Will the “Golden Dome” Work? A “Star Wars” Engineer Shares His Take

An ex-Raytheon engineer in Huntsville, Alabama, “the Pentagon of the South,” on how weapons engineers see their jobs — and what they don’t see.

May 22, 2025

Hi,

On Tuesday, when US President Donald Trump announced his plan to spend $175 billion to create a “Golden Dome” shield over the United States that would intercept incoming missiles, he acknowledged that the idea was not new.

“We will truly be completing the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago,” he said. In reality, the United State has been seeking missile defense systems to shoot down incoming missiles for far longer, since the 1950s. Trump added that the Golden Dome would “forever [end] the missile threat to the American homeland. And the success rate is very close to 100%.”

Republicans have earmarked nearly $25 billion in a spending bill now making its way through Congress for the venture.

When I first heard Trump’s chatter about a Golden Dome, I reached out to some contacts in Alabama. Why? Because few places in the US have spent more time trying to come up with a way to shoot down incoming US-bound missiles (i.e.: the scenario that is the beginning of nuclear war) than Huntsville, Alabama, known as “the Pentagon of the South.”

One person I heard from was none other than a former Raytheon engineer who worked on the “Golden Dome” of yesteryear — Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly and pejoratively known as “Star Wars”.

Mike Schroer, who’s now retired, first worked first on the Patriot air defense system in the 1980s. It’s had many decades to prove its worth, and Schroer told me its shoot-down rate was unimpressive.

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Israeli example “sure doesn’t make building the Golden Dome look very feasible”

He pointed to the 1991 Gulf War. After the US Army initially claimed the Patriot had a near-perfect track record intercepting missiles, the military backed down its claims under scrutiny, and the Congressional Research Service would eventually report that the system had only one apparent success there.

In more recent times, the Patriot system reportedly failed to intercept any of the seven missiles fired on the Saudi city of Riyadh in 2018, and the results were deadly — one person was killed and two other wounded by missile fragments that fell from the sky. Even more recently, in Ukraine, the country’s army chief last year gave a sobering breakdown of Russian missiles the country has intercepted with its various missile defense systems, with rates sometimes in the single digits depending on missile type. And just earlier this month, Israel’s missile defense systems failed to shoot down a ballistic missile from Yemen that hit near the Ben Gurion International Airport.

“One missile, not a batch of missiles to saturate the air defense, just one, and it got through the Iron Dome and several other air defense systems,” Schroer said. “They supposedly have a multilayer defense system with all their systems combined. But that sure doesn't make building the Golden Dome look very feasible.”

*Huntsville’s weekly “Peace Corner.” Photo by Taylor Barnes*

Schroer, who began working on “Star Wars,” or SDI, in 1986, said engineers, with their noses deep in resolving each tiny technical step toward achieving a hypothetical missile shield, can engage in a myopia that misses the forest for the trees.

Here’s what Schroer said about how missile defense engineers do their jobs:

“When I was working on the SDI program we were always looking to improve the technology to overcome the current technology shortfalls. That might be sensor technology, computer power, software algorithms, power sources. The challenge to innovate and build is what makes scientists and engineers tick. And in our current system, the fact that you need a job to keep a roof over your head and food on the table also brings you into work every day.
But as you wade into the development of these very complex systems, you start to realize you bump up against physical limits. As these systems get more and more complex, each component of the system has to become more and more reliable for the overall reliability of the system to be useful. Then you have to remember that you are building a weapons system and the enemy has a say in the exchange. They devise equipment and tactical countermeasures. At some point you may reach a point of technological or financial inviability.
But from an engineer’s point of view, if you don’t step back and look at the big picture, that day-to-day search to innovate and fix that next technical challenge keeps you going.

Until it doesn’t. Read on more to hear about how Huntsville became the hub for missile defense, Schroer’s personal path and why he thinks the Golden Dome involves much more magical thinking than diplomacy and activism to end the nuclear arms race.