The head of President Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense program gave a classified briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that described the secretive architecture of the project, The Washington Times has learned.
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Multiple sources have told The Times that none of the money has thus far been allocated for contracts, and that White House Office of Management and Budget is currently holding the funds.
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“Congress pre-appropriated $24.5 billion without a program plan, scheduled requirements — nothing,” says Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Never have we seen that much money appropriated in advance of a program actually starting,” Mr. Harrison said during a virtual panel discussion last week.
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The potential for systems involved in the project to be focused on every threat — from small drones, fulfilling a counter small uncrewed systems (C-sUAS) role — all the way up to protecting against things “like a strategic nuclear strike from Russia or China, or both of them simultaneously, or a rogue missile from North Korea,” exist, according to Mr. Harrison.
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But there is a sense of optimism among many in private industry, both with regard to the funding and with regard to Gen. Guetlein’s progress. Robert Lightfoot, the president of Lockheed Martin Space, said space is now a “war-fighting domain.”
“The threat is real,” Mr. Lightfoot said during an exclusive interview on the “Threat Status” podcast. “You see initiatives like Golden Dome that are going to have a space component for sure. I think that’s the place where the U.S. has begun to talk about, ’Are we going to have weapons or offensive capability in space and not just be defensive for the assets that we have?’”