One thing that’s evident about President Donald Trump’s proposal for the Golden Dome missile defense shield is that designing, deploying, and sustaining it will cost a lot of money, at least several hundred billion dollars, over the course of several decades.
Beyond that, it’s really anyone’s guess. That doesn’t sit well with some lawmakers, but the Republican-controlled Congress committed $25 billion in July as a down payment for new missile-defense technologies.
The White House stated in May that Golden Dome will cost $175 billion over three years, but a new study from a center-right think tank concludes that it is simply not enough to develop the kind of multi-layer shield Trump described in a January executive order. It’s also clear that it will take longer than three years to implement the full spectrum of defense capability envisioned for Golden Dome.