“It’s been a great day so far. I have just come from the White House, where the Golden Dome is a primary position today, and the urgency for that and the excitement behind that and the movement for that is there. Momentum is pushing this thing forward, and it’s exciting to see.
We’re here today on our 85th roundtable virtual, and this one is on Golden Launchers. I want to just step back on how this fits into the overall Golden Dome position, because I think we have to stay focused on what the main element of Golden Dome is, and that is the C2. That is the ability to command and control, number one, of all the data that’s going to come from all the sensors that can detect any launches anywhere coming towards the United States. To be able to give that data to the commanders, to be able to process that data and send that data out to effectors or so forth.
The second thing is that systems of systems have integrated everything together. They can’t be confused as a C2. It’s system integration with whatever is out there that we have, whatever we’re going to develop next, is to be able to integrate, and that’s what R&E does best. That’s what we think we do very well at.
Then the third thing is what we’re talking about, being able to do cheap, I wouldn’t say cheap, I’m not going to say cheap, but capacity, a capacity of capability that we have to go mass. We’re not in a position where we were doing North Korea and Iran with small numbers now. Now this is about mass on mass, and we have to be able to show that. I think one of the key cool things here, we’ve got one thing here, this golden launcher that I think, well, not think, believe that will be a part of that mass that we’re talking about as we scale up with Golden Dome to have a capability that can be put on containers and be able to have multiple different types of effectors on that to be able to handle that.
That’s the discussion we’re going to have today. We have some great speakers today. As we know, the history of the container of the VLS is a Navy history. They are the ones that created the multi-mission VLS for their destroyers. I don’t know, 40, 50 years ago, we’ll go into that history, but they’ve used them effectively, obviously, both offense and defensive capabilities, and so good that, Tom, you’ve been part of that, of moving it on land to some critical sites in Europe and Romania and Poland and testing sites. It’s a very effective way to do this on that.
I want to just introduce that the Army has also now, because it’s such a great idea, not now, but years ago, have also their variant of being able to do that aspect with Navy inventory, with SM-6s and Tomahawks. To give you a good perspective, and I think we’re going to get heavy focus on it, but I like to start off with an Army perspective of how valuable this is and the sense of what the strategy is behind having something like this. We have an esteemed board member, Lieutenant General retired Jamie Jarrard, who was the Deputy Commander of US Army Pacific, where a lot of the Army capability in this measure is being put forward with our allies in that area of the world. I always like to say he’s a special forces guy, and also very proud to say that he is a Georgia Bulldog to his heart. Jamie, you get to go. You’re up.”
—Mr. Riki Ellison, MDAA Founder and Chairman
Speakers:
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Jamie Jarrard
Deputy Commanding General for the U.S. Army Pacific
Rear Admiral (Ret.) Tom Druggan
Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense, MDA
JD Gainey
Former Senior Analyst, USINDOPACOM and National Security Affairs and Advanced Technologies
Riki Ellison
MDAA Founder and Chairman
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