Golden Dome will fail without software-defined warfare

If the United States wants to defend the homeland against the next generation of missile and aerial threats, hardware alone will not save us.

Sensors, radars and interceptors are necessary but no longer sufficient. The decisive advantage for Golden Dome for America will come from software and the ability to integrate, test, adapt and fight as a single, coherent system.

But software-defined warfare will not emerge organically. The Office of Golden Dome for America must serve as the change agent for this initiative. It is uniquely chartered, empowered and resourced to make these decisions for the Defense Department and the U.S. If Golden Dome is to succeed on its compressed timeline, the program office must mandate a software-defined architecture from the outset and enforce integration as the organizing principle of the program.

At its core, Golden Dome is a systems integration problem. The only way to solve it on the required timeline is through digital alchemy: using software to transform existing materiel into a capability greater than the sum of its parts. This is the essence of software-defined warfare, and the next war will not be won with the best PowerPoint slides but rather victory will belong to the side that can iterate faster, integrate across domains and adapt in real time.

The good news is that the U.S. is uniquely positioned to do this now. The U.S. stands at the intersection of a technological maturity curve and a strategic necessity. The technologies required for software-defined warfare (massive compute, edge AI and autonomous orchestration) are no longer exotic; they are industrial-grade and deployed commercially at scale. But, more importantly, the Defense Department has signaled a definitive pivot from “acquisition compliance” to “arsenal speed.”

Golden Dome isn’t the first, and certainly won’t be the last, national security problem set that would significantly benefit from a digital-driven lifecycle. But it has the best chance of achieving its objectives with a committed adoption of that principle for two reasons:

1. Scale, complexity and latency of the problem. For the past couple of decades, we have watched adversaries implement sophisticated anti-access/area denial strategies aimed at preventing power projection over their sovereign territories. Reminiscent of this approach, we now see ourselves faced with defending a similar “home game” for the first time since the birth of our country. The continental U.S. is a very wide area to defend, including two oceanic borders, northern exposure over the pole and a host of tumultuous southern neighbors. The threat vectors are also diverse, from conventional ballistic missiles, hypersonic and other advanced cruise missiles, to other unmanned aerial and drone threats.

2. Urgency to deliver. Driven by the realism of the threat, the urgency to deliver has Manhattan project or moon landing likeness. The traditional Defense Department hardware development cycle (10+ years) is incompatible with this reality. A 2028 deadline means that almost no new systems can be developed and fielded, and that the initial capability will be through existing material solutions, integration and interoperability, command and control systems and autonomy.

The first step toward a digital-based transformation will be through modeling and simulation. Not just eye-catching visualizations, but high fidelity, physics-based representations of real-world systems running on a highly performant core simulation engine with the data analytic tools to make sense of the simulation results and “so what” outcomes. Having these capabilities will enable intelligent decision making, from architectural analysis; vulnerability assessments, strategic investments; tactics, techniques and procedure development; to advanced wargaming.

But modeling and simulation is just the digital foundation on which to build. The synthetic “arena” now becomes the unified environment enabling integration, testing and interoperability across material solutions, first with weapon systems software only, then hardware-in-the-loop testing and eventually live-fire events. From here, it evolves to combat support systems using this infrastructure to generate courses of action for real-world events in real-time.

Eventually, with everything digitally integrated, we could use this as a distributed and federated battle management, command and control capability. Finally, the pièce de résistance is using this entire framework to develop, deploy, train and control an autonomous missile defense decision engine.

Ryan Frigm is the Chief Engineer – Space at Applied Intuition. Previously, Ryan was the Deputy Director of the Space Development Agency and the agency’s first Technical Director.

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