The eye-popping $1.2 trillion cost estimate for the proposed Golden Dome missile shield is deeply flawed because it focuses on past missile defense capabilities and does not account for massive leaps forward in technology that will drive the price down, the Trump administration’s point man for the project said Thursday.
Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, the Space Force’s vice chief of space operations and the top decision-maker on the Golden Dome, pushed back against the Congressional Budget Office report released this week, which said the ambitious missile shield could cost $1.2 trillion over 20 years.
Gen. Guetlein has previously said the Golden Dome — which aims to protect the continental U.S. from potential ballistic and hypersonic missile attacks from adversaries such as China or Russia — would cost about $185 billion over three years. President Trump wants it operational by 2028.
Gen. Guetlein told an audience at the “Inside the Dome” event in Washington that the CBO did not analyze the project correctly.
“They’re not estimating what we’re building,” he said, according to the digital media platform Payload, one of the organizers of Thursday’s event.
“You can’t just take what we’ve done in the past and multiply it forward, or you’re going to get large numbers like what CBO got,” Gen. Guetlein said.
The general also said the CBO did not ask his office for additional information about the program’s potential costs. Gen. Guetlein said the price tag is a key consideration as he makes decisions.
“If I cannot do something affordably and scalably, it doesn’t make sense as a nation to go after it because I cannot bankrupt the nation,” he said. “That’s a signal to industry that we have to simplify the solution. …How can I get after this threat in this domain affordably and scalably? It requires you to think differently about the problem.”
The CBO study assumed four layers of missile interception: One in space, two wide-area layers on the ground, and separate, smaller regional sector layers that could add extra protection for cities such as Washington, or for highly valuable military facilities or national infrastructure.
The ground-based layers would likely rely heavily on existing missile defense capabilities, including Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, anti-ballistic missile defense batteries.
A lack of clarity regarding the up-front and long-term costs of space-based missile interceptors seems to be driving disputes about the Golden Dome’s overall price.
The CBO estimated that the space-based component — a 7,800-satellite constellation capable of engaging at least 10 intercontinental ballistic missiles launched simultaneously — would cost $723 billion just to acquire and deploy. Annual operational costs would drive that cost even higher.
The CBO estimated that each space-based interceptor satellite would cost about $22 million. The CBO said the initial 7,800 SBIs would need to be followed by at least another 1,600 SBIs every year because each satellite has only a five-year service life.
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