Space Force will play ‘central role’ in Iron Dome, service chief says

The Area Drive will play a “central position” within the Pentagon’s efforts to develop a homeland missile protection protect, or Iron Dome for America, in accordance with the service’s high officer.

President Donald Trump issued an govt order in late January calling on the Protection Division to develop an “Iron Dome for America” — a extra superior model of Israel’s Iron Dome, designed to counter a variety of missile threats, together with hypersonic weapons.

The order highlights a number of space-based parts of this structure that construct on present capabilities just like the Missile Protection Company’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Monitoring Area Sensor program and the Area Growth Company’s Proliferated Warfighter Area Structure, which features a constellation of missile warning and monitoring satellites.

Chief of Area Operations Gen. Probability Saltzman advised reporters Monday that given the manager order’s emphasis on house programs, it’s pure the service would play a key position in its improvement, including that the service has established an built-in planning staff, or IPT, to discover choices in response to the order.

“I believe we now have a central position to play,” Saltzman stated. “We’re leaning ahead establishing this technical IPT to begin fascinated by it from an overarching perspective.”

The staff is evaluating what programs the Area Drive already has in improvement to help the president’s order and what capabilities it might have to construct. From there, it’s exploring questions round technical feasibility and drafting value estimates based mostly on present packages, in addition to its projections for what a extra superior structure would require.

The IPT will seemingly finalize that early evaluation within the coming weeks — a truncated timeline that may require “lots of triage,” in accordance with a senior Area Drive official who spoke to reporters Monday on the situation of anonymity.

As soon as full, the Area Drive’s IPT work will likely be shared alongside comparable evaluation being performed by U.S. Area Command, the Nationwide Reconnaissance Workplace and the Missile Protection Company. Senior DOD leaders will then conduct a sequence of evaluations to find out subsequent steps, together with what packages to begin.

The official famous that the Area Drive’s intent is to offer an trustworthy evaluation of the place the expertise stands at this time and what’s possible to ship — notably in the case of fielding space-based interceptors.

“One of many worst issues to do is chew off a technical problem that you would be able to’t remedy in an inexpensive value body, an inexpensive timeframe,” the official stated. “We’ll be very forthright with, ‘Right here’s the place we expect the expertise stands.’”