Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said on Tuesday that despite rumblings about the future U.S. Golden Dome missile shield being under construction, the program is still in its early stages and that he will try to prevent the $25 billion for the program in the $113 billion DoD reconciliation bill from becoming a “slush fund.”
Golden Dome is “conceptual at the moment, frankly,” Reed, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told a Defense Writers Group breakfast. “I suspect that the DoD money in the reconciliation, which is highly unusual, about $113 billion, I think there will be a category called ‘Golden Dome,’ but that’s just potentially a slush fund. They have to identify the technologies. They have to go ahead and design an integrated plan. In my view, from what I’ve heard, unclassified, it’s more of a warning system than a firing system, although it [Golden Dome] will develop firing units to complement it. But the key now is to identify hypersonics as soon as they launch so we can engage them, but that’s still a work in progress.”
A Jan. 27 executive order from President Trump directed the development of the U.S. missile defense shield, to include space-based interceptors–a project analysts have estimated could cost trillions of dollars.
A group of five Democratic senators and 37 Democratic representatives on May 1 asked Acting DoD Inspector General Steven Stebbins to investigate the lawmakers’ conflict of interest concerns related to top Trump adviser, Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, and SpaceX’s position as a front-runner for Golden Dome contracts (Defense Daily, May 1).
“Every time I read about it [Golden Dome], there’s a paragraph about Elon Musk’s participation with Starlink as the communication link; etc.,” he said. “We have to be very careful of this because this is essentially a kill chain from observation to execution, and we typically don’t have non-military contractors in the middle of something like that. We have to think very seriously about how do we legally do this. Do we lease with the right to retain [data rights] or the right to prevent it from being leased to any other entity–these types of communications systems and weapons systems, and they’re doing that right now. Space Force is very much involved in that and trying to think out how do we put together a communications system and link it to the firing system.”
“The biggest part of Golden Dome, while I’m not the expert, is really the detection and communications systems,” Reed said. “The firing systems, if we can identify the target early, the easier part–and it’s not easy–will be to get the kill vehicle developed.”