The Pentagon’s baseline estimate of the cost to build the “Golden Dome” has grown by about $10 billion, according to the military general selected to lead the department’s project.
Golden Dome Director Gen. Michael Guetlein said on Tuesday that the baseline will be roughly $185 billion, up from $175 billion, a figure President Donald Trump announced about a year ago.
“We were asked to procure some additional space capabilities, so we are at $185 billion for the objective architecture,” Guetlein said at the McAleese Defense Programs conference on Tuesday.
He also said that Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), and Northrop Grumman have joined six other firms selected to procure the equipment and technology needed for the Golden Dome.
The Pentagon and Trump administration’s vision for the Golden Dome is a multilayered network of sensors, satellites, and interceptors — both ground and space-based — designed to protect the United States from a wide array of missile threats.
Guetlein noted that the new $10 billion addition still pales in comparison to some long-term projections from outside experts, and he argued that “they’re not estimating what I’m building.”
He indicated that three specific programs would benefit from the increased funding: the Advanced Missile Tracking Initiative, a space data network, and the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor, which is a space-based sensor system designed to track hypersonic and ballistic missiles.
“It is not the technology, it’s the scalability of the affordability,” Guetlein added. “Can we scale those solutions fast enough and affordable enough to be effective against the threat? [That] is really where the challenge is going to be.”
Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of U.S. Northern Command, which oversees the U.S. and Greenland, said on Tuesday that the most important aspect of the Golden Dome is the domain awareness layer, which would identify any incoming threat.
HEAD OF GOLDEN DOME OFFICE STRESSES THREATS POSED BY CHINA AND RUSSIA
“The most important layer is the domain awareness layer, because regardless of how sophisticated and capable the interceptors are, if that threat is not first detected, tracked, and queued to those interceptors, we have no chance of hitting them,” Guillot said during a hearing in front of the House Armed Services Committee.
Trump initiated the Golden Dome project in the early days of his second term via executive order, though some specific details remain unspecified.
