Trump Announces Plan For Golden Dome, Led By Space Force General

President Donald Trump wants his signature Golden Dome missile defense program to be up and running before the end of his term, he announced in the Oval Office May 20 alongside Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

“I was really looking forward to this day, because this is very important for the success and even survival of our country,” Trump said. “It’s an evil world out there, so this is something that goes a long way towards the survival of this great country.”

Trump has tapped Space Force Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael A. Guetlein to lead the project, which is expected to heavily depend on satellites and other space-based technologies to track and stop incoming fire. Guetlein serves on a key council that oversees requirements for joint acquisition programs and previously ran Space Systems Command, the Space Force’s acquisition arm.

Trump said he wants to finish the project in “less than three years,” a much faster timeline than many analysts believe is needed to develop and field the technology, if Congress opts to fund it.

Golden Dome would become a “state-of-the-art system that will deploy next-generation technologies across the land, sea, and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors,” Trump said. The network aims to protect America from everything from drones to hypersonic weapons and ballistic missiles, threats which the country’s current defenses are too piecemeal, too limited in scope or not advanced enough to eliminate.

Space Force and defense officials have said Golden Dome will be a “system of systems,” rather than one big-ticket project. The most ambitious proposals call for space-based missile interceptors, a technology that has yet to be developed.

“This design for the Golden Dome will integrate with our existing defense capabilities and should be fully operational before the end of my term,” Trump said. “Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space.”

He estimated putting the shield in place would cost about $175 billion—much lower than estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which said the program could cost $831 billion over the next two decades.

The administration will seek a $25 billion down payment on the first phase of Golden Dome in the Republican-led spending package, known as a budget reconciliation bill, advancing on Capitol Hill. Trump, Hegseth, and Guetlein did not offer details on which components may be funded first.

“We’ll have a big phase in very early,” Trump said. “We’re starting immediately.”

The project is reminiscent of former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, announced in 1983. The U.S. spent billions of dollars on the endeavor but never produced the network of antimissile systems Reagan promised would make “nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” Proponents of Golden Dome say technology has advanced since then.

“We will truly be completing the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago, forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland,” Trump said.

But Trump acknowledged his proposal was a highly ambitious, so-called “super technology,” and, in some cases, theoretical.

“There really is no current system,” said Trump, before alluding to the U.S. nuclear arsenal as the nation’s primary current deterrent from attack. “This is something that’s going to be very protective. You can rest assured, there’ll be nothing like this. Nobody else is capable of building it, either.”

In testimony before Congress in March, Guetlein compared Golden Dome to the Manhattan Project. The Space Force’s No. 2 often warns of the new dangers America faces and defends the creation of a separate space-focused service and its niche capabilities.

“Our adversaries have become very capable and very intent on holding the homeland at risk,” Guetlein said. “Our adversaries have been quickly modernizing their nuclear forces, building out ballistic missiles capable of hosting multiple warheads, building out hypersonic missiles capable of attacking the United States within an hour and traveling at 6,000 miles an hour, building cruise missiles that can navigate around our radar and our defenses, building submarines that can sneak up on our shores, and, worse yet, building space weapons.”