Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, said while it is no surprise that Golden Dome is growing more expensive, the new estimate is “no more believable than the president’s initial estimate.”

And Guetlein’s suggestion that deploying missile defense systems overseas are more costly than a homeland system overlooks the fact that “defending the entire United States against all missile threats, as the president has called for, would require defending a far larger area against far more advanced threats than missile defense systems deployed abroad are currently tasked with defending against.”

“Either the Pentagon is not being honest about the likely costs of this system, which wouldn’t be a first, or it’s now planning to build a system so limited in its architecture that it will not have even a theoretical hope of achieving its stated goal,” Murphy told Federal News Network.

“Importantly, even if we spent $3.6 trillion on Golden Dome, an estimate based on a robust architecture, the program would still fail to achieve its central goal of reliably defending the United States from peer and near-peer nuclear weapons,” he added.