EXPERT PERSPECTIVE / OPINION – On January 27, 2025, President Trump signed an Govt Order geared toward defending the U.S. in opposition to an assault by ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles in addition to different superior aerial assaults; the Golden Dome initiative. The Pentagon moved out well to meet this order. Business lined up with concepts on the way to defend the U.S. and Division of Protection bureaucrats convened and developed a method. All of the work that has occurred is required. However we’d like extra.
We have to construct the expertise to help defensive programs to safe the homeland from adversary superior aerial assaults. However we’re lacking an important a part of the equation which might be occurring now with solely restricted extra sources.
The U.S. must be shifting out diligently to place in place the perfect assortment functionality to supply early warning concerning U.S. adversaries. Too typically, the U.S. jumps to an answer and forgets that we should begin with intelligence to place the constructing blocks in place to deal with the answer.
On this case, the Govt Order asks for a research of adversary risk however that’s all. There may be nothing about growing intelligence for early warning on adversary intent. This is a vital oversight. The U.S. should give attention to growing warning that lets decisionmakers know when our adversaries are planning a launch. The essential satellite tv for pc monitoring mechanisms that can observe the launches ought to solely be used if the intelligence neighborhood misses the early warning.
To make sure the U.S. is utilizing its sources to its greatest capacity in constructing the Golden Dome, your complete intelligence infrastructure of assortment, expertise to help the gathering, and skill to take advantage of the gathering – to incorporate analytical specialists – have to be synergized to supply early warning that an adversary is contemplating an aerial assault.
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The literature concerning golden dome focuses on interception and monitoring missiles as soon as they’re launched. There may be loads of dialogue concerning the want for a defensive system. All of that is warranted, and it’s the space the place essentially the most cash must be spent. Nonetheless, the literature is far much less targeted on what the U.S. must put in place previous to launch to purchase time for growing choices to counter an assault and restrict the chance concerning that call making course of.
With out the platforms that may acquire on adversary intent, functionality, motion, and different anomalies, decisionmakers might be left with rushed selections on using defensive programs that would lead to catastrophic penalties if the expertise detects missiles too late or misreads that aerial assaults are coming our approach once they is probably not.
Time is the essential variable for choice makers. The sooner the intelligence neighborhood can current them with evaluation and reporting of adversary intent, the higher and certain much less dangerous the results are for the US.
For instance, if the Intelligence Neighborhood (IC) can present the President with data that an adversary has given an order to organize an aerial assault in opposition to the U.S. – whereas the assault is being deliberate however previous to launch – then there are extra choices to cease that assault.
The IC is then alerted to trace adversary actions in order that decisionmakers know the way a lot time they need to determine on an choice and which choice will work greatest underneath the circumstances. On this situation, U.S. choice makers have days as a substitute of hours, to plan. This enables for a variety of choices to cease a launch – from diplomacy, to sanctions, to army motion.
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The present Golden Dome literature talks rather a lot about monitoring these aerial gadgets and requires a brand new have a look at radars, each house and floor based mostly. As I said, a reliance on this structure dangers being too late within the choice cycle. Kudos to the Military for recognizing the necessity for good warning by integrating synthetic intelligence into their Built-in Battle Command system, however even this initiative doesn’t hit the early warning assortment subject head on.
LTG Gainey, commanding basic of the USA Military House and Missile Protection Command (USASMDC) hinted on the subject throughout a Home Armed Providers subcommittee listening to in April when he mentioned the Golden Dome additionally consists of left-of-launch operations, offering deny, delay, disrupt and degrade missile defeat results in coordination with world combatant instructions, the Intelligence Neighborhood, Joint Workers, interagency, and Workplace of the Secretary of Protection. This nonetheless doesn’t spotlight the necessity for early warning.
The U.S. can detect missile launches with its present House-Primarily based Infrared System satellites in geosynchronous orbit. These satellites can inform the place a ballistic missile goes and the place its warheads are more likely to fall, however the USA desires to develop higher warning and monitoring by making a Custody Layer — satellites that can watch the place all the opposite man’s stuff is — and a Monitoring Layer that would additionally decide the place extra refined weapons, like hypersonic missiles, are headed.
Fred Kennedy, the inaugural director of the U.S. House Improvement Company and a former director of DARPA’s Tactical Know-how Workplace, shares in Aerospace America, his imaginative and prescient of a Custody Layer, a constellation that might be geared up with shifting goal indicator radar, imaging radar and different sensors, to maintain tabs on an adversary’s offensive “web of issues.” …..These satellites could be the equal of Joint Surveillance Goal Assault Radar System and U-2 plane, however in house. To strike a missile, you need to know the place it might be launched from, in any case. Complementing the Custody Layer was the Monitoring Layer, the satellites that might detect and monitor hypersonic or ballistic weapons after launch.
That is all essential work and wanted however notice, it’s all targeted on launch.
If decisionmakers are being advised by the space-based interceptors that assaults are on the best way—there is just one choice, to intercept. However what if these interceptors misinterpret the knowledge or what if they didn’t learn the monitoring in time? In both situation it might be the start of a catastrophic occasion that’s based mostly on a mistake.
For that motive, we have to begin with the intelligence and put as a lot effort into that as we’re on the interceptors. Collaboration with the Pentagon and different companies that monitor satellite tv for pc imagery is essential. I might additionally add that the Protection Intelligence Company must play a main position on this initiative which should embody elevated human intelligence and all types of open supply to incorporate industrial information.
With the intelligence neighborhood and division of protection getting smaller, we have to work collectively greater than ever. Defending our nation is a group sport that requires robust intelligence to arrange choice makers and operators to make the perfect choices doable, serving to to mitigate danger. This can not occur with out the protection and intelligence communities working collectively to supply the primary warning—approach earlier than launch. Now could be the time to push the intelligence neighborhood to improve applied sciences that monitor missiles by offering warning of aberrations in patterns earlier than launch.
Through the use of Synthetic Intelligence (AI) to synthesize essential technical assortment with anomalies in open supply (OSINT), industrial (CAI), and private (PAI) information, we may have the cultural breakthrough we have to change how the intelligence neighborhood makes use of technical assortment fused with OSINT, CAI, PAI and AI. Towards this nationwide safety backdrop, we may have our first large win in altering how we course of intelligence and safeguard the US. NGA’s Maven program is an enormous step in the precise path of fusing intelligence to help DoD and the remainder of the nationwide safety institution. This apply must be extra widespread.
Now could be the time to make use of confirmed expertise with skilled evaluation to supply choice makers elevated time and house to counter aerial assaults on the homeland. The sources concerned, in comparison with the quantity wanted for satellites and lasers to shoot down the missiles, is minimal. This motion may be began now, the expertise exists. Putting in early warning buys time for the US to develop the remainder of the Golden Dome safety.
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