President Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense project officially has a new team lead and gained potentially another $13 billion, setting the effort on a race to hit its ambitious three-year timeline.
The office will be led by Vice Chief of Space Operations Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, unanimously confirmed by the Senate on Thursday as the first Golden Dome for America Direct Reporting Program Manager, according to a Pentagon statement released Tuesday.
Guetlein, who Trump named as the Golden Dome lead in May, will be “responsible for developing the Golden Dome portfolio of capabilities,” and report directly to Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg.
“Golden Dome for America requires a whole-of-nation response to deter and, if necessary, to defeat attacks against the United States,” the Pentagon said in the release. “We have the technological foundation, national talent, and decisive leadership to advance our nation’s defenses. We are proud to stand behind Gen. Mike Guetlein as he takes the helm of this national imperative.”
Intended to protect the skies over the continental United States, Golden Dome promises a network of space-based missiles launched from satellites to intercept missiles launched from the ground, an expensive, untested technology.
The Trump administration has insisted the project is necessary to protect against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks and will only cost $175 billion.
To fund the effort, $24.4 billion was included for the project in the One Big, Beautiful Bill, signed by Trump on July 4.
Then on July 17, the House voted to pass the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, which includes roughly $13 billion for advanced initiatives to support Golden Dome.
But the purported price tag, also announced by Trump in May, is far below estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, which pegged the figure at more than $500 billion over 20 years to develop. Other estimates have placed the cost at $1 trillion.
What’s more, missile defense experts highly doubt a Golden Dome system as Tump has described can be created in under three years.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) last month called out “the physics” of Golden Dome, pressing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to seek out viability analysis from scientists instead of defense and space firms.
“This idea, you know, might not be fully baked,” Kelly, an engineer by trade, told Hegseth during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on June 18.
“You’ve got to go back and take a look at this. . . . You could go down a road here and spend hundreds of billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money, get to the end, and we have a system that is not functional,” Kelly added.
In its statement, the Pentagon said Golden Dome would establish partnerships with industry, academia, national labs and other government agencies to rapidly develop and field the system, with an architecture to be developed within the next 60 days.
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