Space and Missile Defense Leaders Ponder Golden Dome
By Unshin Lee Harpley
Within a week of his inauguration, President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon to outline a comprehensive air and missile defense strategy with a focus on advanced space-based interceptors. Drawing inspiration from former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system, Trump dubbed his project Golden Dome with the aim of protecting the U.S. homeland from future missile and airborne threats.
“My focus is on building the most powerful military of the future,” Trump said in his address to Congress, calling the Golden Dome missile shield the first step toward realizing that vision.
Building a missile shield over North America, a land mass roughly 1,000 times larger than Israel, will be far more challenging than simply scaling up Israel’s Iron Dome. It will require a unified effort across military agencies, including the Space Force, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), the Air Force, as well as intelligence agencies. It will also involve Congress, the private sector, and most likely allies, along with new technologies.
Creating Golden Dome has the “magnitude of the Manhattan Project,” said Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein, requiring a “heavy lift” across organizations to be successful.
Collaboration and Policy Hurdles
Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said the Space Force will play a “central role” in Golden Dome, a frequently repeated point during the AFA Warfare Symposium.
“There are players across the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community (IC) all working on this,” said Lt. Gen. Shawn W. Bratton, the Space Force’s top officer for strategy, plans, programs, and requirements.
Within the Space Force alone, officials from Space Systems Command, the Space Development Agency, the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, and Space Forces-Space, the service component to U.S. Space Command, all said they have provided input and feedback on Golden Dome.
But which agency will take the lead remains an open question, Guetlein acknowledged. “Our biggest challenge is going to be organization, behavior, and culture,” he said. “What we’ve got to really push back on are the organizational boundaries and the cultures that are going to try to slow us down or to prevent us from working together.”
Military bureaucracies are notoriously tribal, and a project of this scale will have to bridge those gaps. Among the agencies vying for a lead role will be the Missile Defense Agency, which dates its lineage back to the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. MDA director Lt. Gen. Heath Collins said the architecture for Golden Dome has been in development for decades.
“We’re saying, ‘Finally, we get another chance to get back at this,’” Collins said. “We think the technologies in space are much different today than they were 20 or 40 years ago, and we’re really excited.”
Both Guetlein and Collins stressed the need for a unified, single leadership strategy for building Golden Dome. Collins underlined that the agency in charge must be given the authority, resources, and “direct access to senior decision-makers very quickly.”
Today’s missile defense structure involves multiple entities, each with different priorities and processes, which Collins criticized as a committee-based system that is “very difficult” and “doesn’t quite work.” He said the layers slow down decisions, noting it can take up to a year just to make an acquisition decision, let alone the years it can take to develop a system.
The Pentagon must also collaborate with the Intelligence Community, including the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees the nation’s spy satellites, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which provides detailed imagery to track and target missile threats, and the CIA, among others. Disconnects between the military and IC have fueled frustrations for years, but Guetlein said the IC’s ability to share information with military units “in a time-relevant manner, and get that data to the shooter, in a manner of time that can actually deter the attack” is crucial for Golden Dome’s success.
“We’ve also got to break down the barriers of Title 10 and Title 50,” said Guetlein, a reference to U.S. law governing the military and intelligence agencies, respectively.
“We are not accustomed to having to integrate at the level that’s going to be required,” Guetlein said. For instance, the Pentagon requires certifications for employees handling IC intelligence but currently lacks a formal certification process for those integrating intelligence into weapons systems. This gap could hinder the timely integration of intelligence into real-time operations.
Guetlein further stressed the need to conduct more testing and training in space to improve the operational capabilities of Golden Dome.
“The authority that we would ask right out of the gate is the authority to do on-orbit training and testing that we’re not capable of doing today,” said Guetlein. The Space Force is constrained from such testing today. “We would ask that that open up so … we can increase our readiness of our forces on the front line, to be able to do that ‘protect and defend’ mission.”
“We certainly cannot do Golden Dome the way we’ve been doing business the last five years or so,” said Collins.
Technological Push Forward
The project’s success hinges on space-based systems for tracking and intercepting missiles, as these are the most effective means to counter fast, stealthy, and maneuverable threats, such as hypersonic missiles.
“The advancements we’ve made in space-based sensor layers, ground-based radars, and automated tracking will be critical to meeting this mandate,” said Lt. Gen. David N. Miller Jr., head of Space Operations Command.
The military will have to develop an effective kill chain to swiftly identify and track targets, process sensor data, and relay that to launch interceptors, according to Col. Robert Davis, program executive officer of Space Systems Command’s space sensing directorate. Israel’s Iron Dome will need significant adaptation for the U.S., which is 500 times larger; if the missile shield is to extend to Canada and Alaska, the land mass would double in size once more.
That’s to say nothing of other allies, several of whom expressed interest in the concept during the symposium.
“I think there will be huge opportunities for allies and partners to contribute to this,” Godfrey said. “And then as a result, we get the benefit of a Golden Dome, which hopefully starts to extend around various areas.”
“I imagine there may be a strong need to continue to expand on the work that Space Force is already doing to pivot our architecture to be able to track hypersonic weapons with the LEO and MEO layers,” Davis added.
The Space Development Agency ramped up its missile warning effort, creating the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA), which will include two layers for missile tracking and data transport. By 2029, SDA plans to have more than 450 satellites in orbit, ready to spot and track hypersonic and ballistic missiles, then relay data on them anywhere around the globe.
But “technological gaps” must still be addressed, noted Maj. Gen. Dennis Blythewood, Special Assistant to the Chief of Space Operations. Among the most daunting task is the boost-phase interceptor in space for ballistic and hypersonic missile.
The SDA and MDA tasked contractors with proposing solutions for a space sensor layer and proliferated interceptors for boost-phase intercept. Companies including Lockheed Martin, L3Harris, and General Atomics have submitted proposals, with technology demonstrations set to begin next year and to continue through 2030.
Collins said sensor fusion will be crucial for effective boost-phase intercepts, integrating diverse sensor types into a single, cohesive architecture that can detect and engage targets from all angles.
“Different target types require different types of sensors and different types of sensor suites to provide 360-degree sensor coverage of the [United] States,” said Collins. “We need to get the right sensor mix attached in there, we need the right command and control battle management construct, which does not exist today.”
Bratton called the complexity of boost-phase interceptors from space “no joke of a physics problem.” The boost phase of an intercontinental ballistic missile typically lasts three to four minutes, and the launch may not even be detected until at least 30 seconds have elapsed.
Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in an analysis that even with SDA’s new missile tracking layer, a space-based interceptor would have only about 2½ minutes to strike during this phase.
Hypersonic weapons, which accelerate faster, fly at lower altitudes, and may be somewhat maneuverable, will require an even more challenging interceptor. Harrison said providing global coverage against even a few such missiles could require thousands of interceptors in low-Earth orbit.
While ground-based systems like the Army’s THAAD, Patriot, and Ground-based Interceptor (GBI), the Navy’s Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense, and the Air Force’s AMRAAM air-to-air missile could all have roles in Golden Dome, MDA and the Space Force are exploring new technologies to counter evolving threats.
“Depending on the target, some of these other capabilities, nonkinetics especially, could really help get us after that magazine depth problem that we have,” said MDA’s Collins, noting that these capabilities could be particularly important when multiple threats arise simultaneously.
For now, the central effort will be organizational and technological, with attention focused on how best to accomplish the mission, including evaluating which existing technologies can be accelerated and what kinds of innovations may be needed. Lt. Gen. Philip A. Garrant, head of Space Systems Command, said that includes “what might be feasible from a physics perspective.” His command is trying to understand “what the requirements and the allocation of resources will be.”
Congress is already starting its work, even before a budget proposal emerges from the Trump administration. Sens. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) have introduced legislation to allocate about $19 billion for the new missile defense system in fiscal 2026, most of that earmarked for interceptors to be based at Fort Greely, Alaska, and for THAAD, Patriot, and Aegis investment. Also included is $900 million for space-based missile defense research and development, $500 million for R&D in directed energy for missile interception, and $60 million for space-based satellite sensors development.