Panel Discussion: Golden Dome -- From inception to reality

Video

National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang moderates a panel discussion with Tory Bruno, President and CEO at United Launch Alliance; Erika Marshall, Vice President of C4ISR at Lockheed Martin; Tom Karako, Director of the Missile Defense Project at Center for Strategic & International Studies; and RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, Co-leader of Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Air and Missile Defense Program. The discussion occurred during the “Golden Dome for America” event hosted by Threat Status on May 13, 2025, at the Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City, in Arlington, Va.

[WOLFGANG] We’ve been talking a lot over the past couple months about Golden Dome. And now I’ve got a very distinguished panel here to help us dive into in real practical, concrete terms how we get from inception to reality, and then what Golden Dome looks like going forward in the years to come. What does the federal government need to do or need to build or need to establish to get this done? Are the offices already there? Do we need something new? What does it look like from the federal government perspective from where you sit?

[MONTGOMERY] We do need one person in charge. We need one person who both secretary Hegseth, but also the Senate and House, you know one throat to choke. They need to absolutely have one person They can go to and say what’s the vision? What are the resources required? What are your gaps? How can we help?

If we don’t have that if we end up having a Force service missile, you know one or two defense agency, you know collective consensus approach, I promise you, we will deliver five years late and suboptimally. So first and foremost, you need one person in charge.

I will say one other thing. We did create the missile, and it should be a four-star, to be able to carry the weight that’s necessary, and I suspect it’ll be General Gutlein, you never know, but someone with a space and missile defense background.

But the other thing that’s really critical here is that we do what we fail to do in the defense of Guam fiasco that carried out over the last five years, and that’s put — make the architect of the system be the people we actually pay to do missile defense architecture, the missile defense agency. That’s where the defense engineers — that’s where the missile defense engineers are.

The idea that CAPE, which is a DOD office, or OSD RNA and other DOD office, or GYMDO, a joint staff office or an individual service can, has the engineers necessary to architect this is laughable. And we cost ourselves four years and billions of dollars in an offensive Guam effort proving that fact.

Now that it’s proven, give us a four star, give us missile defenses as their architect, one of the deputies in there, align the services to them and then provide the resources that are necessary to execute what the leader’s vision is, what should be carrying out what the president proposes and the Congress disposes in its resourcing.

[WOLFGANG] Do you think this survives administrations politically moving forward? I mean, if we have a czar in charge, for example, or we establish some kind of new agency or department, is this the kind of thing right now, this idea of missile defense for the U .S. homeland that will have enough bipartisan support to sort of transcend administrations and politics going forward?

[KARAKO] I’m concerned that the effort is not being put in to making the case, to going to Capitol Hill, to explaining the why here, the why and basically the scenario of what this is for. I would say it’s comical to see folks casting about, well, it’s gonna going to cost $2 trillion, dot, dot. There’s no it yet that is publicly out there to be costed. And furthermore, the explanation, no kidding, of what are the metrics by which we are going to scale the architecture and that kind of stuff. So I think we’re going to see that very soon. But there needs to be a lot more attention to making this not a a stick that will be poked into partisan ways. I think that needs to happen and needs to happen very fast.