Defense Department officials will soon brief President Donald Trump on a variety of options for him to fulfill his pledge to protect the United States with something modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense, according to U.S. officials and experts familiar with the initiative.
Like former President Ronald Reagan’s push for the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was proposed to protect the U.S. from Soviet nuclear missiles, Trump’s call for an “Iron Dome for America,” more often referred to as Golden Dome, is a signature endeavor that could sew together multiple air defense systems with the idea of keeping the country and perhaps eventually American assets around the world safe.
The Strategic Defense Initiative, which has come to be known by its mocking nickname, “Star Wars,” was never operational, and it was all but canceled years after Reagan left office. Trump’s plan is seen as more realistic than SDI was, given technological advances since the 1980s, but the biggest vision the administration is contemplating — including stopping nuclear missiles fired from another continent — would most likely be extremely expensive and take years.
The intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles Reagan wanted to protect against can now be stopped to some extent, at least in theory. Israel’s Iron Dome has largely been seen as successful in its job warding off small rocket and artillery attacks. It has a clearer and easier task than any U.S. system would, however — a country less than 1% as large as the United States to protect from enemies next to it, rather than oceans away. Trump’s Golden Dome would most likely be a patchwork of systems that would need to stop a wide variety of threats, including cruise missiles fired from ships off the coast, ballistic missiles launched from countries such as Russia or China, attacks from drones inside the continental U.S. and state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles that can travel hundreds of miles in a single minute.
Some elements of Golden Dome would involve simply repurposing existing parts of the U.S. arsenal, such as surface-to-air defenses, destroyers and fighter jets. Smaller-scale moves like those could be completed in months or even weeks in some cases, officials said. But depending on the option Trump chooses, the U.S. might find itself spending hundreds of billions of dollars to develop new technologies that would become part of the defense system years down the road.
Trump’s executive order required the Pentagon to come up with an initial blueprint for Iron Dome for America by mid-April, and those plans are what will be briefed to him in the coming days. His order also requires that at least some elements of the initiative be operational by the end of next year.
Getting much of Golden Dome in place by the end of next year would be unrealistic, said Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy admiral who is now a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank in Washington generally seen as aligned with neoconservatives, who hopes Trump will go ahead regardless.
“I’m glad President Trump came up with this idea,” Montgomery said. “I hope he has the patience and the vision to recognize the importance of a long-term solution that really does define America, but it probably won’t really come into being until he’s out of office.”
Montgomery said he believes that the failure of past administrations to establish a sufficient air defense system for the homeland has brought the U.S. to this moment and that solving it will take more like five to seven years, not one.
Trump is expected to receive a briefing within days from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials about essentially three plans, or what people in national security circles refer to as “Goldilocks options”: small, medium and large, each with its own timeline and price tag, according to an administration official and a military official and another person familiar with the plans. Hegseth received the options from U.S. Space Command last week, according to Space Command.
The most modest plan could be assembled rather quickly and cost about $10 billion, the middle option would cost less than $100 billion, and the largest option would cost several hundred billion dollars, those officials and the person familiar the plans said.
Hegseth has not settled on one option, the officials said. The undersecretary for defense for research and development, James Mazol, is leading the effort at the Pentagon, said Montgomery, who has been in close contact with officials about the initiative.
The short term and the long term
While it is not clear exactly which options will be presented to Trump, officials identified a number of potential approaches at each level.
The U.S. could install some systems already in its inventory, like Patriot missile batteries, within the next year. The Pentagon could also move some Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, anti-ballistic missile defense systems into positions where they could intercept incoming missiles, the same officials said. The Army maintains THAAD batteries in the U.S. for training that could be moved to strategic locations and used to monitor any missile launches, they said.
Other things that could be done relatively quickly could include moving around or shoring up existing missile defense systems, for example assigning Navy destroyers equipped with Aegis combat systems to patrol off the U.S. coast as a mobile missile defense system, as America has done for other countries, like Israel, the officials said. Aegis ships can use advanced radar and interceptors to take out incoming missiles, but those capabilities are extremely limited in range and what kind of attacks they can counter, Montgomery said.
The U.S. could also assign F-35 stealth strike fighters to essentially fly combat air patrols over the country, the officials said.
The Trump administration could make other moves that would take longer. Those could include adding more Patriot missile defense systems to the continental U.S. for missile and drone defense and building sites in the country for Aegis missile defense systems similar to the land-based Aegis systems it has placed in Poland and Romania.
The longer-term options could also include creating a much larger network of space-based interceptors that can take out missiles soon after they are launched, when they are in what is known as the boost phase. Such a network could take years to complete and field, the officials said. A goal under that plan would also be to develop and deploy a Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, which is essentially a network of communication satellites.
One of the most pressing threats to contend with is what is known as a fractional orbital bombardment system, which puts a warhead in orbit around the Earth and then drops it out of space onto a target quickly. China is already ahead of the U.S., having tested such a system in 2021 with a hypersonic glide vehicle.
The military is working with commercial industry to realize different potential components of Golden Dome, and the Missile Defense Agency and the Space Force are expected to have a summit in coming months to host industry officials.
