'Probably not': CNN analyst casts doubt on Trump's plan to 'weaponize space'

An analyst cast doubt on president Donald Trump's pledge to build a massive and expensive national missile defense system before the end of his term.

The president on Tuesday announced the so-called "Golden Dome" defense system missiles, satellites and sensors similar to to Israel's "Iron Dome," and he tasked Space Force vice chief of operations Gen. Michael Guetlein with leading the ambitious project, but CNN's global affairs analyst Kimberly Dozier expressed skepticism about its success.

"Look, the kid in me that grew up in the 'Star Wars' generation, with sci-fi as the backdrop," Dozier said. "I want this to work as an American who knows that China has a successful hypersonic missile system, that China and Russia are testing space-based weapons, and that Russia may have even armed some of its satellites. I can see the need for this, but weapons experts say it could cost as much as $500 billion, not $175 [billion], finishing it in three years. You're talking about creating new technologies, new systems to control them, integrating them into our existing command and control and weapons system, and covering this huge, vast area."

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Israel's defense system cost about $100 million per battery to produce and has 10 batteries, but the U.S. is 400 times larger than Israel, which is about the size of New Jersey, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the total cost over 20 years as $161 billion to $831 billion.

"Great idea," Dozier said, "but executing it this cheaply and this fast? Probably not."

Former president Ronald Reagan proposed a similar system in the early 1980s derisively nicknamed after the blockbuster "Star Wars" movie franchise that never materialized but escalated the Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union, and Dozier said Trump's "Golden Dome" would likely have a similar impact.

"There's absolutely an arms race, and there's a gray area in terms of what you can put it in the atmosphere," Dozier said. "There was a 1967 treaty for outer space that says you can't put weapons of mass destruction up there, like nuclear weapons, et cetera. But the problem is, once you weaponize space and you've got satellites that can target each other, that can create the kind of space debris that renders whole sections of space unusable."

"We've seen the Chinese test things where they use one satellite to hit and take out another satellite, but we're not certain that anyone has got a laser or something similar in space," she added. "So it is fraught with. complications, but also second- and third-order effects, like there are nuclear weapons treaties that are dependent on the countries watching ground-based stuff to see which side, you know, what the trust is built into, what they can see, and once you've got a layer of weapons in space that you think might just be satellites, but might be something else, all those treaties could go out the window."

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