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Golden Dome Director Gen. Michael Guetlein speaks Sept. 14 at the Air & Space Force Association's Air, Space and Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland—As the Golden Dome’s command-and-control (C2) system takes form, senior U.S. military leaders see a key role for artificial intelligence (AI) to help human operators sift through the reams of data coming off of the multiple systems coming through that nascent network.
The U.S. military has to make decisions “at machine speed” rather than human speed, to counter a growing missile threat, Golden Dome Director Gen. Michael Guetlein said Sept. 14 at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference here. When it comes to Golden Dome, he sees a “scalable” application of AI that can help leaders present options in times of war or peace.
“During times of peace, it can be 100% human in the loop,” he said. “And then, as the threat starts to accelerate it, and the operational tempo of the fight starts to accelerate, we can move more and more toward more and more automation.”
U.S. Northern Command Commander Gen. Gregory Guillot, whose command would be a key operator of the Golden Dome architecture, said his team is “very receptive to AI.
“If we’re building a system to defeat the threats that we anticipate seeing, which could be waves, swarms, all domains simultaneously, we would have to have AI to give our operators the choices that they need to quickly make those decisions,” he said.
Guetlein’s office has prioritized the development of an integrated C2 system since kick-starting the program more than one year ago, and has completed two tests of the system over the past year that he described as “effective.”
From the beginning, he has incorporated operator input into the design of the system to make sure it is capable of working with the full scope of adversary systems under the Golden Dome umbrella, from ICBMs to cruise missiles to air threats, Guillot said at the conference. That integration is critical as the U.S. military expects to field Golden Dome C2 nodes at “different locations,” rather than in one centralized location, he added.
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