S. missile defense technology and cutting-edge innovation to rapidly develop and field a dependable umbrella of protection for our homeland."

The Cipher Brief spoke about the Golden Dome project with Admiral James “Sandy” Winnefeld (Ret.), former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Bradley Bowman, Senior Director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; and Carlton Helig, a fellow with the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. They addressed the Golden Dome project, the nature of the threats it is meant to counter, and the costs and feasibility of such a system. 

Their comments have been edited for length and clarity. 

THE EXPERTS

The theory behind the “Golden Dome”

Adm. Winnefeld: When most people think of this, they think of the Iron Dome, they think about what Israel has done in cooperation with U.S. industry to protect themselves from rocket attacks from Hezbollah, Hamas, and the like. This is not that. It's really a metaphor. And I'm reminded of the adage: take Trump seriously, but not literally. What he means is a system to protect the United States from ballistic missile attacks, cruise missile attacks, hypersonic missile attacks. And that's a pretty ambitious project, but as a former NORTHCOM commander, I'm happy to see it get a little more attention than it's been getting.

It's a massive area to defend if you want to try to defend the whole [territory of the U.S.]. And clearly, we're going to have to make choices on critical infrastructure, the national capital region, New York City, major metropolitan areas, major defense areas, potentially nuclear power plants, that sort of thing. And it's going to be very hard to defend all of that. But that doesn't mean you should defend none of that. So we've got to make some choices. 

Bowman: Every president since 9-11 has talked about how homeland defense is the number one national security priority. And that makes sense, of course – if you don't protect your home, then what are you doing? 

As a candidate, President Trump was impressed by the Israeli Iron Dome system. And it is an impressive system. Its effectiveness has ranged somewhere between 90 and 95 %. But it's designed to protect a country the size of New Jersey against rocket threats. That's obviously very different than protecting a country that spans a continent against cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles. 

The idea here is, let's protect ourselves as much as possible. But if we set unrealistic goals, we're going to fail. And let's be clear, this is not going to protect us against every ICBM coming in from China and Russia. That is not within the capability of what we can currently achieve, as nice as that would be. For that, we're going to rely on a modern version of MAD, mutual assured destruction – [the Cold War doctrine] that says to China or Russia, if you attack us with a large-scale nuclear attack using intercontinental ballistic missiles, we will retaliate in such a way that you will regret having done that. 

The nature of the threats

Haelig: We're talking ballistic missiles, we're talking hypersonic weapons, and cruise missiles, which are semi-stealthy and harder to engage. We're talking aircraft, and all of these have different threat vectors. They require different defensive measures. What you may be able to engage with a space-based laser or some sort of kinetic vehicle is not going to be as effective at targeting a much lower-flying, much slower, much harder-to-see cruise missile that might be coming across the horizon. 

So part of the issue is trying to identify what the Golden Dome Missile Defense System is really intending, and how it prioritizes those different threats that it's intending to engage.

Adm. Winnefeld: There's a multi-population of threats that are out there. Obviously, there's the classic intercontinental ballistic missile threat, which is what Ronald Reagan was thinking about when he put together what was known as the Star Wars system. That's a very difficult threat to defeat, particularly if it comes from a very sophisticated adversary like Russia, because there are all kinds of penetration aids and the like, and just sheer mass. It's very, very hard to defend against that.

What that evolved into was the ground-based interceptor program that is our current missile defense program, and which was intended to be used against Iranian or North Korean threats or an accidental launch from Russia, something along those lines. It just didn't have the capacity to handle a massive ICBM attack from Russia.

Obviously hypersonic missiles are another threat, and something that has been in the news quite a lot. They're very difficult to counter. They're hard to see. They can maneuver; they're very fast. And so there's a big effort involved in trying to take those on – something called the Glide Phase Interceptor Program, which is just now starting up. And then there are the potential rogue threats you hear about, like a container on a merchant ship off the coast with more of an intermediate-range ballistic missile, or short-range ballistic missile.

Bowman: The reality is that our adversaries have been sprinting to field capabilities to threaten us here at home. And that includes – as your older audience will remember – the Cold War and how we had Soviet ICBMs, nuclear-tipped ICBMs to worry about.

But today, in addition to those nuclear-tipped ICBMs, we also have Iran and North Korea increasingly getting in the mix. And we have Russia and China developing and fielding hypersonic weapons, and increasingly cruise missiles that can threaten us here at home.

So we have the old Cold War ICBM and nuclear threats, and we have this new family of weapons – hypersonic weapons that obviously travel at high speeds, but also maneuver and are hard to detect based on their flight profile. And you have cruise missiles, which by definition, unlike a ballistic missile that travels in a ballistic trajectory, fly lower. And the first step to defeating an incoming missile is seeing it, detecting it. And if you can't detect it, you can't kill it.

And so this creates all sorts of problems for the United States. The reality is that we have near-zero ability as a country to detect cruise missile threats coming into our country other than a small portion of Washington, DC. So if a major adversary like China or Russia were to decide to attack us with cruise missiles, the first most Americans would know about it is when the explosions start. And that's not great. So when you combine that with the existing ballistic missile threat and you combine that with the hypersonic vehicle threat that I've talked about, what we have is an American homeland that is less than secure. 

One quick related point: your audience will remember 2023 and the embarrassment associated with the Chinese balloon. We were apparently unaware of this big, massive white balloon flying into our airspace. What explains that? Well, we have all these different sophisticated radars that are tuned to look for certain things, flying at certain speeds of certain altitudes. But if you have something flying at a different speed, even a slower speed or at a different altitude, the algorithms, if you will, weren’t tuned to pick that up. And that's one of the reasons why we were so surprised as a country with the balloon. It helps you begin to understand some of the challenges associated with these cruise missiles.

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The elements of “Golden Dome” 

Adm. Winnefeld: First of all, we have to make sure we pay attention to the detection side of this. Some of these threats are very hard to see using traditional infrared, something like a cruise missile launched from the sea or a hypersonic threat. So there are efforts going on, space development agencies doing the proliferated war-fighter piece. We need to accelerate those. You can't shoot something if you can't see it. For the more traditional ICBM and MRBM threats, we have radars that can generally see those in time, as we saw with the defense of Israel. But those other emerging threats, the hypersonics and the like, are tougher. So that's point one, is to get the detection piece there. 

Another one is, we talk a lot about directed energy. And the first thing that people think about when they hear directed energy is lasers. And lasers have a problem, or several problems. One, it's very hard to get the power into them that they need in order to actually take out a serious ICBM or MRBM threat. Another is that they don't like bad weather. They don't like to penetrate clouds. They also have to dwell on the target for a certain amount of time. 

It's more likely that the type of directed energy we're going to use is what I call ultra-high-power microwaves. There are high-power microwave systems out there that can take out little drones, and there's a million little startups that are doing that. And those are important, and they're nice on the battlefield, and if you're going to take out a serious ballistic missile threat, you can actually do it with ultra high-power microwaves, but it takes a certain type of technology that we have, but we need to accelerate. And it's just a quick shot. And it doesn't take much electrical power to do it because it's such a short pulse that goes out there. 

And then there's a big vibe out there put out by some of the small startups, the sort of “tech bros” that say the defense primes are history, they're obsolete, we're the future. And in some small areas, that's actually probably true. It's important that those people be nurtured. But this is big-boy business here. It's not a little drone with some AI in it that's going to do missile defense. This is very difficult, very complex, has to be done at scale, and you need people who can produce that. 

Bowman: There's going to be a space-based element. You’ve got to get up high, to get your detectors and your radars up high, so you can look down and see the threats – both cruise and hypersonic and additional ballistic missiles. And we've got to look for cost-saving things that get the job done in a less expensive way. And so we have got to look at directed energy – that's an element here, not just kinetic capability. And we’ve got to use dirigibles and unmanned aerial vehicles, which can give us some of these detection interception capabilities at a lower cost.

Haelig: The timing will depend on how much they would patch together existing systems. It would not be quick. They would have to build a lot of bespoke systems in order to coordinate the finding and fixing of the threats and prioritizing what aspects of that defensive system are going to be used to engage what threats when and how. It would not be a short time frame whatsoever. And then you run to the question of, if this thing got halfway toward being built, does the future administration say, you know what, this is an unnecessary sum of money, we're going to abandon this, and then you have all that sunk funding that you've already put into the system that is now largely moot because you're not going to be continuing onward with it? 

Feasibility – and costs 

Adm. Winnefeld: The supply chain is hard – and industry is taking a lot of hits in the news these days because we just can't build things fast enough. And it's really important to remember that industry sizes itself for what the government asks it to do. It's not going to put out extra assembly lines out there and a massive supply chain if there's no possibility that someone's going to buy what's produced there. So there is a little bit of lag time, but with multi-year contracts, which is what gives industry the confidence it needs in order to put together large supply lines with the people involved, with the supply chain involved – that is where you have to go here if you're going to be serious about stepping up the sizing of this thing.

Bowman: I think to succeed, we have to put our money where our mouth is. [In the past], we just didn't invest the way we should in air and missile defense. So, big surprise: if you don't invest in it, you're not going to have enough, either to protect your homeland or protect our forward-positioned US forces.

If you want to start to get a sense of the scale here, this is kind of what one of my colleagues has called a Manhattan-level type of project. You have this $25 billion working its way through Congress. It is just a drop in the bucket. It's a down payment, like a down payment on a house – at most it's 20%. There's a lot more that comes after it. And let's be clear: I think this is worth doing. There's ways to make it more affordable, but this is going to be very, very expensive. But I think it's worth doing, to protect Americans first and foremost at home. 

Haelig: The United States and other countries have been chasing overall national missile defense or kind of homeland defense systems now since really the dawn of the missile age. And at no point in time have any of those systems been truly impenetrable. So I think there's this question of, are we, as the American public being sold a false bag of goods? Is this something that we can achieve? And on that, I'll only say that the Reagan administration tried – and it didn't necessarily work out. They ended up abandoning the plan because of the costs associated with it. You can do anything if there's enough money, but as we all know, there's only a finite amount of money, even towards defense, that the White House and Congress are to be able to agree on.

What the administration has been saying [about costs] seems to be including just the things that they are adding specific to this program, this Golden Dome program. But in order to do the tracking of missiles, the overhead infrared systems that we've had in place now for decades to detect the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles for nuclear missile defense, those are very expensive. We're actually in the process now of developing and eventually deploying the next generation of those systems.

And the dollar figure on those is eye watering. I don't have the exact figure off the top of my head, but suffice to say that it is an order of magnitude greater than the figure that the administration is putting out there just for the Golden Dome. So it's not just about how much Golden Dome is going to cost, but it's also about how much are all these enabling systems going to cost in order to make that effective.