The highly-touted “Golden Dome” air and missile defense system, unveiled earlier this year by President Donald Trump to protect America’s cities and modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome, entered a new phase last month as the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) began soliciting proposals from industry. The MDA opened the bidding for a multiple-award “Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense” (SHIELD) contract.
Although President Trump called for the Golden Dome to be completed in three years, industry insiders have called that unrealistic, which could explain why MDA’s award is centered around a 10-year, $151 billion initiative that would include far more than just ground-based air defense systems. Current plans call for SHIELD to include a network of interceptor systems, satellites, ground-based radar, and other sensors.
Deadline Pushed
Industry proposals were due on Friday, but due to “considerable interest” in the indefinite-delivery contract, the deadline was pushed to October 16. According to an October 2 memo from the MDA, the agency received more than 1,500 questions from industry as part of the “considerable interest” that the solicitation had generated.
“The questions received were primarily focused on requests for clarification based on individual company interests/situations and resulted in very few updates to the solicitation,” Mark Wright, a Missile Defense Agency spokesman, told Defense One. “The extension is predominantly due to the sheer volume of answers for industry to review and not the updates to the solicitation.”
The program has already earned comparisons to the famed Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb during the Second World War, as it is intended to protect the entire continental United States with a multilayer defense network.
A Star Wars Reboot?
Golden Dome has evoked memories of the planned missile defense system conceived by President Ronald Reagan as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). This initiative called for space-based missile interceptors to counter missiles and other airborne threats from America’s adversaries, which at the time were mainly the Soviet Union. That program, which earned the nickname “Star Wars” in honor of the popular science fiction franchise, never got off the drawing board due to costs and even physical limitations.
President Trump has earmarked $25 billion for the program. However, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) previously estimated that developing a truly comprehensive missile defense system will cost far more than the $175 billion pledged and will require over $500 billion over the next two decades. Other analysts have suggested it could even cost nearly $2.5 trillion just for the Iron Dome-style ground-based batteries. That figure doesn’t include any space-based interceptors, which could cost hundreds of billions more.
Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a report in September that depending on the scope of the Golden Dome project, it could cost anywhere between $252 billion on the low end to upwards of $3.6 trillion to protect against the “full range of aerial threats posed by peer and near-peer adversaries,” and warned, “even then, it would short of the ‘100 percent’ effectiveness claimed.
Harrison further suggested that the $175 billion version touted by the White House wouldn’t likely be capable of countering the more capable missiles in the current arsenals of China and Russia.
It is also unlikely that any defense system could keep pace with more advanced missiles. Such efforts result in arms races, with both sides attempting to counter the other.
Arms Race with Adversaries
Yet, military leaders and industry insiders have argued that the United States shouldn’t consider itself safe from missile and drone attacks. The oceans that once protected America during the wars in Europe and the Pacific are meaningless.
“The conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine should teach us that the use of ballistic and hypersonic weapons is no longer off the table with our adversaries, and things like low-end drone attacks have become a regular part of a nation’s military strategy,” said Johnathon Caldwell, vice president and general manager for strategic and missile defense systems at Lockheed Martin, during a panel at the recent Space and Missile Defense Symposium, organized by the National Defense Industrial Association’s Tennessee Valley Chapter.
Earlier this month, China deployed prototypes of a missile defense system that is similar to the proposed Golden Dome. It calls for leveraging sensors in space, the ocean, the air, and on the ground to identify and analyze potential threats in real time, track flight trajectories, determine weapon types, and ascertain whether the missiles are active “warheads” or decoys.
It is unclear how far along China’s missile defense system is, or when it could be fielded.
