HUNTSVILLE, Alabama — The head of President Trump’s ambitious Golden Dome for America project said Tuesday that the military has already carried out two secretive tests of the multibillion-dollar missile defense shield, with new technologies and artificial intelligence being incorporated into the developing system.
U.S. Space Force Gen. Michael A. Guetlein told an audience at the Space & Missile Defense Symposium here that the tests were promising, though he would not discuss details. He said the Golden Dome system — designed to protect the entire continental U.S. from missile threats — is on schedule and expected to be functional by 2028.
“We’ve had two tests. We can’t talk about those tests, but those tests were phenomenally successful, and they demonstrated that the capabilities that we are putting together — both command and control, our sensor network and our effectors — are going to be effective against the threats as they are currently designed,” Gen. Guetlein said in a keynote address to the conference on Tuesday.
One of the tests, he said, was conducted at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in June. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also hailed that test as a “full mission success.”
Gen. Guetlein described it as “the most complex test, with the most threats in the air” in the history of the testing range. He did not give details on whether the tests involved space-based aspects of Golden Dome.
Despite the assumed success of the system so far, there is palpable concern over the project’s future funding.
Lt. Gen. Brian W. Gibson, the vice director of Golden Dome and Gen. Guetlein’s right-hand officer, said in an exclusive interview with Threat Status at The Washington Times that the Pentagon is tracking every Golden Dome dollar that comes from Congress.
“Gen. Guetlein is laser focused on, if things are not affordable and scalable, we are not going to do it,” Gen. Gibson said. “We take it serious, from Congress, the amount of money that they are investing in this effort.”
Gen. Guetlein was more blunt in his assessment of the funding question.
“We’ve got to figure out as a nation a different way of funding Golden Dome, at least through 2027,” he said.
Most of the Golden Dome money is part of reconciliation, a funding vehicle in Congress that is becoming broadly unpopular on both sides of the aisle.
“If they don’t figure it out, there is no Golden Dome, because there is no funding,” Gen. Guetlein said.
Assessing the cost
The Trump administration argues that the Golden Dome is necessary because China, Russia and other actors are making huge investments in their ballistic and hypersonic weapons programs, and the U.S. currently lacks a full missile shield protecting the entire country. There are growing fears that those defensive gaps could be exploited as adversaries’ missile technology improves.
The specific architecture of the Golden Dome is classified, and its funding has been a continuous point of contention between lawmakers and the Pentagon.
A May report from the Congressional Budget Office estimated the missile shield could cost as much as $1.2 trillion over 20 years, though the study makes clear that the estimate is not based on “a specific administration proposal.” The White House initially estimated that the entire Golden Dome project would cost $175 billion over three years.
That number has increased by $10 billion publicly this year. In his address Tuesday, Gen. Guetlein reiterated that the price tag is roughly $185 billion, with the additional $10 billion to be spent on space-based systems, which is the most complex and ambitious part of the project.
The defense contractors at the Huntsville symposium are acquainted with those numbers. Many of the nation’s largest defense companies are already working on major Golden Dome contracts and will play an outsized role in standing up the system.
“I do believe as a nation that we’re going to figure this out,” Gen. Guetlein said. “But it is a challenging budget environment. Talk to your representatives. Please let them know your thoughts. It is a tough situation that we find ourselves in.”
Industry and congressional sources have told Threat Status that Golden Dome money could be threatened if the Pentagon redirects some of those funds to replenish stockpiles of munitions being used in the U.S.-Iran and Russia-Ukraine wars.
But the Golden Dome is designed to be independent of many of the systems being used in those conflicts, officials said.
Gen. Gibson told Threat Status that the project is meant to “fundamentally give us a different approach for years in the future.” He said the Golden Dome is trying to diversify how it solves problems so the U.S. doesn’t find itself in a position where “the only kit you have is the kit for the away game,” meaning the country can’t rely heavily on the same sets of interceptors and other capabilities currently used in foreign conflicts for America’s homeland missile defense.
Many of the current Golden Dome price estimates have relied on taking current weapon systems’ costs and showing how many of them would be needed to achieve the Golden Dome program’s ambitious goals. Equipment such as Patriot missile batteries or the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) weapon, specifically designed to defeat the types of ballistic missiles being fired by Iran and others, aren’t the cornerstones of the Golden Dome.
“This isn’t about putting a bunch of Patriot batteries and THAAD batteries around major United States cities, or Aegis destroyers off our coast,” Gen. Gibson said. “We could, absolutely — based off the threat, we could do that today — but our approach is not that.”
Those existing systems are at the center of current controversy in Washington. About 86% of the Trump administration’s budget requests for missile interceptor funds are part of reconciliation, according to an exclusive data analysis created for Threat Status by Obviant, a Virginia-based artificial intelligence data analytics firm.
New technologies might help drive down costs and improve U.S. missile defense capabilities. Artificial intelligence is a major aspect of Golden Dome and one that shows great promise, Gen. Guetlein said.
“The combination of advanced processing and artificial intelligence together gives us a significant increase in capabilities,” he said.
The development of advanced technologies such as AI for missile defense and the speed at which U.S. companies are able to develop them will continue as a major theme at the Space & Missile Defense Symposium here.
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