Guetlein dismisses CBO’s Golden Dome cost estimate
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Pentagon official in charge of the Trump administration’s planned multilayered missile defense shield discounted today the Congressional Budget Office’s new cost estimate for the effort.
The CBO in a May 12 report projected Golden Dome “would cost about $1.2 trillion to develop, deploy, and operate for 20 years,” its first comprehensive cost estimate of the initiative. The report noted “details about what and how many systems will be deployed — the ‘objective architecture’ — have not been released, making it impossible to estimate” the cost of what the Pentagon is planning.
The Pentagon previously estimated the initiative would cost $185 billion over the next decade.
Asked at a Thursday event co-hosted by Payload and Tectonic about the gap between the two estimates, Gen. Michael Guetlein, Golden Dome’s program manager, said “they’re not estimating what we’re building. It’s as simple as that.”
“They didn’t come and ask us what we’re building,” Guetlein said of the CBO. He told the audience the agency is “not necessarily wrong, but they take legacy capabilities, they take technology from the two early 2000, 2004 reports, et cetera, and then they just multiply that forward.”
A 2000 CBO report analyzed “a variety of options” for national defense, including missile defense. A 2004 report focused on the “technical, operational, and cost issues” of boost-phase missile defense, or defenses to intercept an incoming missile at the beginning of its flight.
Guetlein said these approaches don’t apply to Golden Dome because it is “a different architecture” than previous missile defense efforts. “You can’t just take what we’ve done in the past and multiply it forward.”
In the May report, CBO estimated that if space-based interceptors are removed from the Golden Dome plan, “the system’s 20-year cost would drop to $448 billion.”
Guetlein last month told members of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee he will not move forward with developing a space-based interceptor layer if it proves to be unaffordable. He repeated this today, saying “if I cannot do something affordably and scalable, it doesn’t make sense as a nation to go after it.”
President Donald Trump has said Golden Dome will be operational before his term ends in early 2029, and Guetlein said the initiative is on schedule.
“What we deliver in the summer of ’28 will be operational,” he said. “It will not be aspirational. It will not be a prototype. It will not be a demonstration. It will be operational capability.”
