The Air Force wants to funnel $1.4 billion into air base defense with new weapon systems designed to protect homeland installations and forward-deployed airfields against drones and missile threats, Air Force budget officials said April 21.
missile defense
The tech industry’s pursuit of space-based AI data centers could have positive implications for military space operations, potentially enabling faster communication speeds from multiple orbits for programs like Golden Dome, industry and defense officials said March 24.
The Pentagon has increased its baseline cost projection for its Golden Dome advanced missile defense shield by $10 billion in recent months due to demand for more space sensing, tracking, and data transport capabilities, the general in charge of the effort said March 17.
The Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s commercial technology hub, plans to demonstrate low-cost, commercially derived missile defense sensors on orbit within the next two years, according to a new notice to industry.
The Pentagon’s Golden Dome Director said Jan. 23 his top priorities for the advanced homeland missile defense shield over the next two years are establishing a baseline command-and-control capability and integrating interceptors into that system.
Lawmakers told Pentagon leaders they want more details about how the Defense Department plans to spend the $23 billion Congress provide to support Golden Dome in last year’s reconciliation deal.
The Space Force is requesting prototype proposals for space-based interceptors that can destroy a missile during the midcourse phase of flight, on top of its previous efforts to develop interceptors that take down missiles in their boost phase.
The Golden Dome air and missile defense shield to protect the United States will have some “operational capability” in 2028, the program’s leader said Dec. 6 at the Reagan National Defense Forum.
The Missile Defense Agency chose a diverse pool of more than 1,000 companies to compete for task orders through its Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered defense effort—a $151 billion contract mechanism to experiment, test, and prototype capabilities for Golden Dome and other homeland defense needs.
Companies planning to compete for Golden Dome contracts say they’re already investing in capabilities that could have a range of defense and commercial applications—regardless of whether they’re selected for the Pentagon’s sweeping program to create an advanced homeland missile defense shield.
Industry executives poised to compete for the Pentagon’s behemoth homeland missile defense initiative, Golden Dome, said the biggest risk to the project’s success is not technical but bureaucratic in nature.
The U.S. homeland is vulnerable to air and missile attack across the Arctic because the network of ground, air, and space-based defenses guarding those approaches have atrophied over time, according to a new paper from AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.