AURORA, Colo.—As the Pentagon prepares to move out on President Donald Trump’s ambitious “Golden Dome” missile defense project, leaders said at the AFA Warfare Symposium this month they are looking to the recent examples of Iran’s attacks on Israel last year to understand the challenges ahead.
In April and October 2024, Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones at Israel. The U.S. played a key role in defeating those strikes, as the Space Force provided missile warning, and the Air Force and Navy both shot down threats.
Now, as the U.S. ponders how to build a “Golden Dome” defense shield for North America, Iran’s attacks loom large, especially given the even greater missile volumes that could be volleyed at the U.S. from more capable adversaries like China or Russia.
“What we are seeing is more proliferation,” said Col. Ernest “Bobby” Schmitt, commander of Mission Delta 4. “More countries have access to this, what I would call legacy technology, but they also are looking at getting more of it. It’s becoming cheaper to develop and build those capabilities. And so, for example, what we saw with Iran last year, they have a lot of missiles, right? But they’re mostly the legacy systems. And so what the adversaries are doing is using those legacy systems and implementing different TTPs, so using more mass and trying to time it differently.”
Essentially, Iran tried to overwhelm the system. Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Schiess, now commander of Space Forces-Space, remembered when he was head of space forces for Air Forces Central in 2014-2015 that the system was meant to handle “tens” of missiles at a time. In April, Iran launched around 120 ballistic missiles and 30 cruise missiles, in addition to attack drones.
“Quite frankly, the system did as well as it could,” Schiess said. “It provided the missile warning that we needed to our joint members and our allies. But it wasn’t good enough. There was latency in it. There was mistyping. But we did our job, we were able to give missile warning.”
That in and of itself was a major accomplishment, said Lt. Gen. Heath A. Collins, director of the Missile Defense Agency. The complexity of putting “a bullet on a bullet,” as experts have described missile defense, is such that some have questioned whether it could be done effectively in real-world scenarios.
“The long dialogue that missile defense would never work, well, we have certainly shown in the last year that missile defense will work,” Collins said. “The system we put in place saved lives and it kept Israel safe and in the fight.”
Still, leaders wanted more, said Lt. Gen. David N. Miller Jr., head of Space Operations Command.
“The key thing I think people need to realize is the demand that the Joint Force has on the Space Force is not just ‘duck-and-cover’ missile warning,” he said. “The demand signal is actually missile warning, tracking, and targeting.”
One of the biggest hurdles to that is speed—processing, confirming, and disseminating data fast enough. Some of that came down to training, using the April attack as the new benchmark for Guardians.
Schiess and Miller said they also learned when to reinforce their crews with extra personnel when intelligence indicates an attack is likely. And Collins said his team learned it needed to speed up the normally laborious software updates the Pentagon is notorious for.
“We were able to cut that down into less than a week from beginning to end, getting software out to the field,” Collins said. “And in the last year and a half, we’ve provided hundreds of updates to the field to answer the problems that we’ve seen.”
Leaders also made the calculated decision to automate some of the system in certain circumstances.
“One of the things that we worked on JTAGS, the system that we took over from the Army when the Space Force stood up, it was already in the process of [gaining] the ability to do what we call auto-release,” Schiess said. “And so we have men and women on the loop, tracking missiles, typing them, and sending the tracks out once they’ve done all that confirmation. We knew that we had to be so much faster that we had to get into auto-release. And so … we worked out, ‘Hey, we think we’re confident enough with the system to be able to do that in a specific situation without putting ourselves in a dangerous situation where we might mistype that there’s an attack against North America.’”
By the time the October attack occurred, “we were much faster,” Schiess said. “We were able to work through some latency issues.”
Yet as successful as the U.S. contributions were, officials see an even taller task ahead with Golden Dome, envisioned as a massive integrated air and missile defense architecture to protect the homeland from all kinds of threats coming from adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
“We can’t wait another 30-some years to get after it because the threat is changing each and every day, and more threats are coming,” Schiess said.
Today, the Space Force is pursuing new missile warning and tracking satellites in low-Earth, medium-Earth, geosynchronous, and highly elliptical orbits. Putting all of that together so that missile warning personnel can respond as quickly as they did against Iran will not be easy, said Army Col. Alexander Rasmussen of the Space Development Agency.
“We’ll have more data than we’ve ever known what to do with … and the question is going to be, are we going to be able to take advantage of it?” Rasmussen said. “We’re going to need the systems that will be able to process it, but how is it going to make sense to the Guardian or the warfighter, with so much coming at them? As we’ve seen in real-world events, systems need to be pretty robust to be able to make sense of things so people can make decisions in real-time.”
The operators also have to have enough interceptors to counter increasingly big missile swarms, especially if attacks are mounted repeatedly.
“Magazine depth is going to be crucial in the future,” Collins said. “The large volleys that we saw were just small percentages of the actual overall inventory that Iran can bring to bear. We need to raise our game when it comes to magazine depth.”