America's Talking - Work Underway on Trump’s Golden Dome, to Be Done Within Four Years

Episode Date: May 25, 2025

(The Center Square) – The Trump administration is moving forward with his Golden Dome missile defense system that is similar to Israel's. The administration has selected an architecture firm for the advanced missile-defense system, and Trump’s "big, beautiful" budget bill before Congress  has allotted $25 billion for its initial construction. President Donald Trump said Tuesday the dome would cost about $175 billion in total and would be completed before the end of his term. “We will have the best system ever built. As you know, we helped Israel with theirs, and it was very successful, and now we have technology that’s even far-advanced from that,” Trump said.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxFull story: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_bb48d379-5c71-4435-82bd-d324ef1b8ec1.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Brett Rowland, investigative reporter for the Center Square. Joining me today is Steve Wilson, who covers the southeast for our team. How are you, Steve? I am doing well. We are recording this on Thursday, May 22nd, and we are going to be talking about President Donald Trump's plans for the Golden Dome. This is a big one, Steve, and I know that you have a lot of knowledge on this topic.

But sort of how did we get here? Have we tried this before? Lay the groundwork for us. So, of course, we develop nuclear weapons. The Soviets, of course, developed nuclear weapons later, a lot of it through espionage. So we realize that we have a problem, and we have to defend the continental United States, and by token, North America, because of no red, North American Defense Command. So that includes Canada.

So what we do is we build this complex called Sage, semi-automop. ground environment. Yes, it's a lot to say. What that was is that would allow all these radar stations to have one tactical picture of what's going on in the airspace. And this thing costs billions of dollars back then. I mean, we're talking in the 50s, so it'd probably be trillions now. And they did this secret test called Operation SkyShield, where they actually grounded all

the airlines, believe it or not. not. So they wouldn't think that the airliners were bombers. But it turns out that the Strategic Air Command, pretending to be the Ruskis, they actually got a lot of their bombers in, and this huge billion-dollar thing didn't really work. So that kind of went by the wayside when they kind of switched to intercontinental ballistic missiles. So we went through these different systems. We had Nike Zeus, which was an attempt to use a a nuclear-tipped surface-to-air missile. Think about it.

You're using a nuke to shoot down a nuke. Not great planning. And then they went to Sentinel. That was the same thing. And then later they did this kind of stripped-down system called Safeguard. And it was just to, because of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, it was designed to protect one field of missile silos in Washington, D.C. that didn't work out either because the House of Representatives scrap bet. And the reason why,

and it's probably going to end up with the Golden Dome as well is cost. I mean, you think about how hard is it to hit a bullet with a bullet, which is what you're going to have to do with a warhead. So how is this system, the one that Trump's envisioning now, the Golden Dome, different from past attempts? I know there's a space component, there's multi-layers on top, and we don't know everything about it yet, right? We've only gotten some basic details.

So how is this one going to be different? And is this more complex than what we've looked at in the past? I would say yes. And right now we do have a limited amount of defense against ballistic missiles. We've, of course, got our Aegis destroyers, which have any ballistic missiles. You have the Army's THAAD system. You have the Army's ground-based mid-course defense, which is another limit. But these are not going to be able to handle a first strike where you've got thousands of warheads coming into the atmosphere about to turn our country into volcanic glass.

So these were more designed for defense against countries like North Korea that have sort of a limited arsenal and limited technology and not for like peers or, you know, USSR, India or China. No. And the other thing is. is like the Russians, the Chinese, they have what are called MIRVs, multi-independent reentering vehicles, which basic reentry vehicles, which are bad because we have limits treaty-wise. But you, so one missile, it's like, boom,

now it's 10 warheads going to 10 different targets. And so that's where things get complex with the intercept. And the thing that I see is a problem, with this. The whole choice of the name, it's based on Iron Dome, which was, of course, the Israeli system designed to protect them from Palestinian rockets

built in people's backyards, literally. This is a wholly different ball of wats. I think it's kind of silly that President Trump is conflating these two things. You're going to have to have space-based interceptors, which are probably, I don't really think we want to put

nukes in space, call me crazy, call me loopy, but I don't think we want to do that. So I think these are going to be what are called hit-to-kill systems where they actually just run into it. But you're talking, do we have the space lift to do it? Do we have enough big rockets to put these things up in orbit, which it's going to have to be a lot? Because if you think 1,200 Mervs in a first strike, you're going to have to have a lot more interceptors than that, because I can tell you from shooting at things in the Coast Guard, you don't always hit what you want. And we're talking, like I said, a bullet with a bullet. You're talking something going Mott 10, and you're trying to shoot at it with something going Mott 10.

That's a lot of computational stuff there. So, Rous Saret, this is a huge thing. It's got many challenges. Trump has given us what I would call an initial price estimate of 175, and he said operational in three years. Any chance of that we're hitting those targets, do you? I would say 0.0, Mr. Blatarski, because there is no way that that thing is going to come in at that price. I think this thing's probably going to be at least $500 billion, maybe even a trillion dollars. I mean, you're talking the whole defense budget.

In the 60s, with the other ABM systems, is the thing that really got them in trouble is they realize, how many of these missiles are we going to stop? what is the acceptable let's say that it kills 75%. You still got 25%. That's not good. There's no way to get up to 100. It's impossible. You could spend infinite dollars and probably never get to 100%.

So it sounds like you're saying we should limit our expectations in terms of what this system will be able to do. Maybe raise our expectations on cost and timeline. Yes, because this is going to take a long time to build. It's going to take a long time to build the infrastructure because you can't just overnight just build some silos and have some interceptor missiles in there. You're going to have to have radars. You're going to have to have space-based sensors. You're going to have to have the space-based interceptors.

And those things, it's not like we've got the space shuttle to do that anymore. Right. Now, CBO has said that the costs for the space portion could come down, but it's still far over what Trump's estimating and the CBO also noted that the system Trump is talking about is so much more complex than what CBO has analyzed in the past that they're going to need to essentially start from scratch. Does that make sense to you? It does because the thing is, if you're going to protect like we're doing now from a limited,

like you mentioned, North Korea, Iran, a missile here, a missile there, maybe even a dozen missiles. That's not undoable. But 1,200, and let's just say they launched 1,200, and let's say they've got five MRVs. You do the per missile. That's, you do the math. That adds up fast. Yeah, the multiplication really, when we get to those levels, then it's, it seems like maybe blunting the effect is the best that we could hope for. Yes, and the thing is, all of these systems, I think, fail on the cost-benefit analysis solely because

with this type of system, you need to at least have 100%. That's like the bare minimum, because nobody wants to see Seattle and Los Angeles turned into volcanic glass. And if 25% or even 10% get through, you got a good chance that them are Salt Lake City or Dallas, Texas, or Kansas City gets turned into a volcanic glass. So we don't want that. But there's not enough money in the defense budget to cover a system that's 100% effective. Well, that's all the time we have today.

But we'll be tracking this story going forward. We'll stay on top of it. Thank you, Steve, for all your insights. Listeners can keep up with these stories and more at thecentersquare.com.