Missile Defense: Lessons Learned
March 5, 2025
Watch the Video
Read the Transcript
This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
So good afternoon, everybody. Hey, Morty, how you doing? That was quite a few familiar faces. Not quite as many faces this week as we were expecting, but nonetheless, it is great to be here. It’s great to be among family. I’m John Hyten. I used to be somebody. Now I’m not. I was Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when I retired in January ’22, after a little over 40 years of service. And I was ready to retire, but I still love being around family of Airmen and Guardians. I love being around the Air Force and the Space Force. I’ve been a member of the Air Force Association for 43 years. Hopefully I’m going to be a member for another 43 years. We’ll see how that works. Some places I’m not in charge. But today we’re going to be talking about missile defense. Missile defense has been a very interesting topic over the last, oh gosh, 42 years. But it’s become a real interesting topic the last two, three years in particular. Interesting because of the threat. Because everybody in here that wears a uniform, I hope the first thing you think about when you come to work every day is the threat and what are you going to do about the threat. Because that’s what our job is, to defend this nation against all enemies. And we have enemies that have missile threats that they can bring to bear against us. So in the last few years, we’ve had a strategic posture commission sponsored by the United States Congress that’s said some very interesting things about missile defense. It emphasized the need we need missile defense against Iran and North Korea. But it also said we need to build missile defenses to take away the threat that China and Russia can bring to bear against us. That’s the first time that we’ve said in a national document that we need to be worried about missile defense against China and Russia. It’s not the entire threat, but it’s the coercive threat that Russia and China can bring. Then last year in April and October, we had a very aggressive missile threat. Not just ballistic missile, but across the spectrum of missile threats from Iran to Israel. And we had a significant role to play. In fact, the first Air & Space Forces Magazine this year talked about what Airmen and Guardians did to defeat that threat. We’ll talk about that a little bit. And then most recently, the President of the United States, President Trump, announced through an executive order that we need to build an Iron Dome or a Golden Dome to protect America. And we’ll talk about that a little bit. And fortunately, we have three truly remarkable officers that I’ve been blessed to know for a long time that know a lot more about this topic than I do. And we’re going to have, hopefully, just a conversation about missile defense and where we go. On my far left, Lieutenant General Heath Collins, 31 years of service, mostly in engineering and acquisition, but if you look at his bio, a lot of time at Shreveport, a lot of time in space, a lot of time in Los Angeles at Space Systems Center–Space Systems Command, excuse me. And then he’s now the director of the Missile Defense Agency. So if you want to know who’s really in charge of missile defense in this country, don’t read the papers, just ask Heath. Then next to him, Lieutenant General Doug Schiess, 32 years of service, almost all missile and space operations. Now he’s the commander of U.S. Space Forces, Space, and the combined joint force space component commander for U.S. Space Command. The one thing that that job has more than any other job is the longest job title in the space business. And then next to him, Lieutenant General Rock Miller, 32 years of service, again, mostly missile and space operations, now commander of the Space Operations Command at Peterson. So again, we’re going to be discussing missile defense, so let’s go ahead and start the discussion. And I’ll just mention to you, like we talked about earlier, any time you want to jump in, don’t wait for me, just jump in. First of all, we’ll start with Lieutenant General Schiess. If you would describe for this audience your view of the recent Iranian missile attacks, the U.S. and the Allied response, and your roles in particular. Specifically, if you learned any lessons, any lessons learned, lessons observed.
Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess:
Yes, sir, thanks. And General Hyten, thanks for your leadership for many decades in the space community. I know that the three of us here, we’re where we are because of what you brought us to, so thanks for doing that. And I know that you know more about missile warning, missile defense, than we do, but thanks for trying to make us look like we know what we’re talking about. All right, I’m actually going to go a little bit farther back, and, sir, you and I both were at Air Space Force in the CENTCOM AOR, and I remember my time there in 2014. We would talk about tens of missiles, tens of missiles that might come at Al-Yadid or into Saudi Arabia or into Bahrain or Kuwait, and that’s kind of where we were. We had a missile warning system that also provided missile tracks and different things to missile defense, but it really was just a missile warning system, and it was built on the strategic missile warning that we had to be able to tell the president and the secretary of defense and the chairman that there was an attack against the United States or an attack against North America. And that was what we were continuing to use, and we found ways to put that into the theater to be able to get after those tens of missiles that might be after there. And then I’ll say we’ve continued to upgrade that system, but we came actually before the Iranian with Ukrainian missiles, and we saw just an incredible increase in the number of missiles, and how could that system that was built for strategic missile warning and theater, but how could it adapt to that? And so we took lessons from that as well, and then we go into April. And, sir, what we saw in April was just an incredible volley of hundreds of missiles, not to mention one-way UAVs and other attacks against Israel and into other parts of the Middle East. Not only that, we saw missiles attacking missiles, which then also gave us more tracks, and then we saw kinetic events from those missiles as well. And so, quite frankly, the system did as well as it could. It provided the missile warning that we needed to our joint members and our allies, but it wasn’t good enough. There was latency in it. There was mistyping, but we did our job. We were able to give missile warning. We were able to provide that. Some of the stuff that Heath’s team has worked with different, you know, TPI-2s and other radars obviously helped the joint force in that time. But we knew that we had to get better. And so what did we do? One, we turned to our Guardians. We went to, you know, my brother from another mother over here, Rock Miller, he has the responsibility to generate, present, and sustain, you know, forces that get sent to us in the form of combat squadrons and combat detachments. And so we went right to him and said, hey, we need help. We need the Guardians there to get after tactics, techniques, and procedures that we can go. And then we also went to my other brother, I think he’s sitting here, from Space Systems Command. We need to be able to get after some of the things that we knew were coming to be able to do that. And we rapidly got that to the point so that when the October attack happened, we were much faster. We were able to work through some latency issues. One of the things that we worked at the system JTAGS, the system that we took over from the Army when the Space Force stood up, it was already in the process of the ability to do what we call auto-release. And so we have men and women on the loop tracking missiles, typing them, and sending that tracks out once they’ve done all the confirmation. We knew that we had to be so much faster that we had to get into an auto-release kind of situation. And so between Rock and I and Phil, we worked out, hey, we think we’re confident enough with the system to be able to do that in a specific situation without putting ourselves in a dangerous situation where we might mistype that there’s an attack against North America. So we worked through that. We also worked on, hey, what kind of intelligence are we going to get so that we can have the right crews on console during that? We may not have that in the future, but we did that. And so Guardians doing what Guardians do best, coming up with tactics, techniques, and procedures, coming to their commanders to be able to go after that. So, sir, when we got to the October fight, we did much better. And I think when you talk to General Carrillo, the commander of Central Command, he would say the same thing. We had exponential better. I think the other thing is the communication that I had with the Space Force Central Commander, Colonel Tool Putman, and the ability for him to say what his command commander needed so that we could get after that to provide that in a timely manner. And so I’ll turn it over to Rock if you want to talk more about some of the advances that we did.
Lt. Gen. David N. Miller, Jr.:
Yeah, I think in terms of observed lessons and things that are key takeaways, just to piggyback on two things in particular. First, I think it validated the unit of action that we have now built and the composition of that unit of action that has a combat crew made up of space operations, ISR, and Cyber Guardians all on the same team because we were tracking threat vectors not just from missiles but from counter-space threats as well as cyber concerns that we had that day. And because they were able to build all that together based off the plan that Doug’s team put together, we were able to posture very well. So I’m really happy with that. I think from my perspective, though, as a first-generation thing, I really appreciated the value that everybody provided in we’re all in this together. What do I mean when I say that? Things that you wanted when you hired me at Buckley, we wanted fusion of track data. Because of the work Phil Garon’s team is doing and because of some of the, frankly, the latitude that Doug gave to some of our commanders to do some demonstration and testing on the operational system at 11 Swiss, we’re able to get to that point now where we’re able to start to see some fusion. And we’re in the same OPIR working groups that Heath is in, and his team is piloting some of those new capabilities. Similarly, we’re able to level set across areas where we knew there would be more infrastructure or resources required in order to meet the threat. So Doug gets the combat detachment, but in reality we knew that the demand signal was going to be higher at a couple of JTAGS units, and we were able to reinforce them and provide more people there in the interim between April and October. So the flexibility we have in the model for our generation teams, and frankly it’s an entire missile warning and missile tracking enterprise that really Doug is orchestrating as opposed to just one team, I really felt that it validated both the organizational change that we made for our unit of action, but also our ability to speed advances into them. In the next two months there will be a couple of more capabilities that I really can’t go into that will further enhance, and they’re small things, but they’re also because we have a unit, 11 Swiss, that’s able to not be held to the strategic warning requirements and can speed advances as quickly as possible in missile tracking. The key thing I think people need to realize is the demand that the Joint Force has on the Space Force is not just duck and missile warning. The demand signal is actually missile warning, tracking, and targeting, and that is what you actually see in the executive order from the president, and that’s what we’re able to provide because people like Heath are part of all these working groups and help field capability for us.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
So for Lieutenant General Collins, you sit in an interesting place at Missile Defense Agency because your acquisition is a statement for all joint missile defense. That’s the focal point that you have. But you had to have some interesting observations looking at the activities in April and October too, so if you’d share with those.
Lt. Gen. Heath Collins:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, General, thanks for that question. We’ve certainly been busy the last year, year and a half, and that’s really the culmination of a couple decades of really focusing on the weapon systems that we have brought to bear, both U.S. weapon systems, but also we have a multi-decade relationship with the Israelis, the Israeli Missile Defense Organization. We have been partnered with them, co-developing, co-producing their layered missile defense system, Iron Dome being a part of it at the lower tier, but David’s sling and arrow as well. And so as General Hyten mentioned at the beginning, we kind of set this missile defense system up back in the day against a small number of threats was what we really thought was going to happen. And so when we test and we design, we think a dozen, maybe a couple dozen. And to Doug’s point, I mean, the sheer size of the volley, April was the largest volley of ballistic missiles ever seen on the planet until October, and that even surpassed that. And so the sheer unprecedented scale, the capacity of what the enemy could bring to bear, as well as the integrated fires coming at us, synchronized through ballistic missiles, one-way UAVs, cruise missiles, and the like, has really complicated the space and really driven the need for a large capital I integrated air and missile defense capability as we went forward. And that’s really what we have in theater today is just that. With our Aegis destroyers, I mean, I would actually not just start with April. I’d go back a year and a half. The fleet in the Red Sea has been under fire from the Houthis for a year and a half, and the combination of the Aegis weapon system with the standard missile fleet of weapons, we’ve learned a lot, the Houthis have learned a lot, and they’ve really been challenging on how they are basically working on their own TTP development to continue to target U.S. ships or any ships in the Red Sea. And so what we found pretty quickly was our processes to get updates to the fleet were way too slow. And so in a crisis, we’ve got sailors being shot at. We were able to cut that down into less than a week from beginning to end, getting software out to the field. And since in the last year and a half, we’ve provided hundreds of updates to the field to answer the problems that we’ve seen. As far as April and October goes, the layered approach that we have put in place, both with the Israelis as well as our Aegis destroyers that were in the eastern med, and then later on we added a THAAD battery, a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System. Those systems worked as designed. That’s word number one. The long dialogue that missile defense would never work, well, we have certainly shown in the last year that missile defense will work. The system we put in place saved lives and it kept Israel safe and in the fight. But the interoperability had to start at the very beginning. Interoperability is the real key to providing IAMD capabilities against this integrated fires that are coming in, and that doesn’t happen overnight. It has taken some time. Back in the original start of the Israeli Missile Defense Organization, they actually pushed back on the Missile Defense Agency in some of the interoperability messaging structures that we wanted to put in place, and we kept at it. I’ll tell you, Moshi Patel, who runs IAMDO, he’s publicly talked about the fact that we had it right when we really focused the Israelis on interoperability because it saved their bacon, really. Our system and their system working together really carried the day. And it took years of training. The actual training–we have a testbed called the Israeli Testbed where we have brought in U.S. and Israelis together to plan and execute the fight. That was absolutely critical in the heated, very complex environment that they were seeing, something they had never seen before. We really hadn’t trained for that large a volley, but that training was absolutely critical as we went forward, and that really carried the day. And then the last thing, just magazine depth is going to be crucial in the future. The large volleys that we saw were just small percentages of the actual overall inventory that Iran can bring to bear, and so we have also need to raise our game when it comes to magazine depth. And as we start talking Golden Dome in a minute, the sheer depth of magazine is something that is a problem. It’s a cost problem. It’s a scale problem. But it’s something that we’ve really got to get after, and that’s something that we’ve learned from the Israeli fight.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
So before we get into the Golden Dome, let’s just take this discussion and drill down one piece. So you talked about integrated air and missile defense, and the Strategic Posture Commission that I was privileged to serve on called for an integrated air and missile defense side. It also described the threat as being a multi-fire threat, not just ballistic missiles, but ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, manned aerial vehicles. All of those are the threat that we have to deal with in integrated air and missile defense. So from a space perspective first, and then from a joint perspective looking across all domains, how are we taking what was developed as a ballistic missile defense architecture, a ballistic missile warning architecture, and translating that into this broad integrated air and missile defense problem, missile warning problem?
Lt. Gen. Heath Collins:
I think from the Space Force’s perspective, I think we’re taking a longer view, just as you said, to the range of possible threat factors there, whether air breathing, aerodynamically maneuvering, and/or just ballistic threats overall. And you’ll see that in the modernization programs that we already have in place, some of which in the next year will begin to field. There’s a couple of things that we continue to emphasize as we look to field the next generation of capabilities. One is you want multiple phenomenologies from multiple orbits to deliver the resilience that you need in order to factor in all those potential threat factors. That’s why you see a combination of orbits that we are deploying in our space layer from out to Geo, sir, all the way down to proliferated warfighting space architecture in LEO, as well as a MEO architecture that you’ll see fielded in the near term. In addition, while we talk about space assets, and certainly a Guardian wants to talk about them a lot, you’ve got to remember, most of our infrastructure in terms of numbers of units associated with missile warning and missile defense are ground-based radars, and they continue to need to be upgraded in order to factor in those threats. Now, as you’ve seen, and Heath will talk about too, the adversaries know where these ground-based radars are, and they tend to fly around them. So there’s a limit to that. But that also speaks to the jointness of this problem. It’s not just a Space Force problem. Having the advantage of leveraging Army capabilities for mobile systems, having the advantage of air-breathing platforms to provide supplemental capability, and ultimately ship-based platforms that Heath talked about to help close some of those gaps are all part of it. And that’s why in every one of these working groups that we have to develop the next generation of capability or field them, like we’re doing with the long-range discrimination radar, Heath is the one, his team is producing it to give it to me as the customer. So I think our approach accounts for all of those threat vectors, but to your point, sir, I mean, the scale of what we were asked to do originally with a focus on North Korea and Iran is a fundamentally different proposition when you’re asking about Russia and China. And that also speaks to the challenge that is the Golden Dome of the future.
Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess:
Yes, sir, and I would say some of the things that we’re doing from a lessons learned and making sure that those aren’t just lessons observed is taking what we can from this fight and then extrapolating it into what the fight in Pacific Command might look like, in Indo-Pacific Command. And so, you know, obviously this was a less than 24-hour volley. That’s not going to be how it’s going to be in the Indo-Pacific fight. So how do we get after–you know, you talked about magazine death, but how do we get to the crews at the right tempo to be able to do that on a multiple-day campaign or a multiple-week campaign? And so those are some of the things we’re doing. And then, you know, Rock brought up, too, how we work with our other services. So being a service component to United States Space Command, I sit right next– I mean, Heath comes to a lot of our meetings, too, and thanks for that, but I sit right next to the NAV space and the MARFOR space and SMDC from the Army, and how can we work together to be able to get after General Whiting’s problems that he then can help with as a supporting commander to other combatant commands. So we do that on a regular basis to be able to use all the capabilities, all the tools that we have. But I’d also say, sir, as the execution arm of Operation Olympic Defender, where we bring our allies into this, we also have to work from–you know, maybe it’s just land. We need to be able to put something somewhere, and so we’re working with our allies, but maybe they have capabilities, too, to bring into the fight so that we can work together. And so we’re working all of those avenues to make sure that we’re ready. And then lastly, I’d just say what we do on–and I think Rock will talk about our force generation model a little bit later–but we, on a rapid process, every time we get something, we update that into our unit prep message that we send to him and say, “Hey, crews need to be trained on these changes.” These are the different things that we’ve seen. So while they’re not in their commit phase, they need to be getting after these kind of threats that we’ve seen and these kind of actions. And so I think we have a pretty good team that we put that together so that the next crews that are coming in in the commit phase are ready for whatever we have.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
So, General Collins, let me broaden the discussion into the executive order then. So 27 January, President Trump issued the executive order for an Iron Dome for America. Popularly referred to now as the Golden Dome. That’s a pretty significant challenge. I’ll just read from the executive order because within 60 days, which, oh, by the way, is three weeks from today, we have to submit to the President a reference architecture, capability-based requirement, and an implementation plan for the Next Generation Missile Defense Shield. It’s got to defend the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and Next Generation aerial attacks from peer, near peer, and rogue adversaries, accelerate the deployment of a hypersonic ballistic tracking space sensor layer, and it goes on and on and on. So that’s the challenge that’s being worked inside the department right now. A lot of significant challenges. You as the Missile Defense Agency are right in the middle of everything. So describe how you’re looking at the entire missile defense posture, especially relative to the executive order that the President has put out now that has to be answered in three weeks.
Lt. Gen. Heath Collins:
It’s quite a challenge. I think, you know, one, I always say we’ve actually been working on this architecture for 42 years since President Reagan’s SDI speech, and we’ve started and we’ve been working and growing it ever since. And it is a scalable architecture that has just recently proven the ability to connect a number of different sensors to a command and control and a decision-making system. We call it C2BMC, Command and Control Battle Management and Communication System, and then get the right data to the right shooter that’s out there in the field, whether it’s Aegis, whether it’s THAAD, whether it’s our Homeland GMD system. And so as we look to grow and expand IAMD, we do see that as a core ability to be able to expand, and every service has its own command and control system, whether it’s IBCS — a lot of acronyms here, sorry — IBCS with the Army, CEC with the Navy, BMC-3 or now coming cloud-based C2 with the Air Force, and then C2BMC. We’ve got to be able to integrate all those together into a seamless weapons system that a NORTHCOM commander can fight. And we have been working on this. It has been in our architecture plan, and today we’re very reliant on J-series messages on how we pass data between our players. That’s how we pass data to the Israelis during the fight. But we’re also working at the fire control level an interface called the Joint Tactical Integrated Fire Control Standard, and we have demonstrated the ability to take different sensors for different services and share the radar or the sensor measurement data with another command and control system through the initial instantiation we call it Joint Track Management Capability Bridge, JTMC bridge. Through that, we’ve tied an F-35 with a ship, and the ship’s been able to shoot off data from an F-35. That’s really what’s going to be at the core of IAMD. The different target types require different types of sensors and different types of sensor suites to provide 360-degree sensor coverage of the states. Depending on hypersonics, depending on ballistic missiles, we need to get that right sensor mix attached in there. We need the right C2 battle management construct, which does not exist today, that we do need to work on that to be able to fight that fight at the pure integrated level. But then we also need effectors. Certainly today, in the last year and a half, we’ve seen a lot of the kinetic effectors, both our interceptors as well as the Israeli interceptors. We do have some new interceptors that we need that we’re working on for the hypersonic missile fleet threat as well as the upgraded and more complicated ballistic missile threat that we’re going to see from up here. But we’re also not just doing that. We’re also looking into non-kinetics, directed energy, and other things. Depending on the target, some of these other capabilities, non-kinetics especially, could really help get us after that magazine depth problem that we have. And so really it’s a whole detect, decide, and defeat construct that we’ve really got to get after from surface to space, 360 degrees. And it is quite a large challenge. But since I still have members that were in SDIO back in the ’80s still on the team, they’re actually pretty energized right now because they’re saying finally we get another chance to get back at this. And we think the technology is at a much different place today than it was 20 years ago, 40 years ago. And so we’re really excited to have this focus put back on it.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
Well, let me share a personal story, and then I’ll ask each of you the same question. Because I heard what you said, Heath, and I’m still frustrated. I think most people in America were surprised at how effective our missile defenses were against the Iranian attacks in April and October of last year. I think that’s remarkable. From my perspective, I’m still unbelievably frustrated that we’re not more effective. And the reason is because 35 years ago now, I was the deputy for engineering for the Air Force element of SDI. And my job was to develop the architecture for SDI, and we developed the phase one architecture and the space base and ground-based elements of what that architecture should be. That’s the late 1980s, early 1990s. And here we are talking about the same issues that we talked about 35 years ago. So for all the panelists, what do you think the U.S. requires from your perspective in order to achieve that? And given the challenges in the acquisition business and our industrial base, what do we have to do to move fast enough to stay ahead of the challenges? So that’s a broad set of questions, but it comes from decades of frustration in this area. So I’ll start with you, Heath.
Lt. Gen. Heath Collins:
Well, great. So my motto is go fast, think big. So I thought I was pretty good with go fast, think big, and then the president completely went above my head and thought bigger and is demanding faster. So number one, I do believe one execution agency needs to be put in charge. I think the committee structure that we tend to approach joint efforts with is very, very difficult and doesn’t quite work. Frankly, I think we need the focus to stay. We’re now starting the third revolution in missile defense. The first one was in ’83 when SDI was stood up, and that was with presidential mandate to do it. And then we lost focus, we lost priority. Other things happened. And then it wasn’t until 2002 with the Rumsfeld memo and the direction, again, needed presidential mandate to get GMD, ground-based mid-course defense, fielded within two years. And we had focus and we had authority and we did it. And then we lost priority again. Other things have been going on. The focus has not been high, and the priorities haven’t been high. Buying power hasn’t been there. And so we’ve lost focus again. So now this is our third revolution. And so I think that single agency needs or service needs to have the authority to make the decisions for the entire system. I think they need to have the resources and funding and manning, and that does seem to be happening. But lastly, they need the access to senior decision-makers very quickly and not the multi-tiers of hell that you have to go through when you’re going through the Pentagon to try to get a decision made that can take a year to get an acquisition decision made within the building. We’ve got to … really go back to the future, the way the structure was set up in SDIO days. I think the structure was set up in GMD days in 2002. I think we need a similar structure there. And we need to incentivize and hold everybody accountable to support the person that’s actually in charge to make this thing happen. Acquisition, I think I could talk the rest of the day on all the different things to get after acquisition, but we certainly cannot do golden dome the way we’ve been doing business the last five years or so. It’s not fast enough. It’s not agile enough, way too risk-averse, and we’ve got to get after all of those as we go forward. I see a future with a lot of focus on designing in speed and agility into the system, a best athlete acquisition approach with constant competition and bringing in the best minds, not just the current one. And so we’ve got to continue to do that. That’s what’s really going to bring speed into this foray and bring this capability forward. There’s a lot of work to do, but I think those are just some of the foundational things.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
All right. For General Miller, General Schiess, why don’t you go next?
Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess:
Yes, sir. So, you know, as the warfighter operator and service component, I like to say I don’t buy or acquire anything, but I want more. And so what I would say to that is, and I’m thankful for folks like Heath that do those kind of things, but we have to, sir, I think we can’t wait another 30-some years to get after it because the threat is changing each and every day, and more threats are coming. And so you talked about other kind of hypersonics and, you know, what about an orbital attack from somewhere that goes around the Earth and comes back and hits us on the other side? And so, sir, I think we have to think about all the threats. We have to go big, you said, go big, think fast, go big. We’ve got to be able to do that so that the warfighters can have what they need. And then, sir, in the meetings that we’ve been in that we’ve discussed this, we can’t forget that we also have to defend whatever assets that we put in to be able to do this because then they become also targets. And so, you know, Rock talked about proliferated architectures and other things, but we have to think about the defense of whatever we have to be able to do this because we don’t want someone else to be able to get into a counter space kind of area where they can then just take out our interceptors or whatever to be able to get after it from that perspective before there’s even a missile attack. So we have to always think about that.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
Rock?
Lt. Gen. David N. Miller, Jr.:
I agree.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
Good.
Lt. Gen. David N. Miller, Jr.:
No, I would–I think that’s good. I would add two things if I can, sir. One, I think–I’m not an acquisition guy, but I’ve seen enough, you know, movies and stayed in enough hotels, called Holiday Inn Express to know this. We’ve had–as the CSO has said a couple times, we’ve been in existence for five years as a service, and more than half of that time has been under a continuing resolution where we can have no new starts and we are taxed at a rate that will constrain our ability and our buy-in power. So whatever the solution is, whatever the design is, there’s going to have to be a stable funding commitment to get this done. This is no small feat. And then I think a recognition that whatever the ultimate answer is in terms of the integrated air and missile defense capability set that is Golden Dome, it will have to be part of an operating–a credible operational concept that recognizes we’re not going to wait until they launch before we decide to do something, so there’s going to have to be some pre-launch and missile defeat activities early. And then, to your point, Doug, it has to operate as part of a credible joint force operating concept that recognizes that this is an incredible opportunity for the nation. This is a potentially game-changing capability. Adversaries will see it, and they will attack all the components of it. If we don’t operate it as part of a credible joint force operating concept where we’re going to defend in depth and provide the level of resilience and then pass an active defense and then get to a place where we can interrupt or disrupt adversary threat vectors, ultimately we’re going to have so little that we can actually have at endgame because we didn’t plan as part of a realistic opportunity. So it’s not going to be something that–they can see the benefit that we would derive from this and they’re not going to allow us to have it. So, over.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
So I want to give you gentlemen a last word, but before I do that, I’m going to tell a story. But the setup for the story is to ask you, General Collins, an unfair question. So I don’t want you to do the specific math in public just because you might embarrass yourself. But over the last, say, three months, what’s the ratio of time you’ve spent in Washington versus time in contractor factories?
Lt. Gen. Heath Collins:
I have not been in a contractor factory the last three months.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
So, when I became the commander of strategic command, this was a continuing frustration for me, this whole story. Why can’t we go faster? What’s the whole story? And so, STRATCOM has a senior advisory group chaired by Admiral Rich Meese, and it’s got a lot of interesting people. One of those individuals who was a member emeritus of that group was a guy named Johnny Foster. Johnny Foster was a long-time director of Livermore Labs, one of the greatest nuclear minds, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. He also happened to be the deputy director for research and engineering in the 1960s. And he hadn’t shown up for a STRATCOM SAG in a long time, and all of a sudden, the first one I hold, he decides to show up. And it’s a big deal, because he’s one of my heroes, he’s a hero to everybody, and he decides to show up. Why he shows up, I have no idea. I think he’s just curious what this idiot was going to do at STRATCOM. He wanted to see what was going on. And so, we’re having this discussion about why can’t we go faster, why can’t we do these things, and all of a sudden, I look over and I see Dr. Foster against the wall, and he’s 94 years old at the time. And I go, all of a sudden, it hit me. Dr. Foster, I got a question for you. So, when you were DDR&E, two people that worked for you were Admiral Hyman Rickover and General Bernard Schriever. They worked for you building Minuteman and building the entire nuclear Navy. So, how did you manage those two guys? And he laughs, and he goes, “It wasn’t that hard. Every month, I would pick up the phone, I’d call him, and I’d say, ‘Hyman, Benny, how’s everything going? How’s the family?’ ‘Everything’s going fine. Do you need anything?’ And three out of four times, I’d say, ‘Nope, we’re good. Thanks very much.’ And one time out of four, they’d say, ‘I got a problem with Congress, I got a problem with the White House. Could you go work that for me?’ I’d go work that. It’d take me a couple days. When I’d done, I’d call them up and say, ‘All right, that’s fixed. Anything else?’ ‘Nope, that’s it.'” That was DOD oversight in the ’60s, where they gave the authority and responsibility to a single person, held them accountable, and in our military today, we will give three-star generals lethal authority to apply lethal power, take human lives on the battlefield, but we won’t give them the authority to make a decision on how we buy something. That is the dumbest thing in our country, and the ability to move forward. So you give people the authority and responsibility, and you hold them accountable. It’s the basis of leadership. All right, last question. This is an amazing time in missile defense. You called it the third revolution. You can call it a third chance. But this is an amazing time. So I just want you, real quick, to share with the audience what you think missile defense looks like in five years and ten years, and ultimately in the future. Just real quick, what do you see it looking like?
Lt. Gen. David N. Miller, Jr.:
I don’t know about five years. I think that’s maybe too close for many of the reasons you just articulated, that we have a lot of stuff to get over. But I’ll give you my sense of where I think we’ll need to be using this template case of Golden Dome as an example. I think space power will be a decisive arm of the missile defense enterprise. I think it will not just be in sensors. It will be also in effectors. I think it will always be a joint approach. It will be also, I think, metastasized in the threat space that is involving not just a risk to forward-deployed forces and allies and partners, but also we’ll have to contend with air and missile threats a lot closer than people are used to. And that means that there’ll have to be levels of options that we have to apply all the way down to a base or local level, in addition to the strategic and operational systems that we’re talking about using here. And then I think the final piece that we’ll have to have is there’ll be a dedicated architecture for command and control that crosses between the pre-launch activity all the way through the missile defeat activity and attack operations, and it’ll be much more expansive than just, say, an air and missile defense as the principal primary operational objective.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
Thanks, Rock. Doug?
Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess:
Sir, I’m going to say five years from now, I know that my friend here and other friends are going to bring us the best system that we can to be able to do the mission that we have. And then my friend over here is going to organize, train, equip, and present those forces to us. And then Guardians are going to get up every day, along with their joint teammates, and do the mission so that the rest of the world says today is not the day to attack the United States.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
Heath?
Lt. Gen. Heath Collins:
So, yeah, the five years, to Rock’s point, it’ll look a lot like the systems we have today. I think they’ll be upgraded, they’ll be modified, but they’ll be positioned such that we will be able to protect the homeland from that broad array of capabilities that the threat has been working on, where there isn’t any today except for GMD against North Korea. But within five years, we are going to be demonstrating and burning down a lot of risk and increasing the tech maturity on a lot of these new concepts, space-based interceptors, directed energy, non-kinetics. We are really going to be focused on those areas to help deepen that magazine but also add extra layers to the missile defeat process. We’ll have a lot of those proven, and we’ll be getting ready to scale those and deliver those. Ten years and beyond, in the 2030s, we will have a fully–our full missile defense enterprise, missile defeat enterprise will be in place. It’ll be 360 against all threats. It’ll be agile. It’ll be fast. It will be able to scale and adjust to the threat as the threat changes. And to Doug’s point, everybody on the planet will be thinking differently when they wake up. Their calculus will be completely changed on whether they would ever take a shot at the United States. And then some of this will be a global capability. As we start putting stuff into space and more into space, if you really go back to President Reagan’s vision, his vision was a world without ballistic missiles, period. It wasn’t just not defending a homeland. He was looking to develop a capability that made him obsolete for the world. And I think in the ’30s, we may be getting to a point where we can have that conversation. Over.
Gen. John Hyten, USAF (Ret.):
So thank you guys very much. I’ll just sum up what I heard over the last five minutes, and that is we have the opportunity, really, for the first time, to build an integrated air and missile defense against all threats. That’s the first decision we have to make. Are we really going to build an integrated air and missile defense capability, integrated, with authorities in the right place in order to do it? If we do that, I think that the vision that they just described will, in fact, take place. So I’d like to ask the audience, if you would, to thank these great, great patriots for their service, and we look forward to the future.