The U.S. has very few options right now to protect the homeland against 21st-century missile attacks, a key senator said Monday, as urgency builds to get President Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile shield operational by 2028.
Speaking at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference just outside Washington, Sen. Deb Fischer said the nation’s current missile defense systems are simply “not good enough” in a world where adversaries such as China and Russia are making massive leaps forward in their own offensive missile attack capabilities.
“Right now we aren’t defended, so that’s not good enough,” said Ms. Fischer, Nebraska Republican and chair of the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.
“Sure, we can defend against a massive strategic attack on this country. We can deter it. That’s our defense. We can deter it, and that’s through mutually assured extinction,” she said, referring to the mutually assured destruction doctrine in which the assumed U.S. response to a major nuclear weapons attack would be to launch similarly destructive attacks of its own against an adversary.
“That’s not good enough,” Ms. Fischer said at the conference, sponsored and hosted by the Air and Space Forces Association and held at Maryland’s National Harbor. “We need to present our president with options and we need to be able to defend the homeland … So we don’t get into a situation where we are looking at massive destruction.”
The Golden Dome missile shield aims to change the equation of modern missile defense and give Mr. Trump and military commanders new options to defeat hypersonic, ballistic and other missile threats targeting the U.S.
The administration’s Golden Dome director, Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, told an audience at the conference Monday that the project is on track to “deliver an operational capability by the summer of 2028.”
“We have space-based interceptors on contract. We have command-and-control on contract. We have radars on contract. We have some munitions on contract,” Gen. Guetlein said during panel discussion alongside Ms. Fischer, on stage at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference.
Gen. Guetlein also reiterated that the U.S. military has carried out two secretive tests of the multibillion-dollar missile defense shield, incorporating new technologies and artificial intelligence.
The Trump administration argues that the Golden Dome is necessary because Russia, China and other actors are making huge investments in their ballistic and hypersonic weapons programs. The U.S. currently lacks a full missile shield protecting the entire country. There are growing fears that adversaries could exploit those defensive gaps as their missile technology improves.
The specific architecture of Golden Dome is classified and its funding has been a continuous point of contention between lawmakers and the Pentagon. Space-based missile interceptors are a crucial component of the planned system, but are also widely expected to be the most expensive piece of the Golden Dome.
A May report from the Congressional Budget Office estimated the missile shield could cost as much as $1.2 trillion over 20 years, though the study makes clear that the estimate is not based on “a specific administration proposal.” The White House initially estimated that the entire Golden Dome project would cost $175 billion over three years.
That number has increased by $10 billion publicly this year. Gen. Guetlein recently said that the price tag has now risen to roughly $185 billion, with the additional $10 billion to be spent on space-based systems.
Still, Ms. Fischer said questions remain about the system’s specifics and its cost. The senator said “there’s not a clear understanding of this layered defense we’re looking at when it comes to defending our homeland,” suggesting that even members of Congress don’t yet have a full understanding of the layered Golden Dome defense system, including the space-based interceptor piece.
There are also growing fears that money meant for the Golden Dome could be redirected to other military needs, such as replenishing munitions stockpiles drained by the U.S. war against Iran.
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