Donald Trump's ambitious Golden Dome missile defence project: What is it and what does it mean?

President Donald Trump has finally announced that he wants the United States to build a “Golden Dome” of security over the United States ushering in a period of unparalleled defence for Americans.

To truly wrap your head around how grandiose a vision of national defence this is, one simply has to look at what The Dome is meant to protect. It’s intended to form a protective missile-shield across the entire 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million square km) of the United States against “next-generation" aerial threats including nuclear attacks and space threats. The United Kingdom, by comparison, is just under 94,000 square miles (242,000 square km).

The idea of the Golden Dome has been discussed in Trump-circles since the very beginning of his second term. It will be a futuristic missile defence system, according to the President. There is speculation it has been at least partly inspired by Israel's Iron Dome, which the country has used to intercept rockets and missiles since 2011.

The Golden Dome is also expected to identify incoming projectiles over the United States, calculate trajectory and deploy interceptor missiles to destroy them mid-flight.

But The Golden Dome, would be many times larger than Israel’s Iron Dome and would need to deal with a wider range of threats, including hypersonic weapons able to move faster than the speed of sound and fractional orbital bombardment systems - also called Fobs - that could deliver warheads from space.

To say it is ambitious would be an understatement. The concept seems to reflect Trump’s enduring belief that large scale, America-first projects can solve complex geopolitical problems. The defence and technology industries in the US have compared the ambition of the project to the Apollo missions of the 1960s, which brought mankind to the moon.

Like the Apollo project, anything of this scale would require a massive public-private partnership in the US. There are already a number of companies circling to get involved and some of the obvious contributors could be Elon Musk’s Space X (could we have a ‘Dome X’), big data companies like Palantir Technologies and defence technology companies like Lockheed Martin. The vision of the project is so wide, there will likely be many organisations involved.

There is no doubt that such a large-scale defence shield would help project American strength. Like the Star-Wars project of the 1980s, which was a US, space-based missile defence project that never really got off the ground, proponents of the Golden Dome claim such a strong defensive shield will promote peace by making it harder to attack a stronger America.

But there are questions over how a shield over the US might impact allies, such as those in NATO, and whether having a clear defensive advantage might ultimately disrupt the balance of global powers. And events like 9/11 show that conventional weapons and wisdom don’t always prevail.

There are also questions over cost. On announcing the plan Trump said he expects the programme will require an initial investment of $25 billion, with a total cost of $175 billion over time, adding that The Dome will be operational by the end of his time in office. The Congressional Budget Office, however, estimated that the government could spend more, up to $542 billion over 20 years, on the space-based parts of the system alone. Such a high cost would suck up a large chunk of the US defence budget. There will be some who invariably think the money could be better spent.

So, who will lead such an ambitious project? It was also announced that US Space Force General Michael Guetlein will oversee the building of the Golden Dome. Selecting Guetlein means the elevation of a four-star general widely seen at the Pentagon to be greatly experienced and gives the project a decent chance of being delivered.

Whether you think it is an expensive white elephant or the future of US defence, if General Guetlein makes headway and the project is even a partial success, it will be an incredible engineering achievement. And, who knows what impact that engineering would have on all our lives. Afterall, the space race of the last century was a hotbed of innovation that, from cordless vacuum cleaners to freeze-dried food, changed the world in myriad ways.