During a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-TN) questioned military officials about progress in development of the ‘Golden Dome,’ an air defense system designed to protect against inbound missile attacks.
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00:00I will now turn to member questioning. We'll recognize each member for up to five minutes, and I'll start by recognizing myself.
00:09While I understand that the final architecture for Golden Dome remains under review,
00:14it would be helpful to hear from each of you how your organizations have contributed to the plan so far.
00:19And General Gio, let's begin with you.
00:23Chairman, thank you.
00:24As you mentioned, we still don't know the final configuration, but NORAD and NORTHCOM has separate commands provided input to both OSD and Joint Staff
00:36in terms of the supported command, what capabilities we would need from a Golden Dome approach.
00:43And what we provided, sir, were three separate layers.
00:47First is a domain awareness layer that detects all threats from seabed to space to include the air and terrestrial layers in between
00:56that are integrated to feed two defeat layers, the first being an ICBM defeat layer,
01:04which largely exists today with the GBI's that can defeat a North Korean threat,
01:09and then an air layer that would defeat cruise missiles and air threats.
01:17The challenge, I think, is the hypersonics, which at different parts of their flight profile could be in the ICBM phase or the air phase.
01:26And so making sure that the detect and track capability was flexible enough to handle hypersonics,
01:34and then, of course, the defeat mechanisms as well.
01:36Okay. General Collins.
01:39Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
01:41So the Missile Defense Agency, as you can imagine, we have been working on a national missile defense architecture for 42 years,
01:49and so we certainly have been a big part of playing, and as the IMD Tech Authority as well,
01:54we were a key part of the team supporting what it takes to put together an integrated missile defense system,
02:01and both what we have been doing, the analysis that we've conducted over many decades,
02:06and we're at the core of helping support and form the department in putting together an architecture that's comprehensive,
02:13that covers all pieces and parts, and could be executable.
02:17General Ganey.
02:22The Army current, I as the Commander of Space and Missile Defense Command,
02:26has not personally been involved with the architecture build.
02:30I am more of the operational side when it comes to implementation.
02:34However, our team continues to man the GBIs and are prepared to support NORTHCOM in any
02:40capacity moving forward.
02:42Thank you, sir.
02:44And Ms. Yaffe?
02:46Given the whole of department nature of this problem set and the expansive vision, the
02:50Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy joined with joint staff early in the days
02:54of receiving the executive order to try to convene the core elements of the department,
02:59the experts, the stakeholders to help frame it in terms of what the department would need
03:03to do, lay out the requirements, make sure that we understood the guidance from the White
03:07House, and start building out different options.
03:10We certainly turned it to the technical folks to dig in and build the architecture from there.
03:14But this is an all-encompassing problem, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for
03:17Policy has helped in the early days to coordinate it.
03:21And once we have a decision on the architecture, the intention is to go to phase two and to
03:25lead and conduct a theater missile defense review, as that will be important, as well
03:29as just broader considerations of strategic requirements.
03:34General Guillaume, can you talk about how the threats were considered in this process?
03:39This isn't just building capability for the sake of capability.
03:44This is based on evolving threats to the homeland, and I think it's interesting we talked about
03:48what it was six years ago, what it is today, and what you expect it to be.
03:51And from your opening statements, obviously there's great concern.
03:55So can you just talk about how you went about this?
03:58Chairman, we did use the threat as the basis for our requirements that we put forward, certainly
04:08starting with the ICBM threat that we see from North Korea and that we could potentially
04:13see from Iran should they decide to take their space launch vehicle and turn that into an ICBM.
04:20And then the hypersonic threat, which as I mentioned a moment ago, kind of goes through both the
04:24ICBM portion, depending on how it's launched, all the way through a terminal phase challenge
04:29for us.
04:30And then the air threat, which certainly over the last six years, as you mentioned, has
04:34increased as we look at both Russia and China and their doctrine, which says they will use
04:38cruise missiles to hit various points of critical infrastructure for us.
04:44And making sure that those were all tied together with a sensing grid that could feed, detect
04:50and track and feed the defeat mechanisms, and then ensure that we had the right command and
04:55control system where we could seamlessly go from one of the layers to another, excuse me,
05:03with one operator to make sure we're defeating those threats.
05:06Okay.
05:07My time has expired.