President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed Star Wars, promised to create a missile defense system so effective it would eliminate the threat of nuclear war forever, at a cost of around $70 billion. As it turned out, the technology just wasn't feasible. And the Soviet Union figured out how to overwhelm the missile defense system at five percent of its cost. Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, scaled Star Wars down to a much more modest program called Global Protection Against Limited Strikes, emphasis on limited.
Now President Donald Trump is promising that, with today's technology, he can create an impenetrable missile shield for $175 billion. But the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in May 2025 that the program could actually cost up to $542 billion over two decades. And according to independent analysis, the CBO may actually be underestimating the cost sixfold. Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has calculated a $3.6 trillion price over two decades. Harrison and other experts spoke to The Washington Post for a bombshell report published on Wednesday.
