In response to an executive order, President Donald Trump’s team will present him with a plan for creating the Golden Dome, a missile defense shield meant to guard against attacks that are increasingly difficult to defeat. This effort will demand innovative thinking, collective will and rapid action.
Since my tenure as director of the Missile Defense Agency in the early 2000s, an integrated network of sensors based in space, land and sea paired with ground-based interceptors has effectively deterred rudimentary missile attacks on our homeland from Iran, North Korea and others. But as they continue to improve their capabilities and as we look at a resurgent Russia and aggressive China, we need to build our next-generation missile defense.
The window to defeat ballistic missiles heading to targets in the US is less than 40 minutes and can be as brief as 10 or 15 minutes if launched from a submarine closer to its target. Being able to intercept a substantial number of warheads in-flight provides significant deterrence to an attacker, thereby saving millions of lives and the infrastructure of the U.S.
Our existing missile-defense system cannot easily defeat some of our adversaries’ more modern, sophisticated weapons. Neutralizing these threats will require a move away from the status quo and the development of the Golden Dome, a next-generation missile-defense shield.
The Golden Dome initiative builds on past projects, including President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and Brilliant Pebbles, which proposed deploying lightweight spacecraft to intercept and destroy Soviet missiles. Technical and financial constraints led to the demise of these early efforts.
With current technology, including advancements in Artificial Intelligence, satellite manufacturing and peer-to-peer networking, it is now feasible to deploy a space-based, missile-defense layer — one that is capable of tracking and intercepting ballistic missiles in their boost/ascent and mid-course trajectories. That would fill a critical gap in our current Missile Defense System, destroying ballistic missiles earlier, and preventing catastrophic loss of life.
We can do this — and we must.
Imagine a constellation of thousands of satellites communicating with each other via a robust space peer-to-peer communications network. Each satellite has the knowledge of every other satellite, and they all serve as both threat sensors and hit-to-kill interceptors. In fact, the networking concept has already proven its effectiveness on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Soon after Russia’s invasion, the Ukrainian army devised a system based on Uber’s peer-to-peer ridesharing network. Their software, dubbed GIS Arta, uses an algorithm to determine which artillery or missile units are best positioned to respond to each threat. A constellation of satellites can operate on this same principle, allowing the most effective satellites in the constellation to swarm on an incoming missile and become hit-to-kill vehicles.
We’ve known that a system akin to this has been necessary for many years, but the technology has only recently made it so that implementation of a lower earth orbit swarming intercept system was within our reach.
My colleagues and I at Booz Allen began briefing policymakers on the practical implementation of such a system last summer and stepped up our cadence of conversations after the election. We were gratified to see the concept included as a policy priority in the days immediately after Trump was inaugurated.
It is important to understand that no shield or system can defeat every missile launched by our adversaries. However, the capability and capacity now exists to defeat single and multiple missile launches, thereby creating strategic deterrence — or ‘peace through strength,’ in the words of both Reagan and Trump. We must force our adversaries to account for the possibility of a successful defense and subsequent retaliatory strike.
Constructing a constellation of satellites like this requires substantial investment, but it offers a commensurate reward at a lower total cost than current systems. Estimates suggest that we can create and deploy a constellation of up to 2,000 linked satellite interceptors at roughly the same or lower cost as the price tag for developing and deploying one element of today’s system — the 44 ground-based interceptors currently installed in Alaska and California and the associated global radars.
SpaceX’s Starlink alone has an estimated 7,000 small satellites currently in low-earth orbit and serves as a potential model for deployment. For a defense system charged with safeguarding countless lives and trillions of dollars in assets, this would be money well spent.
Golden Dome will require collaboration among many companies and bold new partnerships. The Department of Defense must act quickly to appoint a lead agency for the effort, preferably one that has actually deployed integrated missile defense systems and shot down an uncooperative space satellite in the past, such as the Missile Defense Agency.
The quicker Congress expedites the confirmation of appointees to senior defense positions to lead this effort, the better. And Congress will need to fully fund the Golden Dome vision.
We cannot allow unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles to stifle our progress. We need to break down traditional silos around technical requirements, acquisition processes, and budget authority, placing them under one team empowered to make swift decisions to drive development and fielding.
The Golden Dome project represents the best of American ingenuity and an ambitious, extraordinary opportunity to fortify our standing as the premier military force across — and above — the globe. We must do whatever it takes to cast this protective net over our homeland.
With China’s continued advances in AI capabilities, they are almost certainly thinking about how these recent innovations can be deployed to defend their mainland. Just as in the global competition among nations to be the first to develop Artificial General Intelligence, being the first to deploy a truly effective national missile defense system ensures a nation’s pre-eminence while the rest of the world races to catch up. Golden Dome must be built first; the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
