https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/archive/2025/08/trump-reagan-golden-dome-missile-defense/683799/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

Pete Hegseth Doesn’t Want to Talk About Golden Dome

National missile defense is still impossible—and expensive.

Tom NicholsAugust 8, 2025, 10:57 AM ET

Donald Trump wants to spend billions of dollars on a successor to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, and he’s calling it “Golden Dome,” inspired by both Israel’s Iron Dome defense and Reagan’s early-1980s concept of a “peace shield” over North America. It’s a hugely ambitious project, but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth apparently would prefer that no one talk about it.

This week, military and civilian experts are in Huntsville, Alabama, for the 2025 Space and Missile Defense Symposium, a gathering of more than 7,000 top experts, military officers, and defense-industry representatives from around the world. One might think that such a jamboree is the obvious place to cheerlead for a new American missile-defense plan. But one would be wrong: The Pentagon has barred anyone from speaking about Golden Dome in public. Instead, according to Politico, representatives of the Missile Defense Agency joined a closed meeting that was not part of, or sponsored by, the symposium.

This shyness about discussing Golden Dome is probably part of Hegeseth’s clampdown on Pentagon officials going to meetings at think tanks and attending other public symposia. Still, the choice to go silent at this meeting is strange: Golden Dome is projected to cost gobs of money, and SMDS is exactly the kind of place where the government can tell its story and get science, industry, and the military on the same page.