The Lockheed Martin booth at the 28th annual Space and Missile Defense Symposium, held Aug. 5-7 in downtown Huntsville’s Von Braun Center. (John R. Roby for Alabama Reflector)
By: John Roby
For the Alabama Reflector
HUNTSVILLE – Surrounded by the materiel of missile defense – sensors, circuits and rocket motor mockups – four of the nearly 10,000 military and civilian professionals of the space and defense community who convened here last week pondered a side question.
Why did the Space and Missile Defense Symposium make so little mention of “Golden Dome for America,” President Donald Trump’s missile defense initiative that has been described as a “Manhattan Project-level effort”?
In one of his first actions after taking office in January, Trump called for a renewed focus on missile defense, including a network of space-based sensors and interceptors that harkened back to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Trump has said the effort will cost $175 billion and be “fully operational” by the end of his term.
During the Space and Missile Defense symposium last week, the industry’s message was clear: Alabama stands to gain through this new investment. But what remains murky is the extent that Trump’s callback to Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative will pay dividends in the Rocket City – or anywhere else.
Critics have called the president’s timetable overly ambitious, and the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the cost at a half-trillion dollars over 20 years.
About $25 billion has been appropriated so far, though specific programs were not designated by Congress. The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is working on two multibillion-dollar contracting vehicles around Golden Dome, the larger of which is still in the presolicitation phase.
Publicly and privately, industry executives are signaling that Alabama might benefit most from a more down-to-Earth version of the president’s vision.
Raymond Sharp, who as vice president of missile defense solutions for Northrop Grumman leads up that company’s Huntsville-based Golden Dome efforts, described the initial push as scaling existing capacity and ensuring various systems can sync up in ways they were not necessarily designed to do.
“Golden Dome is missile defense on a massive scale, but I think our industry is ready for this moment,” he said. “There’ll be new capabilities required, but we’ll also be employing our existing capabilities in new and different ways: layering and integrating like never seen before.”
Yet while industry executives spent three days in Huntsville’s Von Braun Center telling the military’s missile defense leaders and procurement professionals they were ready with solutions, the Pentagon often played defense.
“We’ve been told every year that we’ve been in existence that it’ll never work, you’re not doing it right, and you probably spent too much money and shouldn’t exist,” Lt. Gen Heath Collins, MDA director, said in a Thursday spech to close the symposium.
Minutes later, he said he would not be answering questions from the audience or the media.
“In the last six months I’ve walked into many, many rooms and said, ‘I can’t take questions on You Know What,’ and I’ve never received a question other than something about You Know What,” he said. “So let’s just avoid that.”
Dare not speak its name
Collins was referring to the central paradox of this year’s SMD: At an event where Golden Dome loomed large, Pentagon officials were reportedly ordered to avoid mentioning it.
The symposium itself had to play catchup. A panel titled “Golden Dome for America” was scrubbed just before the conference began, with the conference website stating, “Information regarding Golden Dome for America will be promulgated by the government.”
That took the form of a separate session for industry leaders after the symposium wrapped. Despite being unclassified, the session was closed to media.
In a sense, it was standard fare for the Von Braun Center’s concert hall, where theater and fantasy routinely play out in a venue named for a rocket pioneer. For three days, Golden Dome was The Scottish Play.
So Collins referred not to Golden Dome but to “the return of priority and focus on the missile defense enterprise … within the past six months” and to the, “new imperative to bring a national capability to bear” on missile defense. Another MDA official spoke of the “policy changes [included in] the president’s January executive order.”
“That was the change from a focus on rogue states such as Iran and North Korea and a focus on peers and near-peers,” said Dan Poskey, director of program management and integration, space capabilities for the Missile Defense Agency. “Now we’re looking at threat sets associated with China and Russia, and it really changes the paradigm.”
The golden road
Absent a clear signal from government, executives of the nation’s largest defense contractors stuck to the tried-and-true this week in Huntsville.
And in truth, missile defense is having a moment.
“Everybody’s eyes were opened [during the] war between Iran and Israel,” said Stan Stafira, chief architect with the Missile Defense Agency.
The community took notice, he said, of the sheer number of ballistic missiles that required interdiction – more than 500 in a 12-day span – as well as the massive, long-range drone strikes of the Russia-Ukraine war. Both conflicts have driven home the importance of layered engagement: Different missile defense systems must have overlapping coverage so the right tool can be used when needed.
“No single system will be able to handle it all,” Stafira said.
The United States’ existing ballistic missile defense consists of four main interdiction systems, supported by multiple sensors and command and control infrastructures. Three of them – Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense and Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) – have been combat-tested in Israel, Ukraine or both in the past year.
All three are mobile, with Aegis launched from U.S. Navy vessels, and THAAD and PAC-3 from truck-mounted launchers. The fourth, Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD), launches interceptor missiles from fixed silos in Alaska and California. All four address missile threats at different ranges and stages of flight; when combined, they are said to be “layered.”
That combination, though, has historically not been a priority for homeland missile defense, which has been focused on stopping a small-scale launch from a rogue adversary like North Korea.
Johnathon Caldwell, vice president and general manager of strategic missile defense systems for Lockheed Martin, said his company, as the prime contractor for THAAD, Aegis and PAC-3, is “on the front lines” of defending U.S. and allied forces in global hotspots.
“All of these things are happening because we have a layered defense of capabilities … connected by command and control,” he said.
That, in turn, is a model for Golden Dome, he said – layered missile defense applied more systematically to the United States. He maintained it is an achievable goal.
“This is going to be an effort … where we take combat-proven technologies [and] we combine them with innovation and industrial scale partnerships,” he said. “I think we’ll get our playbook soon, [but] our job right now is to get ourselves into shape, hone our skills and build our muscles and our relationships so we can … stand up to this new scale of layered homeland defense.”
James Johnson, senior vice president for space solutions with Parsons Corp., said the key difference between existing capacity and Trump’s Golden Dome vision would come down to scale. He predicted it would initially involve “more of everything” – those interdiction, sensing and command and control systems already in use – in light of lessons from recent global conflicts.
“The president’s drawing a line in the sand for the end of his administration,” he said. “Whatever we’ve got at that point is the initial capability. It will not be perfect, but it will evolve.”
‘We do a lot of that here in Huntsville’
Alabama is positioned to be a key part of that scaling and evolution.
Industry is banking on most Golden Dome procurement dollars flowing – at least initially – into existing systems, particularly those that have been fielded successfully. And the state is already home to a vast and growing defense base that touches aspects of all U.S. missile defense systems in existence.
Misty Holmes, RTX’s vice president for shipboard missiles, said the company’s Raytheon division is seeing “strong demand focus” since the SM-3 saw its combat debut in April 2024, when they first intercepted Iranian ballistic missiles bound for Israel.
“We’re continuing to see unbelievable rates of utility in these weapons defending our sailors, our allied sailors and international allied friends … the demand signal is loud and clear,” she said.
Raytheon has been scaling up its capacity both in its own facilities and through the production chain. The company is nearing completion of a $115 million expansion of its missile integration facility on Redstone Arsenal, where the company integrates all variants of its Standard Missile family. The growth will allow it to expand production by 50% and is expected to bring 185 new jobs to the region.
Boeing is also growing its manufacturing footprint in north Alabama, with an 35,000-square-foot expansion expected to come online this year. The company makes “seekers,” or guidance systems, for the PAC-3 missile in Huntsville as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin, and recently announced a record of over 500 deliveries in 2024. The new facility is expected to boost production by 30%.
The growth will “meet current demands of the day but also plan for the challenges we’re going to face in the future,” said Pierce Lehr, Boeing vice president for global supply chain and integration.
Josh Jackson, executive vice president of SAIC’s Army Business Group, said data will be key to making the nest of interdictors, sensors and command and control infrastructure work at scale.
The company’s Huntsville operation is its second-largest worldwide, and its focus is on data integration, or turning the riot of “noise” generated by hundreds of sources across services and platforms into a clear, actionable signal for units on the ground.
“That’s what we’ve focused on: how can you create a data fabric that allows multiple systems that usually don’t talk to each other to interoperate seamlessly so you can provide better situational awareness, [allowing for] crisper decision-making for commanders,” Jackson said.
If data is a frontier of Golden Dome, space-based interdiction is the promised land. Trump’s executive order specifically mentions it – but it’s considered the thorniest and most expensive of problems in missile defense.
Yet steps are being taken in Huntsville as well. Leidos’ Dynetics subsidiary is building the common hypersonic glide body, a housing for offensive and defensive hypersonic missiles, under a $670 million Army contract. Lockheed Martin, General Atomics and Raytheon subcontract parts of the process at several Alabama facilities.
“This system, that we’ve been working with our customers to mature and build the industrial base for, brings a lot of capability that will be increasingly important as we talk about space-based interceptors,” said Jason Morgan, vice president and CTO for Leidos.
Whether Golden Dome launches with a space-based component must wait until Trump’s end-of-term deadline. But the capacity for near-term production ramp-ups and systems integration work exists now in north Alabama – and industry has an appetite to expand it.
“We’re relying on capabilities here locally – as well as across the nation – to continue to [drive] innovation across the industrial base,” said Sharp, Northrop Grumman’s Huntsville-based Golden Dome lead.
The Alabama Reflector is an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to covering state government and politics in the state of Alabama. It is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
John Roby is a journalist living in north Alabama.
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