Lawfare Archive: The Golden Dome Missile Defense Program

The Lawfare Podcast

This archived episode of the Lawfare Podcast explores the Trump administration's proposed Golden Dome missile defense program, a strategic i

Key takeaways

• The Golden Dome initiative is driven by the escalating global proliferation of sophisticated missile systems, including cruise missiles, hypersonic gliders, and ballistic weapons.
• Missile defense cannot protect everything; strategic prioritization of defended assets is essential due to limited resources.

Main topics

• Golden Dome Missile Defense Program
• U.S. homeland missile threat assessment

Notable quotes

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.

Conclusion

The Golden Dome program represents a pivotal shift in U.S. missile defense strategy, moving from reactive protection against regional

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:09) I'm Sarah Wilrich, intern at Lawfare with an episode from the Lawfare Archive for August 22, 2026. Recent reports have raised concerns about the United States rapidly using up its missile stockpiles amid the war with Iran. Particularly, the U.S.'s supply of Patriot and THAAD anti-ballistic missile systems is running low. Due to limitations on the production of such high-tech systems, a full replenishment of the stockpile could take years. Both Secretary of Defense Hegseth and President Trump have pushed back against this reporting, stating they are not concerned about the stockpiles. For today's archive, I chose an episode from April 11, 2025, in which Daniel Byman spoke with Tom Carrico, director of the Missile Defense Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, about the Trump administration's proposed Golden Dome Missile Defense Plan. They discussed what it is, what success could look like, whether the U.S. could feasibly execute such a plan, and more. Speaker 3 (1:11) It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Daniel Byman, the foreign policy editor of Lawfare. And I'm here today with Tom Carrico, who is the director of the Missile Defense Project at CSIS. Speaker 2 (1:24) You've seen the Russian kind of proliferation of cruise 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 a pen to paper and you think it through. Speaker 3 (1:44) 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. Speaker 2 (2:23) Well, look, I think fundamentally, as it 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 was once perhaps seen as a boutique threat. has very much now become weapons of choice. And we've seen this in spades in 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 of years. And you've also seen a real, I would say, stepping out and a demonstration of the technical prowess of active air and missile defense. Ukraine has put the Patriot air defense system on its currency because of the significance of its preserving Ukraine's sovereignty to date. Air and 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. We 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 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 in the 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 the, 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 emphatically not about the Iron Dome product made by Rafael. 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 that 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. Speaker 3 (5:55) 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? Speaker 2 (6:12) Yeah, well, I think it is important to emphasize that, you know, 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 in 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