Golden Dome: Trump’s pharaonic military project is blowing up all budgets!

In the 1980s, American President Ronald Reagan dreamed of an anti-missile space shield nicknamed “Star Wars”. For various reasons, the project was never able to see the light of day, notably considered to be far too expensive. In terms of pure research alone, it cost the US government $30 billion over nine years. Forty years later, Trump is relaunching the idea under the name Golden Dome, but does not seem really aware of its real cost.

The Golden Dome is the new anti-missile shield that Donald Trump absolutely wants to design before the end of his mandate at the start of 2029. He notably signed a presidential decree on January 27, 2025 ordering the armed forces to build the defense system. A new fad whose objective is to protect American soil from any ballistic threat coming from an enemy country.

Directly inspired by the Israeli Iron Dome deployed in 2011, the American dome should however cost much more, the surface area to be protected being significantly larger. At the time, the Israeli government had spent several hundred million dollars to deploy its defense system, with the cost largely supported by the United States.

But the United States and Israel are incomparable

For the United States, the situation is clearly different. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the independent budget evaluation body of the US Congress, President Trump’s Golden Globe is expected to cost around $1.2 trillion, or $1.2 trillion. A cost estimated over 20 years and which would include research, development, deployment and operation.

A staggering cost that is difficult to justify for the leading world power, especially since this figure is light years away from those put forward by the President. When signing the decree, Donald Trump announced that the Golden Dome would cost “only” $175 billion to manufacture, or seven times less than what the CBO estimated. Worse still, the United States Congress has so far allocated only $24 billion to the project.

“The Golden Dome is nothing more than a gigantic gift to defense contractors, paid for entirely by American workers.†– Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley

Donald Trump’s project would thus be completely disproportionate on a financial level, but also on a technical level. “The Golden Dome has no chance of stopping a determined ballistic attack, despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on research on the subject over the past 40 years“, explains Joseph Cirincione, defense expert and former president of the Plowshares Fund. According to some experts, it would take more than a thousand weapons in orbit to intercept a single ballistic missile.

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