JUNE 2025
The Golden Dome as a Service
Pushing the Envelope on DOD Use of Commercial
By Clayton Swope
Executive Summary
On May 20, 2025, President Donald Trump announced that the Golden Dome, an initiative to provide
a missile defense shield for the U.S. homeland, would cost $175 billion and take three years to build.
Since it was rst described in an executive order on January 27, 2025, a number of U.S. companies
have expressed interest in contributing to the project, including a consortium reportedly proposing
a space-based solution, which would, at least in part, be sold as a service using a subscription model.
Regardless of whether this rumor proves true, given President Trump’s emphasis on federal use of
commercial options and the Pentagon’s pilot anything-as-a-service program, it provides a timely pretext
for examining the legal, regulatory, and policy foundations for military use of commercial services
and assessing the compatibility of space-based missile defense elements of the Golden Dome within
this framework.
The military has long used contractors and commercial services to accomplish military functions,
including space missions for which the U.S. Space Force has articulated a “buy before build”
commercial preference. This predisposition for commercial options supporting military space functions
aligns with overall U.S. government policies that have attempted to remove barriers for using
commercial services to support the government’s mission and space missions specically.
Some of the benets of the anything-as-a-service model include continuous innovation, technoloy
refresh, and possible economies of scale. Companies developing commercial solutions are not
constrained by the rigid strictures of government contracting and can typically develop and oer a
service, oftentimes using a fail-fast methodoloy (i.e., a willingness to accept failures and more risk to
quickly make improvements), quicker than the government could have developed its own capability
using its typical mechanisms.
Though it may sound far-fetched, use of commercial services for the space-based elements of the
Golden Dome deserves serious, thoughtful consideration. Space-based interceptors could be provided
