Golden Dome chief pushes back on $1.2 trillion CBO estimate

WASHINGTON — Gen. Michael Guetlein on May 14 forcefully rejected a new Congressional Budget Office estimate that President Donald Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile defense initiative could cost $1.2 trillion over 20 years, arguing the analysis relies on outdated assumptions and does not reflect the architecture the Pentagon is actually pursuing.

Guetlein spoke at the “Inside the Dome” conference hosted by Tectonic & Payload.

“They’re not estimating what we’re building,” he said of CBO, repeating a line he has used previously in response to outside cost estimates.

Golden Dome is Trump’s proposed missile defense system intended to integrate ground-, air- and space-based systems against ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missile threats.

The White House has publicly estimated the effort would cost roughly $185 billion. But the CBO report released this week concluded that a system broadly aligned with the president’s January 2025 executive order could cost about $1.2 trillion over two decades, with the bulk of that spending tied to space-based interceptors — thousands of spacecraft in low Earth orbit to maintain continuous missile defense coverage.

Guetlein argued the report extrapolated from older defense acquisition models rather than the emerging commercial space manufacturing and launch systems his office expects to leverage.

“They take legacy capabilities. They take technology from the early 2000s, and then they just multiply that forward by the geography of the homeland,” he said.

Those earlier systems, he said, were designed for regional conflicts and point defense missions, where highly specialized weapons operated independently and prioritized maximum performance regardless of cost.

“That is not what we need for the homeland,” Guetlein said. “We need a regional defense. So it’s a different architecture, and you can’t just take what we’ve done in the past and multiply it forward, or you’re going to get large numbers like CBO.”

He also criticized the process behind the report, saying CBO did not consult his office directly about the architecture under development. Guetlein noted that the Pentagon has disclosed little publicly because of security concerns. “We have not been putting a lot of information out in the public on exactly what we’re doing, because the intelligence threat is so high.”

The administration’s objective is an operational capability by the summer of 2028.

“What the president asked us to do last January was to build a defensive capability, rapidly deploy an actual operational capability, not a prototype, not a demonstration, but an absolutely operational capability,” he said.

A problem of economics

A central theme of Guetlein’s remarks was that Golden Dome hinges less on physics than on economics and industrial scale.

He acknowledged that affordability remains the decisive issue for space-based interceptors and defended previous comments that the Pentagon will abandon the concept if it cannot be produced cheaply enough and at sufficient scale.

“If I cannot do something affordably and scalably, it doesn’t make sense as a nation to go after it, because I cannot bankrupt the nation,” he said.

He contrasted that philosophy with previous generations of missile defense systems that pursued the highest possible performance regardless of expense.

“If you look at the way we’ve pursued capabilities in the past, we’ve had the most exquisite capabilities with the highest probability of mission success,” he said. “But when I put all those requirements on one weapon system, it becomes expensive.”

“The type of architecture CBO priced, that’s not affordable at all,” he added. “So we’re not going to do that.”

Guetlein said he believes newer commercial space business models — including mass production, reusable launch systems and high-volume satellite manufacturing — could fundamentally alter the economics of missile defense.

He pointed to the 20 Other Transaction Authority agreements the Space Force recently signed with 12 companies to develop space-based interceptors as evidence that industry is approaching the problem differently.

“When the president put out the executive order last January, it became clear to the department that the traditional way of doing acquisitions and development requirements was not suitable,” he said.

Guetlein said he has been granted unusually broad authorities over budgeting, contracting, requirements and hiring, reporting directly to the deputy secretary of defense rather than through traditional acquisition channels.

“I’ve met with well over 400 companies one on one already, but I want to harvest the innovation coming out of our industrial base to get after the homeland defense equation,” he said.

“This is not a physics based problem,” Guetlein said. “This is an economics, scalability problem, an organizational behavior and social engineering challenge, not a technical challenge.”

Responding to critics who say space-based interceptors are technically unworkable, Guetlein argued the underlying technologies already exist.

“I say they’re wrong,” he said. “I have proven I can close the fire control loop with an object in space. I have proven over and over, I can re enter an object into the atmosphere. And I prove it over and over, I can maneuver an object once it’s in the atmosphere.”

Still, he acknowledged the Pentagon has not yet demonstrated all those capabilities together in a single operational interceptor architecture or shown they can be deployed affordably.

“I know it’s physically possible,” he told the audience. “I’ve seen what our industrial base can do when I give you a long term demand signal, when I resource you and I get out of your way.”

Guetlein also described an emerging dynamic between established defense contractors and newer entrants in the interceptor competition.

“The new entrants are coming in, they don’t have the scar tissue to understand why some things are the way they are,” he said, while established primes are beginning to share lessons learned.

GOP lawmakers attack CBO

Following Guetlein’s appearance, Republican lawmakers sharply criticized the CBO report.

CBO is a nonpartisan agency established by Congress to provide impartial analysis on budgetary and economic issues. But Rep. Mark Messmer (R-Ind.) said the estimate “reeked of political bias.”

Rep. Jeff Crank (R-Colo.) similarly criticized CBO for “scoring the executive order” rather than an actual proposed architecture. “It’s very unfortunate that it came out,” Crank said, adding that opponents of the program will likely use the report to weaken the administration’s push for Golden Dome.