Reflections on Trump’s Golden Dome Announcement: Revolutionary or Not?

In the late afternoon of May 21st, President Trump filled out the budgetary details of his missile defense initiative called the Golden Dome. The idea is to provide a shield against incoming missiles of all types, be they hypersonic or improved mirved nuclear ballistic missiles. If successful, it will be a massive science driver for the economy and lead to presently unknown technological breakthroughs and spinoffs while definitively changing all strategic dynamics away from MAD and toward peace.

Some specialists who have worked in the area questioned whether the 3 year, $175 billion program announced by the President could meet the lofty goals announced above. Brian Lantz, who has studied recent developments concerning the Golden Dome extensively, responded as follows: 

President Trump’s approach has been that in doing a big project - as with what eventually became Riverside South in NYC - that the developer builds the project so that it is continually self-sustaining, financially. Otherwise you get “eaten alive before you ever turn the corner into profit.” 

Trump’s approach to the Golden Dome defense initiative can be thought of as similar to how he would think about a huge multi-billion dollar real estate development in NYC — with all its political and logistical complications!

Here the analogy is not about the dollars and literal profits.  The analogy is in thinking through how to successfully ‘structure‘ an enormous project, and sustaining it through to completion. The financing does enter-in, however, in terms of Congressional appropriations. (At the WH presser President Trump, in response to a question, stated that he had, through discussions, secured congressional support for the whole, eventual $175 billion.) 

Already Under Way

Just to say, the approach to building a layered space-based system (which was mentioned in the remarks at the WH presser) has always been to buildout in superseding “tranches,” each new tranche incorporating more advanced tech and capabilities.  Each new tranche (and tranches) is already under development while the prior one is being launched, and then tested and integrated. A more complex and rich form of iteration. 

This has been on-going — the building of a space-based system integrated with ground-based capabilities — since Trump’s first administration and that process managed to continue under the avatar ‘Biden.’  

This iteration process, of superseding capabilities, brought to bear by both existing and new contractors & start-ups, will continue. However that process does not sum-up neatly for a national press conference where a fixed ‘bottom line’ helps ensure a certain clarity.

“Spiraling” is another term used in conceptualizing this process, across SDA, MDA and private sector vendors in this area.  A Senator at the press conference spoke to the “open architecture” of the project; that is the importance of interoperability, modularity and flexibility. Many new contractors will become part of this project.  (This writer has covered the iterative “tranche” approach in some detail in my Substack series that began in February.  That is available in a series of five posts @brianlantz.substack.com )

There is a continuity between Trump’s creation of the U.S. Space Force and initiation of a layered defense initiative during Trump’s first term, with Mike Griffin’s important role at the Department of Defense, and how that work is being expanded by Trump’s new Golden Dome initiative. 

A New Defense Sector?

The spiraling process is ongoing, across all agencies in this project and Guetlein will be charged with pulling the agencies together and supercharging it.  This is a broad initiative that foreshadows a new defense industry. 

General Michael Guetlein, who will now lead Golden Dome, is clear on his task. He comes from the engineering and acquisition side of the space defense arena (he also actually spent a year assigned to SpaceX over a decade ago) and is tuned-in to an aggressive, outreach approach to the private sector — including small, cutting- edge outfits. 

The upcoming, June 11 Golden Dome pow-wow in Huntsville, being held by the Department of Defense at the Von Braun Center (seating thousands) is to officially bring-in non-traditional contractors with their ideas & unique capabilities.  That give-and-take between the DOD & its agencies with America’s new tech, science and manufacturing firms has been ongoing. It has been officially underway, with official, broadly-advertised requests to the tech community, since the “Golden Dome for America” EO was released on January 27th.     

Trump and Mike Griffin, in the first administration, were already all about bringing in commercial capabilities and know-how — as with SpaceX Starlink tech — into the process. They also fully appreciated the new SpaceX capacity to launch payload at a fraction of prior cost. Also in that period, research was coordinated through NASA.

Consider that $150 billion (beyond the $25 billion in Big Beautiful Bill) is to be spent in the next 2+ years. That expenditure is to deliver the initial Golden Dome system before Trump’s term is up. It is in a very compressed amount of time and therefore supercharged. 

This is a tremendous, sudden new investment into science, manpower and related resources. We don’t know what DOD (and OMB) delivered to President Trump as a plan or set of options, but given the already-existing trajectory of ongoing new work over most a decade, I am pretty sure we can be confident that the derived plan is not some sketchy, one-off effort. 

A Strategic Initiative 

We need to keep in mind that this initiative is also coupled with the US Moon/Mars colonization efforts, and not only coupled through SpaceX and Elon. The Golden Dome requires more than the directly-related LEO capabilities. Emerging tech that allows for capture and updating of satellites in orbit, with that tech overlapping the development of in-space robotic manufacturing, is an area of important common interest. As is the critical development of laser — light speed — communications among assets. 

 How this defense initiative will unfold also has a critical diplomatic dimension, of which President Trump is certainly fully aware.  President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), announced in 1983,  promoted “mutually assured survival.”  President Trump’s Golden Dome could unfold in a way that echoes President Reagan’s strategic approach.  

Trump therefore has more than a single reason to keep cards close to his chest, and negotiations with both Russia and China are among them. Those negotiations will certainly continue to unfold and broaden. 

Russia and China recently released a joint statement denouncing the Gold Dome, with its layered defense and space-based interceptors, as “destabilizing.” Of course, on the other side, they are the folks with deployed hypersonic glide and cruise missiles!  

So how President Trump and team proceeds and unfolds their plans will be premised on more than the science & technology — and what may or may not be ‘top secret’ and currently hidden behind a curtain. 

It is the “Art of the Deal,” both in terms of a domestic alignment of institutions and politics, AND new strategic — potentially Four Power — negotiations. In short, operating from the standpoint of peace through strength.

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