Golden Dome’s first fight will be won or lost on its ability to see.
The layer of sensors acts as the eyes of the C4ISR enterprise. Without sensors, the command-and-control architecture has nothing to process, or act upon. Sensors are the first link in the chain—and if that link breaks, everything downstream collapses.
The problem: The threat environment is unforgiving. Hypersonic glide vehicles compress timelines to minutes, drone swarms overwhelm with sheer numbers, advanced decoys muddy targeting pictures, and cyber-spoofed signals erode trust in data feeds. Together, these threats press relentlessly on the sensor layer. That makes the layer of sensors both Golden Dome’s weakest point, and its greatest potential strength.
If the US can build a sensor network that survives disruption, fuses information, and delivers usable intelligence at relevant speed, Golden Dome has a chance to hold. If the US cannot, the shield will fail before it ever deploys.
A winning formula: To prevail, Golden Dome must:
- Be resilient against jamming, spoofing, and cyberattacks.
- Be proliferated, and spread across multiple orbital regimes, to prevent adversaries from creating (and then leveraging) blind spots.
- Fuse data so that operators receive actionable, decision-quality data, rather than torrents of raw information.
Without these foundations, Golden Dome remains more ambitious than reality. The path forward comes down to three essentials:
- Proliferation, to ensure resiliency and redundancy;
- Fusion, to enable operator decisions and outpace adversary tempo; and
- Interoperability and survivability, designed from the start.
Proliferate to survive: Strength in numbers, and the mission assurance that comes with it, are imperative to the success of the Dome.
DoD has already started down this road on other projects. The Space Development Agency (SDA) is fielding Tranche 1 of its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, with 28 tracking satellites and 126 transport satellites now moving toward orbit. The objective is not simply more satellites, but resiliency in numbers, which ensures coverage and continuity even when parts of the constellation are lost.
Proliferation strengthens Golden Dome in three reinforcing ways.
- Eliminating single points of failure. When a constellation has built-in resiliency and redundancy, the loss of a single—or even multiple—nodes does not degrade or paralyze the system.
- Improving revisit rates. Adversaries must deal with persistent coverage, and thus have less time to maneuver undetected or to exploit gaps in coverage.
- Denying adversaries the ability to create asymmetric advantages, through inexpensive techniques that would create gaps of critical sensors. Instead, adversaries face a resilient and redundant system with fewer vulnerabilities, which limits our adversaries’ ability to maneuver.
Speed matters: Numbers alone are not enough. Sensors must speak a common language, and feed into a common operational picture that flows seamlessly into interoperable command and control networks. Golden Dome’s advantage will come from fusing sensor data from across the spectrum and domains. This fusion will provide operators an integrated picture that reduces task saturation, and gives them the decision space to optimize defensive responses.
This is not an academic problem. In April, the Government Accountability Office issued a review that flagged the department’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort for failing to establish a unified framework. The lack of common standards and architectures has slowed the flow of information from sensor to shooter.
On-orbit edge computing and AI-enabled data fusion offer a way forward, to further accelerate the delivery of data as well as the subsequent response actions. Algorithms can validate signals, flag anomalies and prioritize the most urgent information before the data ever leaves the satellite. Early processing and prioritization of data ensures the system delivers operators the best decision-quality data available, and thus enables optimum defensive action.
Survive the fight: The most exquisite sensor—if easily isolated or degraded—can go from being a great strength to a great weakness. Survivability and interoperability must be included at the design level for the individual systems, and for the overall architecture. Sensor design must not be treated as an afterthought.
Golden Dome’s sensor network must be designed to withstand electronic warfare, cyberattacks, and other non-kinetic actions, as well as to defend or minimize exposure to kinetic strike. Defending against these attacks—while maintaining an open architecture, and integrating data across multiple domains and sensor regimes—is difficult, but a necessity. In short, resilience is not a feature; it is the system.
Get real: Survivability is often treated as a goal rather than a threshold, leaving dangerous ambiguity about how sensors will perform in the contested environment of a conflict. Golden Dome’s design risks being an exquisite, yet fragile system without the reforms that make interoperability, resilience, and survivability foundational and non-negotiable.
Testing Golden Dome under realistic conditions is the only way to ensure the shield works as intended. Until Golden Dome’s acquisition priorities, test infrastructure, and requirements are aligned around interoperability, resilience, and survivability, sensors will remain the program’s Achilles’ heel.
Bottom line: Golden Dome will stand if its sensors do, but it is not the individual sensors that will win the day. It is the system of systems, or integrated sensor network, that can deliver success.
That capability requires a proliferated constellation to:
- Ensure resiliency and redundancy, and eliminate blind spots;
- Fuse data to deliver an integrated picture, and to reduce decision latency for optimized decision-making; and
- Stand up to non-kinetic and kinetic attacks throughout the fight, and continue to deliver in a contested environment.
If as a team we can engineer and deploy that, Golden Dome will not only stand. It will stand fast.
Dan Knight is VP of sensors and platform engineering at Orion Space Solutions, an Arcfield company. John Noto, Ph.D. is the chief scientist at Orion Space Solutions, an Arcfield company.
