August 2026
Karako was asked to explain the Golden Dome missile defense effort to people outside the missile defense community. Rather than sell it as a shield, he sets a deliberately modest claim for it: not a war-winner, just something whose absence is fatal. Two turns later he goes further and says missile defense will be a limited, scarce asset like every other weapon system, and that you cannot defend everything.
Transcript
You've seen the Russian kind of proliferation of crews and hypersonic and yes, undersea, you know, megaton delivery devices. It's going to be wicked hard to get everything. And that's why I think it is far more stabilizing than destabilizing when you put pen to paper and you think it through.
Today we're talking about the Trump administration's Golden Dome Missile Defense Programs. So we're going to talk today about the changes or possible changes in U.S. missile defense. And I want you to start really by educating us. On January 27th, President Trump issued an executive order entitled An Iron Dome for America. It's since come to be called the Golden Dome effort. And for those of us who are outside the missile defense community, can you give us a description of what Golden Dome is, why it's happening now, the cost and purpose, and just make us smart, please.
Well, look, I think fundamentally, as I kind of said at the outset of the January 27 executive order, this is driven by a particular problem set, a particular threat set, and that is the very considerable proliferation and expansion of missile threat capabilities globally. This, what was once, you know, perhaps seen as a boutique threat, has very much now become weapons of choice. And we've seen this in spades and the Ukraine conflict over the past three years. And likewise, we've seen it in the number of very sophisticated air and missile attacks on Israel, for instance, over the past couple years. And you've also seen a real, I would say, stepping out and a demonstration of the technical prowess of active air missile defense. You know, Ukraine has put the Patriot air defense system on its currency because of the significance of its to kind of preserving Ukraine's sovereignty to date. Air missile defense is not going to win a conflict for you by itself, but its absence will lose one for you pretty quick in this environment. One can just imagine what would have happened in terms of, for instance, Israel's response on April 14 of last year when hundreds and hundreds of things were coming in simultaneously. If it had not been for the engagement of so many hundreds of those things, both in the air and with ballistic missile defense, it would almost certainly have meant a massive response by Israel to Iran. And so the executive order kind of recognizes that very significant missile threat and says, hey, we've got to do something about this, especially for the homeland. And it's very much attentive to the U.S. homeland, especially, but not only CONUS, continental United States, as opposed to, say, force protection abroad, things like that. And so that's, I think, the fundamental impulse here. You know, the title Iron Dome for America plays off of the executive order. It plays off what is perhaps the best publicly, you know, popularly known missile defense system, the lowest layer of Israel's multi-layered defense. But it's definitely and emphatically not about the Iron Dome product made by Raphael. It is going to be about a very different threat set and a very different set of capabilities. Some of those things we're going to kind of draw on what's already in existence today. And yes, it's also going to be about new. Capabilities, new domain basing, things like that. But it'll be a mix, and it's going to have to be a mix because just in the same way that Israel has a multi-layered system, there is a multiplicity of threats. UAVs, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, various things, hypersonic gliders, and the like. And all of those are, they're threats that are here. They have arrived. And those are things we have to be contended with to provide some degree of protection for the American people, for critical infrastructure, and the like. And so that's kind of the problems that it's to deal with. It is a very wicked, hard problem. And this is not to say that the Golden Dome effort aspires to catch everything, but rather to have, as I said, a degree of protection for certain things against, I would say, this full spectrum of threats.
When we talk about these systems, my impression is the cost can vary considerably depending on what you're trying to achieve. Can you talk us through what some of the estimates are, both for the near term, but also as we think of this as, you know, five years out, 10 years out, what this might end up costing?
Yeah, well, I think it is important to emphasize that every weapon system in DOD is limited, every one of them, and missile defense will be a limited, scarce asset as well. It's not going to be unlimited. I think that's something that somehow gets in the conversation on the water and needs to be disabused. The threat is very robust. And so I think that's the beginning of wisdom, is the recognition that you can't defend everything, especially in terms of non-ballistic maneuvering threats. You can't defend everything. You have to pick and choose in terms of what is your defended asset list. So that's sort of the beginning of wisdom. And so therefore, it's hard to cost or throw out numbers because we don't yet know what the architecture is exactly. We don't yet know how many threats are going to be baked in in terms of, okay, we're going to defend against 100 cruise missiles or 500 cruise missiles. So in other words, it's hard to cost what it is when we don't yet have an it and a scale for it. Now, don't worry, the CSIS missile defense project will be costing the bejesus out of this once we get the architecture and some numbers. But what I would say is based on various atmospherics and things, for instance, in Congress and otherwise, I would not be terribly surprised if you're looking at perhaps a $10 billion a year increase. And I tell you, we've put out various studies, including one on, for instance, homeland cruise missile defense. And we built an architecture. We costed it conservatively. And it was a couple billion dollars a year of funding to be able to provide cruise and air missile defense for, I think it was five areas of the country. And so an extra $10 billion, I would say, is going to go fast, even if you are constrained and conservative in terms of what you're trying to defend and against how many things you're trying to defend. Again, the threat gets a vote. It has arrived in spades in terms of air and missile strike capability. You're also almost certainly going to see, because it was there in the executive order, more space sensors, which is critically, critically important for tracking, especially hypersonic gliders and the like. And yes, you're probably going to see a significant research and development effort on the space-based interceptor front. We're recording on April 4th. There was a request for information, an RFI that dropped today for an industry day on space-based interceptors specifically that will be held at the end at the end of the month, April 30th. So that's coming. It's coming because it was directed in the executive order. Space-based interceptors is useful if you can do it to kill especially ballistic missiles in their boost phase. But it's hard. All of this missile defense is hard. As I like to say, we have demonstrated positively and definitively that you can't hit a bullet with a bullet. In fact, we can hit a bullet in a very specific place with another bullet. The precision guidance of Hit to Kill has come so far and again demonstrated in real life with every single missile defense system of ourselves and the Israelis has been used successfully in combat over the past five years and actually just over the past two years. Thad, Patriot, you name it, Aegis has been used successfully against especially Iranian missiles, for instance, and also Russian, of course, in Ukraine. So you're going to see some of the more of the same, but you're also going to see, I predict, a lot of new stuff.
So let's talk a little bit more about the threat. I at least was surprised in some ways by the effectiveness of missile defense against what Iran threw at Israel and also impressed by what's been happening with Ukraine when they, when at least when the systems have been in place. That said, China's a different adversary and it has impressive capabilities. It has lots of systems and it's going to get better. So could you describe how China might use hypersonics, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles in an all-out conflict and what some of the problems would be for the United States in these circumstances?
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