Few details have emerged about the Trump administration's homeland defense network since $25 billion was placed in the sprawling tax and spending bill last year.
On Thursday, designers of the Golden Dome for America showcased the project at Fort Story.
Flanked by batteries of Patriot and THAAD missiles, Space Force Gen. Mike Guetlein, director of Golden Dome said, the designers want to start being more open.
“The funds have flowed,” he said. “We have submitted a (2027) budget request to Congress, and it was time to start showing the American public that Golden Dome is real.”
The estimated $185 billion project includes yet-to- be-tested space-based interceptors, which Guetlein told the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee April 15 may not be “scalable” or “affordable.”
“We are building a layered set of defenses that are not a single point of failure in any domain,” Guetlein said. “So it'll be multi-domain. It'll be at sea, it'll be land, it'll be in the air, and it'll be in space. It’ll be an integrated network with no single point of failure.”
The network also includes more conventional weapons, radar and software that is being tested at bases including Fort Story.
For the demonstration, the Army brought examples of current sensors, mobile radar units and missile defense systems that are already in use by the around the world. Organizers continued to be vague about how the new system would cover the continental United States.
“It is a full-on integrated systems and systems architecture that is layered,” Guetlein said. “So we have both a terrestrial layer and air layer and a space layer, as well as a vast array of sensors. That data is spread across all those systems.
“We're actually buying hardware though. We are not doing prototypes. We're not doing demonstrations. We're actually buying hardware and delivering operational capability into the field.”
The Trump administration’s executive order that created the Golden Dome for America project sets an ambitious 2028 time frame to debut the new system. Only a fraction of the $185 billion price tag has been approved by Congress.
Funding for the system is included in the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget proposed by the administration. The Trump administration is also planning to ask for another $17 billion as part of a large reconciliation package.
The United States has fielded ground-based missile defense systems in the past. During the Cold War, Fort Story housed three Nike Missile silos at Cape Henry, from the 1950s until the early 1970s, when the system was decommissioned.
