Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) on June 18 expressed skepticism that the wide-ranging Golden Dome missile defense initiative is realistic, and also questioned the wisdom of planned cuts to the Pentagon’s top weapons testing office.
In a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kelly told Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that getting the system to work reliably would be incredibly complicated. “[W]e’re talking about hundreds of [intercontinental ballistic missiles] on simultaneously, varying trajectories,” with “multiple re-entry vehicles, thousands of decoys, hypersonic glide vehicles, all at once. And considering what the future threat might be, might even be more complicated than that.”
Kelly added while the Donald Trump administration is proposing starting by spending $25 billion for Golden Dome in the reconciliation bill, he said the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said this could cost upward of $500 billion while other estimates are closer to $1 trillion.
Last month, President Trump announced some details of the Golden Dome, including that it would have a total cost of $175 billion and be ready only within three years with a nearly 100% success rate.
Given these challenges, Kelly pressed Hegseth on how this might hurt the initiative’s reliability when DoD is cutting most of the staff of the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), the Pentagon’s top weapons testing office.
He asked Hegseth if DOT&E was cut due to its plans to oversee testing of Golden Dome systems.
Hegseth responded, “the concerns were not specific to Golden Dome, it was years and years of delays, unnecessarily, based on redundancies in the decision making process, that the services, COCOMS and the Joint Staff, together with OSD identified as a logjam that was not helping the process.”
The Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars” by headline writers, was a proposed missile defense system that then-President Ronald Reagan announced in 1983. While the Star Wars initiative was never realized, it envisioned a space-based missile defense system most similar to Trump’s Golden Dome that he announced originally as the “Iron Dome for America” in a January executive order.
A May CBO report estimated the costs of the Golden Dome space-based interceptor constellation section alone could range anywhere from $161 billion to $831 billion, depending on its scope.
“I am all for having a system that would work. I am not sure that the physics can get there on this. It’s incredibly complicated,” Kelly, a former astronaut, warned.
This tracks with March statements from former first Trump administration Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin, who argued boost-phase missile defense via space-based interceptors is probably not physically or technically possible, as in under a one percent chance. He said it was not worth spending money on a space-based interceptor constellation that targets a missile’s boost phase.
Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily first published this story.
