Recently, President Trump has announced a plan for an “Golden Shield” to be built in the US, similar to Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system. However, this is entirely impractical, for a number of reasons, from the insane cost of this project, to technologies we don’t have at the moment.
The first part of this plan, and (somehow) the most reasonable, is building a “Golden Shield” over the United States, made up of advanced anti-missile systems, similar to what Israel is using in their “Iron Dome” network, that helps keep cities in Israel mostly free from risk of missiles hitting them. The trump proposal, however, is supposed to protect all of the U.S., unlike Israel’s system that only protects cities. The cost of creating a system like this, that protects the entire United States from missiles, would cost roughly $2,470,000,000,000. That’s about 2.5 trillion dollars, and that doesn’t even cover stuff like RADAR sites to detect the incoming missiles, but just the missile launchers alone. For comparison, the U.S. Military’s budget at the moment is roughly $850 billion, and Trump wants to make the military smaller, which contradicts his plan for this so-called “Golden Shield.”
These missile defense systems, though, aren’t designed to defend the U.S. from what Trump would like to use them for. The “Iron Dome” is only designed to intercept small missiles and drones, not the much larger, much faster ICBMs that the U.S. would be threatened by, defeating the purpose of building them entirely.
The next, stranger part of the plan, is to create “non-kinetic capabilities to augment the kinetic defeat of ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks.” Simplifying this a bit, Trump would essentially like to create ground and space lasers to defend the U.S. against enemy missiles. This is even stranger than the first part of the plan, since it involves putting weapons in space, something that is both very advanced technologically and would lead to both the U.S.’ allies and enemies having more reason to dislike the United States than they already do. Also, like was already stated, putting weapons in space is a very advanced proposal technologically, since you would have many more problems to solve, and especially so with a much newer weapon like lasers, compared to using missiles or regular bullets.
The space laser program, by itself, would probably cost in the trillions as well, because of how many technologies need to be developed and improved before we could actually use these space lasers, and you would also have to launch these satellites into space, which would cost billions more.
All of these ideas, of building a missile defense system for America and putting weapons in space, echos the Reagan-era program known as the “Strategic Defense Initiative,” or more commonly called Star Wars. The Star Wars program involved using missiles and lasers in space, as well as ground-based defenses, to keep the Soviet Union from attacking us, as well as being able to hit it harder than it could hit us. The entire program was shuttered, much for the same reasons that the current administrations plans to protect the U.S., because it was far too expensive and because all of what they were trying to do was simply too advanced for the time.
The supposed “Golden Shield” is the product of a man who claims to be “Making America great again,” but really doesn’t know what he is doing, and is simply lying and making impossible promises to the American people, and one that doesn’t understand how America’s defense system works.
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https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/the-iron-dome-for-america/
https://www.ucs.org/about/news/us-iron-dome-fantasy
Trump’s Iron Dome for America is ambitious. It also has some serious technology and policy flaws
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