Hearings to examine Department of Defense missile defense activities in review of the Defense Authorization Request for Fiscal Year 2026 and the Future Years Defense Program.
Senate Subcommittee on Strategic Forces
2025-05-13
Source: Congress.gov
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ensures that we remain capable of fighting for and from Guam, meeting the challenges of today and tomorrow. Thank you again for the opportunity to speak with you about this critical mission and the joint commitment to the defense of Guam. Thank you. Thank you, General Resch, and thank you all for your opening statements. We don't have too many of us here today, so we may have more than one round of questions. I'll begin the first round. General Guillaume, I appreciated our past conversations about the need for increased domain awareness, for we cannot shoot what we cannot see. As we look towards Golden Dome and the future of missile defense, what additional improvements need to be made with respect to domain awareness?
Madam Chair, I think that what I call the domain awareness layer of Golden Dome is the most critical that we need to have first for the reasons that you just mentioned. Any chance of using advanced interceptors or defeat capabilities would not be possible if we can't detect and track these threats. I think that it's a seabed to space approach. We need to have undersea sensors to detect submarines that can now get closer to North America than they could before based on improved stealthiness of those ships, and then a ground layer that can see much further out because of the advanced standoff weapons that our adversaries can now employ. We need an air layer like the E-7 to close the kill chain with fighter aircraft or surface-to-air systems, and then a space layer. The space layer would both track airborne moving targets or aircraft, but also systems like HBTSS that could track hypersonics as well as the warning capability that we need to detect the launches to begin with. Is there anything you can tell us in this setting about Golden Dome and the options that may be available on the sensors and the radar systems that would be used? Madam Chair, I don't know what the Golden Dome will look like, but I suspect that it would be able to use a lot of the systems that are already in place and currently in development, which would give us a full capability in probably something closer to zero to five years as opposed to something a decade out into the future. A couple of those systems would be the HBTSS that I just mentioned for the hypersonics. Space-based AMTI, which we have a number of prototype systems on orbit now, over-the-horizon radars, which are also operational, not in the United States, but elsewhere.
So given that, how much risk would Golden Dome incur if the department was forced to vacate? the lower three gigahertz or portion of the seven to eight gigahertz spectrum that it now has? Madam Chair, it's my assessment that we would assume an extraordinarily high level of risk if we lose control of those portions of the spectrum. Many of the systems that we rely on every day today, much less in the future, for homeland defense reside in that spectrum range. Thank you. General Collins. Can you provide us with an update on the hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor, or the ABTSS system?
Yes, Madam Chair, thank you. So the hypersonic ballistic tracking space sensor is a prototype program that MDA pursued to prove out the technology such that from space we could close the hypersonic fire chain, the kill chain on a hypersonic weapon. And the focus of that was to prove out that the space system could have the accuracy, the track quality, and get that data into the command and control system fast enough to be able to close that fire control loop. Those two systems launched in February of last year have gone through two test bed launches where we had a test bed target launch, fly a hypersonic profile, and we have collected data from the sensors during that. So far we have proven out the timeliness latency of the fire control loop with those systems as well as the sensitivity of those systems to close the loop. We're going back with some algorithm updates into the payload to improve on the track quality, but we see that closing as well. It's been a very successful prototype program. And all along, we've worked in parallel with the Space Force and the Space Development Agency. They now have our HBTSS-like requirements as part of their proliferated warfighting space architecture. And in the tranches to come in the follow-on years, they will slowly be building up an operational hypersonic tracking layer for us. Thank you.
I'm certainly in favor of defending the homeland against missile attack, no question. My fundamental question is, is it feasible, given today's technology and also the cost involved? I'll quote Lincoln, your critic is your best friend, so take it in that spirit. For example, Ziafi, you mentioned deterrence by denial. Is that really viable today, deterrence by denial? Can we realistically say that we could deny a substantial missile attack from Russia or China or, heaven forbid, both?
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