​​Golden Dome’s Price Tag Will Likely Exceed Half a Trillion Dollars, Space Force Chief Says

The “Golden Dome” homeland missile defense system proposed by President Donald Trump will likely cost more than half a trillion dollars, Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said.

Saltzman’s prediction came during a May 15 POLITICO event when he was asked if he thought the Congressional Budget Office’s $542 billion estimate for the largely space-based air and missile defense system was too high. He said he believed it was not.

“I’m 34 years in this business; I’ve never seen an early estimate that was too high,” Saltzman said. “My gut tells me there’s going to be some additional funding that’s necessary.”

The Space Force is sure to play a key role in the initiative. The massive undertaking involves developing an architecture of satellites in low- and medium-Earth orbit designed to detect, track, and defeat hypersonic missiles and other sophisticated threats from adversaries such as China and Russia.

Golden Dome has been compared to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which was intended to protect the United States from nuclear attack. Dubbed by some as “Star Wars,” the missile defense program ultimately failed because of high costs and technology constraints.

Critics of the effort maintain that the billions of dollars already earmarked for it would be better spent on weapons capable of penetrating China’s formidable defenses.

“To build a system over the entire country would be incredibly hard, and we’re not sure it’s going to work,” said retired NASA astronaut Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who also spoke at POLITICO’s event, adding that the reconciliation package in the White House’s proposed defense spending plan has about “$26 billion in there for Golden Dome that could go toward things like [F-47] or the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which we really need if we want to be competitive in the western Pacific against China.”

Some of Kelly’s Democratic colleagues agree.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) criticized the money proposed for the Golden Dome as “essentially a slush fund at this point” during a Defense Writers Group event May 14.

“They have to identify the technologies,” Reed added. “They have to go ahead and design an integrated plan. From what I’ve heard, it’s more of a warning system than it is a firing system, although they will develop firing units to complement it. But the key now is to identify hypersonics as soon as they launch, so that we can engage them. That’s still a work in progress.”

Saltzman acknowledged that Golden Dome is still in the early stages of planning and will involve overseeing many advanced elements “that you have to stitch together in very technical ways.”

“You don’t buy Golden Dome; you orchestrate a program that includes a lot of programs … it’s a system of systems,” Saltzman said. The U.S military will need to decide “which systems are critical … which ones are affordable, which ones are practical in terms of the technology we can rapidly bring to bear.”

Once a basic plan is drafted, it will be submitted to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to present to the White House, Saltzman said.

“That’s where we are—it’s in that basic planning to say, ‘given the threat scenarios that we think you’re trying to defend against, here are the systems that we think are appropriate, here’s the technology that’s available; here’s our plan how we would proceed,’” he said.

Space-based interceptors—an explicit part of the initiative—are perhaps Golden Dome’s trickiest requirement, and for the Space Force, it “puts us front and center,” Lt. Gen. Shawn N. Bratton, the deputy Chief of Space Operations for strategy, plans, programs, and requirements, said during a May 15 event hosted by AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. He added there was “a lot of overlap” in some elements of Golden Dome with “space superiority” missions that the Space Force was already seeking to pursue.

“The technology to do that, we’ll be able to use that in other areas,” Bratton said. “That’s a tough problem to solve, but we’re going to figure it out.”

As the Space Force works out its role in Golden Dome, Saltzman noted it’s “the nature of the business” to see cost estimates increase in the early stages of complex strategic defense programs as programs move toward real-world fielded systems.

“I think that we don’t always understand the full level of complexity until you’re actually in execution, doing the detailed planning,” Saltzman said. “Space and these kinds of capabilities are exquisite. They are unique in the sense that there’s not a lot of market that would drive the cost down. And so yes, there is sticker shock—but it doesn’t surprise me.”

Pentagon Editor Chris Gordon contributed reporting.