OPINION — “The Golden Dome for America Industry Summit will be held on June 11, 2025 at the Von Braun Center downtown Huntsville, Ala., at the UNCLASSIFIED level…The goal of the Summit is to equip non-traditional and industry partners with the knowledge and understanding of MDA’s [Missile Defense Agency] and Space Force’s role in Golden Dome for America, empowering them to take concrete actions that support and align with government requirements. There will be no planned One-on-One sessions, or panels during the event. Non-Traditional Contractors are highly encouraged to attend as MDA is extremely interested in ‘outside the box’ thinking and we believe that non-traditional contractors are vital to shaping the future of missile defense.”
That was a May 13, MDA announcement to contractors of an industry day to hear more about Trump’s Golden Dome idea for an anti-missile defense for the entire United States.
On May 20, President Trump announced from the Oval Office that he had selected an architecture for the system that “would be fully operational by the end of my term,” meaning January 20, 2029. He added, “We’re probably talking about $175 billion total cost.” That’s an amount and a time frame that most people with experience in relevant agencies believe are totally unrealistic.
Then on May 22, MDA released a pre-solicitation notice to publicize its intent to issue — sometime in June — the first contract proposals related to the Golden Dome architecture. MDA has given the bureaucratic name Scalable Homeland Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) to the overall contracting vehicle to be used by it and other participating Defense Department (DoD) agencies.
MDA explained, “As a long-planned strategy, SHIELD will allow MDA and other DoD entities to rapidly issue orders under one enterprise flexible [contracting] vehicle.”
But perhaps more importantly, these proposed contracts, according to the MDA notice, anticipate “a period of performance of 10 years, which will consist of a base ordering period and one or more optional ordering periods.” In addition, MDA’s pre-solicitation notice said, “The anticipated stated maximum value [of the proposed contracts] is $151 billion. Individual order awards will consist of various contract types.”
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MDA’s statement of work is breathtaking: “The MDA requires an advanced, multi-domain defense system capable of detecting, tracking, intercepting, and neutralizing threats to the United States homeland, its deployed forces, allies, and friends across all phases of flight by ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks.”
It also calls for “continuous, layered protection against air, missile, space, cyber, and hybrid threats originating from any vector – land, sea, air, space, or cyberspace. This effort supports services and supplies of both classified and unclassified programs on multiple security domains.”
Perhaps SHIELD’s most ambitious goal is: “This contract will provide rapid delivery of innovative capabilities to the warfighter with increased speed and agility, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning-enabled applications where pertinent, and maximizing use of digital engineering, open systems architectures, model-based systems engineering, and agile processes in the acquisition, development, fielding, and sustainment of these capabilities.”
It first should be understood that Golden Dome is really a plan to expand on various existing local and regional U.S. missile defense systems which are already deployed, plus new elements currently in development.
What these systems have in common are sensors and interceptors. The sensors must be able to track the target from launch through trajectory to terminal dive. Interceptors must be able to get close enough to destroy targets throughout their boost phase, midcourse, and terminal descent.
Gen. Michael Guetlein, Space Force’s vice chief of operations, who is Trump’s choice to lead the Golden Dome effort, has told Congress that Golden Dome will require unprecedented cooperation among current military anti-missile systems, including ground-based Army Patriot missiles and THAAD interceptors, the Navy AEGIS ship-fired missiles, and the Air Force and Space Force satellites for sensors and space-based weapons.
Earlier, before he was named, Guetlein looked to the future telling a Senate subcommittee, “Investing in maneuverable satellites equipped with state-of-the-art sensors will enhance our ability to detect and track emerging threats, ensuring we can maintain constant awareness of the battle-space, provide timely warnings, and ultimately, deny our adversaries the element of surprise. These capabilities [will] assist to deliver on the President’s Golden Dome for America initiative and highlight the central role space-based capabilities will play in bringing that effort to fruition.”
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Guetlein also raised an interesting, unpublicized issue: One of the biggest needs is the approval to conduct on-orbit testing and training. “It’s a very constrained set of authorities that we have…We would ask that that [on-orbit testing, training] open up so that we can increase our readiness of our forces on the front line to be able to do that protect and defend mission,” he said.
Trump’s Golden Dome plan calls for “development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors (SBIs) capable of boost-phase intercept,” a weapon that does not yet exist.
As many experts have pointed out, SBIs would have to be placed on satellites in low-earth orbit so they could spot the flame/heat from launched missile during the three-to-four minutes of the boost phase that begins a missile’s flight.
Here is the tricky part. Someone or something has to give the order to shoot within a minute or two and your SBI has to be in position to hit the rising missile. Since SBIs are always in motion, you need a parade of SBI-armed satellites to defend against one missile, and twice that many against two, and so on.
Since Golden Dome must consider both Russia and China, plus North Korea as potential missile threats, that means the U.S. could be looking at 10,000 or more SBI satellites for even minimum deterrence.
There was a logical reason why the Reagan administration dropped the idea of its Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), and I believe the SBI element of Trump’s Golden Dome plan may face the same future.
Needless to say just proposing Golden Dome defenses has drawn threats from Moscow and Beijing that their answer may very well be more offensive weapons – and perhaps some of them in space – leading to a whole new arms race – in space.
Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
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