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.
