“There’s no doubt that whatever it’s going to be called, it won’t be called Golden Dome, and there will definitely be machinations in the system, but it won’t be a ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’ approach,” Taylor said. “Given the risk profile, I don’t see that happening.”
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President Donald Trump speaks alongside Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in the Oval Office at the White House on May 20, 2025, in Washington, DC.
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In a Senate hearing in September, Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, proposed the idea of a name change as one option to “depoliticize” the missile defense issue.
“It is no secret that the ‘Golden Dome’ moniker has contributed to political polarization around the effort,” Karako said in his testimony. “Several options exist to depolarize and depoliticize the effort. It belongs to Congress to name or rename executive departments—witness the pending proposal to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War. Congress likewise has legislative power to rename the Golden Dome initiative in a future national defense authorization act.”
“There are things in the program that make sense,” said Sen. Kelly, who serves on the Senate Subcommittee for Strategic Forces. These include new capabilities for “detecting launches,” he said. “The Space-Based Interceptor part is really, really hard, and the physics clearly favors the offense,” Kelly said. “We could go down this road, spend hundreds of billions of dollars, and not get any return on that investment, and missile defense is too important to pursue this just based on aspiration alone.”
Kathy Warden, the CEO of Northrop Grumman, acknowledged last year that with SBIs, “more invention is required than other parts of the [Golden Dome] architecture.”
The most recent trends in warfare, as seen in the Middle East and Ukraine, highlight the need for cheaper, mass-produced countermeasures to use against massive drone and missile attacks. In other words, it requires magazine depth, as some military commanders like to say. Democrats seem likely to conclude that the path to magazine depth does not include SBIs.