As head of the “Golden Dome for America” initiative, Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein said today he will spend his first 60 days focused on building partnerships across the Defense Department and other federal agencies, developing a comprehensive command and control structure and assessing the industrial base for capabilities and capacity.
While Guetlein is confident in the components of Golden Dome, he acknowledges that creating an organizational structure surrounding the system will be difficult, particularly as the needed technologies have been developed in different stovepipes across the Defense Department.
“I firmly believe that this technology that we need to deliver Golden Dome exists today,” he said at the Space Foundation’s Innovate Space: Global Economic Summit. “It’s just never been brought to bear to this problem set to protect the homeland, nor has it been brought to bear on this form factor.”
According to a press release posted by the Pentagon today, President Trump has given Guetlein 60 days to draft an objective architecture for Golden Dome, which is intended to serve as a comprehensive homeland defense system spread across all domains.
Integrated C2 has been a struggle for DOD for years as several efforts to connect across domains — particularly Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control — have yet to effectively tie communications together across the services. It’s not an easy task, Guetlein said, but it is necessary to achieve Golden Dome’s goals.
“We have to deliver on that vision of integrated command and control across the nation, across all these multiple platforms,” he said. “Then we have to bring to bear an integrated network of sensors to be able to close the fire-control loop with an integrated network of interceptors that have probably never been brought together before between the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and even the Marine Corps.”
Golden Dome will run “incremental demonstrations” every six months, Guetlein said, as a way to deliver on the timeline set by President Trump. Such demonstrations will help the team ensure it is on the right path while also creating a sense of urgency and a way to show the early wins for the system.
“The president gave us three years to deliver this capability,” he said, “and we’re going to deliver in three years.”
Guetlein has been given a powerful mandate for the $175 billion effort as a direct reporting program manager who answers directly to Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg rather than the traditional service and agency chains of command.
“It elevates you above the bureaucracy,” he said of his position, “so you don’t have a lot of people that can tell you no. You’re not asking a lot of permission along the way, and more importantly, you can integrate horizontally across the DOD but also across the federal government, which is what’s going to be required to get after Golden Dome.”
Guetlein said he has also been given the authority to direct hire. The general has about 30 people in consideration for roles within the team, but he could also hire from industry, academia or research institutions.
Guetlein is also setting up a consortium called a “national team” that will include industry partners, academia, labs and other groups, he said. That national team will be technical advisers and capability providers.
Close partnership with industry is going to be important, Guetlein said. Noting that he had “grown up” in the Air Force at a time when industry was kept at arm’s length, he said DOD will need to show deeper trust in its partners and openly collaborate to ensure all the capabilities needed and feasible can be brought into the system.
Space-based interceptors are going to be the most difficult component of Golden Dome, according to Guetlein. While the technology exists and the physics supports the technology, it’s still unknown whether they would be cost effective or able to be built at the scale needed, he added. Understanding industry capacity will help prove out SBIs.
The general said he will take some of the lessons from the Space Force’s Commercial Space Office to boost that partnership with industry, including nontraditional defense contractors.
ComSO created a “front door,” or single point of contact, that could direct any business to the correct person to talk to about contracting, rather than leaving a business to figure out whom to contact on its own. ComSO also hosts “reverse industry days” where businesses can bring their ideas to the office and explain how they could be useful to the Space Force.
Originally published Inside Defense
