The Trump administration began pushing the Golden Dome missile defense project, a multi-layered homeland defense architecture, to counter advanced aerial threats from strategic competitors like Russia and China, in 2025. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Panelists emphasized that the objective is not absolute protection against thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles, but improving the odds of defeating smaller or more limited attacks — including those that could involve large salvos or advanced countermeasures.
Melissa Dalton, a former senior Pentagon official, said missile and drone use has become increasingly normalized in recent conflicts, lowering the perceived threshold for employment.
"They don’t respect the boundaries," Dalton said, noting the growing frequency of missile and drone attacks.
Bingen argued that the U.S. historically leaned heavily on the threat of retaliation to deter attacks, but that changing technologies and adversary capabilities require a broader approach.
"Americans would be surprised how reliant we have been on vulnerability and retaliation," she said.
While space-based missile defense once drew skepticism due to cost and technical hurdles, Karako said advances in commercial launch and satellite technology have changed the feasibility calculus.
"This is not the Soviet Union in the ’80s or the ’90s," he said. "The technology has evolved quite a bit."
Still, experts acknowledged that integration — linking sensors, interceptors and command-and-control systems at machine speed — may be the most difficult challenge.
Concept art of the Golden Dome initiative shows a layered missile defense system designed to track and defeat ballistic, cruise and hypersonic threats, including from space. (Lockheed Martin)
Officials have floated an aggressive timeline — including a three-year push to stand up initial capabilities — but Golden Dome is still in early development, with much of the work focused on planning, prototypes and initial contracts. Significant technical and acquisition hurdles remain, particularly for any space-based interceptor layer, which defense officials acknowledge would take years to fully field.
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The effort marks a broader shift in how the U.S. approaches homeland defense. Rather than relying mainly on midcourse interceptors and the threat of retaliation, Golden Dome is designed to push defenses earlier in a missile’s flight — and further into space — with the goal of stopping threats before they can deploy countermeasures or overwhelm existing systems.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/missile-defense-race-shifts-space-experts-say-real-battle-first-minutes-after-launch