“There’s no doubt that whatever it’s called, it won’t be called the Golden Dome, and there will definitely be machinations in the system, but it won’t be the approach to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Taylor said. “Given the risk profile, I don’t think that will happen.”
President Donald Trump speaks with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC on May 20, 2025
Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
President Donald Trump speaks with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC on May 20, 2025
Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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 a way to “depoliticize” the missile defense issue.
“It is no secret that the ‘Golden Dome’ nickname contributed to the political polarization surrounding the project,” Karako said in his statement. “There are several ways to depolarize and depoliticize the effort. It is up to Congress to name or rename executive departments – an example of this is the pending proposal to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Congress also has legislative authority to rename the Golden Dome Initiative in a future national defense authorization bill.”
“There are things in the program that make sense,” said Senator Kelly, who serves on the Senate Strategic Forces Subcommittee. This includes new features to “detect launches,” he said. “The Space-Based Interceptor part is really, really heavy and the physics clearly favor the attack,” Kelly said. “We could go down this path, spend hundreds of billions of dollars and get no return on that investment, and missile defense is too important for us to pursue this based solely on our ambitions.”
Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden acknowledged last year that SBIs “require more ingenuity than other parts of the company.” [Golden Dome] Architecture.”
Recent trends in warfare, such as those seen in the Middle East and Ukraine, highlight the need for cheaper, mass-produced countermeasures to massive drone and missile attacks. In other words, it requires magazine depth, as some military commanders like to say. Democrats are likely to conclude that the path to magazine depth does not include SBIs.
