US HOMELAND — Assistant Secretary of Defense Marc Berkowitz told a US Senate hearing that the country's homeland missile defenses are limited to a single-layer ground-based system designed to counter a small-scale attack from North Korea, as he outlined the Trump administration's Golden Dome project to expand those capabilities. Berkowitz said the existing architecture provides only very limited capability against other ballistic missile threats and no defense against advanced cruise missiles or hypersonic weapons.
The Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system is currently the only system capable of defending the US homeland against an intercontinental ballistic missile attack. It utilizes integrated communication networks, fire control systems, globally distributed sensors, and Ground-Based Interceptors that can detect, track and neutralize ballistic missile threats. According to public data from the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, 21 tests of the system were conducted between 1999 and 2023, resulting in 12 hits and 8 misses for a 57% success rate. A March 2026 Heritage Foundation report stated that the US fields 44 Ground-Based Interceptors and that the system is limited both numerically and technologically, constraining its ability to defend against sophisticated or multi-missile attacks, including those with multiple warheads or advanced countermeasures.
A March 2025 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment found that China fields about 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking the US homeland, Russia fields about 350, and North Korea fields 10 or fewer. The assessment found that submarine-launched ballistic missiles pose a risk because no part of the US is beyond their reach. China possesses about 600 hypersonic weapons and Russia about 200 to 300, which complicate interception due to their speed and maneuverability, while China possesses about 1,000 land-attack cruise missiles and Russia 300 to 600, which exploit low-altitude flight and reduced signatures to evade detection. The assessment also noted that fractional orbital bombardment systems can approach targets from unexpected trajectories, including over the South Pole, to bypass early warning systems.
Golden Dome aims to address gaps in US homeland missile defense by building a layered system of systems integrating space-based, air-based, ground-based, and sea-based defenses against ballistic, hypersonic, cruise missiles, and other aerial threats. The project has drawn both support and criticism from outside analysts. Kari Bingen argued that Golden Dome can be justified because the threat environment has changed, leaving the US homeland vulnerable to a wider range of large-scale, diverse, and coordinated missile and aerial threats, and that the initiative is intended to limit damage, complicate adversary planning, and raise the threshold for attack to strengthen deterrence. Jeffrey Lewis argued that Golden Dome is fantasy rooted in the belief that the US can buy its way out of nuclear vulnerability, and that the logic of mutually assured destruction has prevented nuclear war despite nuclear vulnerability.
A February 2025 American Physical Society report stated that despite more than $400 billion spent on missile defense since 1957, no system is effective against realistic intercontinental ballistic missile threats, and that current capabilities are likely to remain low for at least 15 years. The report also stated that intercepting a single nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile or its warhead in flight is extremely challenging due to short engagement windows and difficulty distinguishing warheads from decoys and other objects in space.