President Donald Trump has been inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome defense against short-range rockets to build something grander, akin to former President Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” — dubbed “Star Wars” by 1980s critics for its fanciful concept of shooting down incoming missiles with space-based lasers.
In terms of developing a working missile shield, Star Wars was a flop, although it did lead to technologies that helped produce today’s effective battlefield systems and spook the Russians enough to contribute to the United States winning the Cold War.
In the decade between its birth in 1983 and its scrapping by then-President Bill Clinton in 1993, the SDI program ate up $30 billion without any of the systems under development ever coming remotely close to deployment.
“Ronald Reagan wanted to do it long ago, but the technology just wasn’t there, not even close,” Trump said in his March 4 address to Congress. “But now we have the technology. It’s incredible, actually.
“I’m asking Congress to fund a state-of-the-art Golden Dome missile defense shield to protect our homeland, all made in the USA. This is a very dangerous world. We should have it. We want to be protected. And we’re going to protect our citizens like never before.”
Trump’s executive order giving the Pentagon two months to submit an implementation plan for “the next-generation missile defense shield,” was titled “The Iron Dome for America.” But it has since been rebranded as “Golden Dome,” given that Israel’s Iron Dome is an area defense system effective against rockets, artillery, and mortars, not intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the name “Iron Dome” happens to be trademarked by Israel’s Rafael, which builds the short-range system in partnership with Raytheon.
Trump is correct that missile defense technology has greatly advanced in the three decades since Reagan’s Star Wars concept was jettisoned.
“We can hit a bullet with a bullet,” says Tom Karako, who heads up the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s routine. It’s not news anymore. We just have to pick what part of the bullet we want to hit. It’s first appreciating and coming to grips with the nature of the threat and prioritizing it. And that’s why I think this Iron Dome initiative is quite welcome.”
Roughly $200 billion later, the U.S. now has the most advanced missile defenses in the world — ranging from the ground-based interceptors based in Alaska, designed to counter a nuclear attack from North Korea, to the Aegis systems and SM-3 missiles on Navy ships, to the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, and to Patriot batteries, which have proven to be the most effective systems deployed in Ukraine.
Those systems and other related missile defense programs cost about $10 billion annually.
But Trump’s grandiose vision of an impregnable dome protecting the entire continental U.S. from “any foreign aerial attack” is drawing the same derisive epithets missile defense skeptics have been voicing for years — words like “boondoggle,” “pipe dream,” and “pie in the sky.”
“Trump wants an outline of such a system, including warning satellites, space-based sensors, and orbiting interceptors, to detect, track, and destroy any incoming aerial threats by, um, April 1,” writes Mark Thompson, a veteran defense reporter and sharp-tongued blogger for the Project on Government Oversight. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know such a multi-layered system is beyond the reach of mere mortals.”
“The Iron Dome plan to erect a ballistic missile defense across the entire country is an impractical boondoggle that could cost as much as $100 billion annually, i.e., more than 10% of the entire defense budget,” historian and defense analyst Max Boot writes in the Washington Post. Even making allowances for Trump’s trademark hyperbole, a serious problem remains: Despite all the technological developments of the past four decades, building a missile defense shield over our entire country is no more practical today than it was in 1983, Boot concludes.
“President Trump’s vision of an Iron Dome over America is a fantasy,” argues Laura Grego, a senior scientist for the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Invoking Iron Dome is just marketing, trying to manufacture credibility for something that has never worked.
“Russia and China already appear to be building new types of weapons with the purpose of defeating or avoiding missile defenses. Missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for keeping the U.S. safe from nuclear weapons.”
Still the Defense Department, to the cheers of the defense industry, is saluting and stepping out smartly.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth included the Golden Dome among the high-priority programs that he’s shielding from budget cuts as he aims to realign military spending with Trump’s priorities.
“Iron Dome, or Golden Dome, whatever you want to call it, we have embraced the executive order of President Trump,” Hegseth said on Fox News last month. “We’re going to ensure it’s included in reconciliation money, in the FY26 [budget], all our budgets going forward, to invest in the ability to get this novel idea to defend our homeland.”
“Unsurprisingly, defense contractors like what they’re hearing,” Thompson wrote, noting that the day after Trump’s announcement, Chris Calio, chief executive of RTX, parent of Raytheon, the Pentagon’s second-biggest contractor, was all in.
“Layered integrated air and missile defense systems are core to us,” Calio said on an earnings call with reporters. “It’s the bedrock of Raytheon, and they are among the best at it. We view this as a significant opportunity for us, something right in our wheelhouse.”
“The critics are too caught up in the hype, instead of focusing on the reality that the U.S. is falling behind on defenses against a new generation of threats including hypersonic cruise missiles,” argued Karako, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The beginning of wisdom is to honor the threat and to acknowledge that you can’t defend everything,” Karako told The Cipher Brief in a March 4 interview. “That’s not possible. There’s just too much stuff. The Iron Dome moniker is really just a metaphor. It’s not a reference to the system made in Israel. … It’s a metaphor for the need to have a degree of protection against a full suite of threats.”
“It’s an umbrella concept,” Karako points out. “It’s not one thing. It’s going out and asking the services, the Missile Defense Agency, all kinds of folks and saying, ‘What can you do? What are the concepts that you can come up with to contribute to fixing this broad problem?’ So, I think that’s all for the good.”
TRACKING WHAT DOGE IS DOING ACROSS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
Thompson, who writes the weekly newsletter The Bunker, is unconvinced, calling Trump’s plans to build “an even Starrier Wars missile shield,” “pie-in-the-sky zany,” and “physically, and fiscally, impossible.”
But that’s the thing about being a skeptic. You go through life either being proven right or pleasantly surprised.
