President Trump recognizes the grave threats posed by adversary ballistic and hypersonic missiles and has issued mandates for the Department of Defense to deploy a “Golden Dome” defense shield for the country. Significant taxpayer investment has already gone towards the arsenal of sensors and shooters for our existing missile defense and more will be needed. The organizational and manufacturing challenges will be immense, unlike anything the Defense Department (DoD) has faced in generations, perhaps since Schriever’s ballistic missiles or Rickover’s nuclear fleet. 

The primary limitation to achieving the capability will not be the physical hardware, but the ability to connect all the components. Of all the development tasks, the most critical technical hurdle in Golden Dome will be its data architecture. And of all the personnel hires, one of the most critical will be the Chief Data Officer (CDO), directly reporting to the Program Director, who will have direct control over the overall data architecture and network, and its implementation on Golden Dome hardware. In an environment with a greatly expanded number of interactions between sensors and shooters, the likelihood of a gap or security blind spot increases exponentially — unless the supporting data architecture is built to account for it from day one.

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