President Donald Trump’s ambitious plan to build a “Golden Dome” missile defense shield over the U.S. will require widespread national support – akin to the level of commitment seen during World War II to support the Manhattan Project’s development of nuclear weapons, a top U.S. Space Force official said on March 5.
President Trump on Jan. 27 signed an executive order calling for the development of the new missile defense system, which he initially referred to as the Iron Dome of America, but later renamed the Golden Dome of America.
The concept aims to “deploy and maintain a next-generation missile defense shield” to protect against hypersonic weapons and other advanced aerial threats, which the order designates as the “most catastrophic threat facing the United States.”
The executive order directs the Department of Defense (DoD) to spearhead the effort to bring the Golden Dome project from concept to reality. To date, only a few defense agencies, including the Missile Defense Agency, the U.S. Space Force, and the Space Development Agency, have begun exploring their roles in its development and implementation.
However, Gen. Michael Guetlein, Vice Chief of Space Operations for the U.S. Space Force, warned last week that making the Golden Dome a reality will require more than just a handful of defense agencies working on the project, and certainly more than just DoD.
“It’s going to take concerted effort from the very top of our government,” Guetlein said at the National Security Innovation Base conference in Washington, D.C.
He went on to explain that this collaborative approach presents a significant challenge, requiring unprecedented cooperation across defense and intelligence agencies, with “coordination across traditional bureaucratic boundaries” posing a major hurdle.
“Without a doubt, the biggest challenge is going to be organizational behavior and culture,” Guetlein said. “We are not accustomed to having to integrate at the level that’s going to be required.” He compared this integration to the “magnitude of the Manhattan Project.”
“It’s going to take a concerted effort from the very top of our government. It’s going to take national will to bring all this together. It’s going to be a heavy lift across all the organizations that are going to be participating. And what we’ve got to really push back on are the organizational boundaries and the cultures that are going to try to slow us down or to prevent us from working together,” Guetlein said.
The general did not name specific agencies outside the DoD that could contribute to the effort but explained that, at this stage, the parties involved remain speculative as the department is still in the planning phase.
“We are in full planning mode,” Guetlein said. “We’re spending a lot of time really talking about architectures … What might the different levels of architecture look like depending on the threat that we want to protect and defend the United States against.”
Later this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will deliver a DoD analysis, required by the executive order, to identify existing programs that support the system’s requirements and any gaps needing further research and development.
