Podcast: What's In, What's Out At The Pentagon

Robert Wall: Welcome to Check 6, where today we look at the latest program developments at the Pentagon. As tempting as it was to talk about Qatar Force One or the F-55, we've settled on the latest Oval Office pronouncement where we got more details on the Trump administration's plans for Golden Dome from the president himself. 

Golden Dome also comes with a sizeable bill, but where all that money comes from is still somewhat up in the air. But it's perhaps not a coincidence that days before this announcement, the U.S. Army's Aviation modernization plan has taken a big hit. So in today's episode, we'll try to cover both those developments.  

Joining me today for our discussion are Brian Everstine, Aviation Week's Senior Pentagon Editor, and Senior Defense Editor Steve Trimble. I'm Robert Wall, the Executive Editor for Defense & Space.  

Steve, we had another announcement from the White House with the President talking about Golden Dome. You've pointed out in your reporting there was still much that we don't know, a lot of it was vague, but give us your main takeaways from what happened this week. 

Steve Trimble: What happened on Tuesday was that President Trump selected an architecture for the Golden Dome air and missile defense system. He didn't provide any real details except that he did confirm what we've known all along that it'll include a space-based layer of interceptors as well as sensors. That's a new thing in air and missile defense.  

I think one of the real fundamental points of this that really needs to be hit home is this is a very different way of defending the homeland than we've done for decades. This is instead of just defending the homeland through deterrence with the threat of a massive retaliation and response to a first strike, either nuclear or conventional, now this says we're not just going to retaliate, we'll probably do that too, but we'll also defeat that first strike, even if it's a surprise first strike. No matter what you throw at us, ICBMs, hypersonic glide vehicles, supersonic cruise missiles, whatever it is, this thing will be able to defeat it nearly 100%. And then we'll retaliate. 

Nobody's tried something like this since President Reagan with the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was labeled as Star Wars and did not work out. Although several elements of Star Wars are with us today in the ground-based interceptor program, specifically in things like the satellite-based early warning system. Now we're going to see how this process unfolds. Just yesterday, the Missile Defense Agency put out the notice that they've established the contracting mechanism. Now they still don't have any money because that's part of this "big beautiful bill,” the spending reconciliation bill for fiscal 2025, which is I think going to a vote in the House, just a little bit after we record this on Thursday, May 22nd, so we don't know the outcome of that. There's $25 billion in there. That's the down payment or deposit as Trump called it for what he says will be $175 billion program. 

Obviously, the details of that have not been released. It does seem a bit low compared to what we think will have to be involved in that and the timeline, he said that it'll be introduced within two and a half to three years. This, of course, is an incredibly ambitious timeline, as some would say, incredible in every sense of that term just because, I mean, the comparison is the Guam defense system that is currently being developed. That's a much less ambitious thing. There's no space-based layer to it. It's just putting together some of the things we already have and assembling it into a defensive architecture for Guam. That's going to take us five years and cost $8 billion just for Guam, which is a city as I noted in the article I filed yesterday, is a city one-third the size of Houston, or sorry, it's an island, one-third the size of the city of Houston. That's $8 billion just for that. And now we're talking about the entire homeland. We'll see how this unfolds. 

The next big step is the industry day in Huntsville, Alabama coming up in a couple of weeks. That's where the Missile Defense Agency will brief the industry and the suppliers. 

Robert Wall: Yeah, very interesting. I wonder if you could talk a bit more, or Brian, if you want to jump in as well, for a long time, if we think of the ground-based system, we were talking about mid-course engagement. At times, though, there were efforts underway under MDA for a boost-phase intercept that was of course ground-based at the time. Boost-phase intercept has always been the holy grail because then the debris falls on the country that's launching it. What's your sense of where Golden Dome is going on this? 

Steve Trimble: I don't have a good sense yet, but I mean this is the challenge. It's very difficult to shoot down an ICBM no matter where it is. Right now we have the ground-based intercept, we have 44 of them in Alaska, and that's really optimized to shoot down a limited strike by a rogue nation, mainly North Korea and their small nuclear ICBM arsenal. That's to do it in mid-course, but you have to deal with decoys in mid-course, and it's obviously a difficult environment to get up to and to track effectively. Yeah, you want to do it in boost-phase because that's where the incoming missile has the least amount of energy. They can't deploy decoys, like you said, they're over their own territory so that's always good if you're going to be blowing up a nuclear warhead. 

I mean, the challenge with that is you have to be over their territory with your intercept capability at the time that you're doing this and that's very challenging. Even if you use satellite-based interceptors, that's seen as the solution. But even then, because you're talking about low-earth orbit and those orbital dynamics mean that you have to have thousands of satellites with interceptors circling the globe at any given moment, there's only going to be a few, a handful over any individual site on the Earth. Keep in mind these missiles can be launched sure, from their homeland. They could be launched from a container ship. They can be air-launched. They could be submarine-launched. There's a lot of different places where you need these interceptors to be, and then so you would have to launch a lot of them to provide adequate coverage. 

I talked to somebody, a consultant with Arcfield, which is a consulting engineering services company for the Missile Defense Agency and their CEO, Kevin Kelly, he gave me a different idea and he said, actually, he thinks the better way of doing it is keeping your space-based layer, your interceptor layer over the homeland essentially. I mean, they're not over the homeland because they're still orbiting the earth, but you're optimizing the orbital trajectories over this one specific site on the earth rather than try to cover the entire Earth all the time equivalently. That simplifies the problem a little bit because you're only defending a certain amount of space, but the key is you have to shoot down those missiles when they're in the reentry phase. 

Again, that's a very difficult thing to do. There's also hypersonic glide vehicles, which are going to be lower than the definition of space and you've got Fractional Orbital Bombardment Systems as well, which are a combination of ICBMs and HGVs that are launched in this orbital trajectory and then reenter before they complete the orbit. Those would usually be coming up through the southern approach to the United States, which is another challenge in this whole thing because all of our early warning and tracking systems are based on a northern-based attack. Again, I mean, we're just giving you just a small sampling of the vast complexity of something like this, and we don't have a lot of detail to really fill out yet. But what we do know is that this is going to be very complicated, probably is going to take a lot longer than what the White House said yesterday and maybe cost a lot more as well. 

Robert Wall: Brian, what struck you out of what's come out now the last few days, but really the last few weeks since obviously we've been talking about Golden Dome now for a couple of weeks? 

Brian Everstine: Well, I thought it was interesting that Trump picked General Guetlein, the Vice Chief of Space Operations to oversee the whole effort. I guess my kind of expectation going into this be would be an MDA-led thing. General Collins could take the lead on it. This comes as, I mean General Saltzman was on the Hill, was it yesterday, the day before, and a couple of times in the past couple of weeks just saying how overstretched the Space Force really is and losing budget as the Space Force has been growing. I'm always interested with the take of why it's a Space Force really thing going forward. Steve, I don't know if you have any input on how that direction will go. 

Steve Trimble: I mean, the other biggest problem with approaching Golden Dome is how you do it from an organizational point of view. This thing crosses so many organizational boundaries. I mean, it involves the Space Force, the Space Development Agency, the Missile Defense Agency, Space Command, NORAD, NORTHCOM, SOUTHCOM, INDOPACOM, I mean you name it. So who gets to call the shots? I mean, we've heard General Guetlein is the nominal program manager, but how will it actually get administered through the different agencies is still something I don't understand yet. I mean a huge part of this is the command and control, which we haven't really talked about. 

Keep in mind, you're going to have to figure out some way of effectively commanding and controlling defense from an attack that could come from any direction with all different types of missiles. Right now our command and control systems for air and missile defense attack are splintered between at least four different organizations and four different systems. They don't talk to each other right now, those systems aren't designed and coded to, so they have to figure out a way to do that. This is a very big challenge and imagining that they could actually do this in two and a half to three years is kind of boggles the mind. 

Brian Everstine: I'm just curious, as this evolves as the industry today happens, how mature it's really going to be. I mean, over the past probably month or two, I've been getting outreach from so many different companies, going from the smallest tiny counter-UAS to big satellite prime saying, hey, we can be a part of the Golden Dome, just knowing that there's a lot of money to be made in it, the $175 billion or so. But it's immature that it feels like just a free-for-all of companies that throw, hey, we can provide this, we can provide this. It will be a great part of it. 

Robert Wall: That kind of gets also to the point I wanted...let me just throw that in, it’s still a bit unclear to me. Obviously the focus right now is on the space-based element, particularly the intercept element, but to what extent are they tying your SM-3s, your THAAD, all that in or is that just assumed that that's there? And yes, there'll be a C2 element to bring it together, but actually really the money, the $175 billion or whatever, the real number is probably upwards of that as you point out, is really for the Star Wars part of Golden Dome. 

Steve Trimble: I don't know what the architecture is, they haven't released it, so I'm speculating. But the way this thing would normally, you would think it would work, it would be something like what Israel has or what Guam has, and it's a layered system. It starts with that space-based interceptor capability with the space-based early warning and tracking capabilities. And then you have a shot that may be for boost phase or it may be for boost phase and reentry or just reentry, we'll see how that shakes out. We've still got a limited ability to target missiles in mid-course with the GBI and at some point the next generation interceptor that Missile Defense Agency is working on right now. And then there's going to be a terrestrial underlayer of interceptors. These include the things that we already have Aegis Ashore with SM-3, SM-6. It could be THAAD, it could be Patriot, could be NASAMS. It could be the kinds of things we've seen in Ukraine with the FrankenSAM and these other types of error and missile defense capabilities.  

There's also going to be an air ecomponent to this as well with E-7s, well, if they survive the budget, which is still a big question which we wrote about last week, directing fighters to shoot down cruise missiles and loitering munitions and so forth that could be launched from submarines or bombers or whatever. I mean, so all of that is part of this, and what you're trying to do is defend the major population centers, just like in Israel. I mean, Israel allows a lot of rockets to hit their territory. If they know that the rocket is just going to hit empty space and is very unlikely that somebody's going to get hurt, they just let it go. That's going to be similar to the United States, I'm sure. 

Robert Wall: A bit harder with a nuclear warhead. 

Steve Trimble: Nuclear warhead complicates that a little bit, but there's still a lot of places in the country you could probably let go, even with that. But you still got all these population centers, and I think it was Senator King that pointed in the hearing last week, that there's 750 cities in the United States with a population over 50,000. And so if you try to defend all of them equally and provide equivalent protection, you're talking about a lot of interceptors, a lot of ground-based interceptors. Are you going to put those in silos? Are they going to be on trucks? How are you going to defend them? How are you going to command and control them? 

These are all questions I have about that because I mean, that's where things start getting really expensive is just managing this vast footprint of missile defense capabilities. I mean, it takes you back to the 1950s and 1960s when we had Nike surface terror missiles and some with nuclear warheads ringing cities around the country. I don't know if we're talking about something similar now, but you would expect something like that would be necessary if they're going to try to provide this comprehensive near 100% coverage that President Trump was talking about. 

Robert Wall: Well, we said we were going to also talk a bit about Army Aviation. Brian, you were down at Quad-A. It must've been quite subdued. Again, we don't know that Army Aviation is taking the hit here because they're looking for money to put into Golden Dome, but clearly they are taking a hit and the money will have to come somewhere. It may be linked, it may not be linked, but it does seem like once again, and certainly not for the first time in Army Aviation history, quite a traumatic moment for their modernization strategies. I mean, Steve and I have covered various iterations of this in decades past and just seems like another one of those, my God, where's Army Aviation now going? So maybe you can give us a sense for how bad was the atmosphere at Quad-A?<\/p>

Brian Everstine: Well, first to back it up just a few weeks. This really started at the end of April or so with a memo from Defense Secretary Hegseth laying out a restructured approach to what the Army needs to field prioritizing long-range missiles, some undisclosed unmanned systems fielded for each division. And then the next day, General George and Army Secretary Driscoll put out what they're calling the Army Transformation Initiative that kind of gets more into what changes the Army needs to make. As we've heard over the past few weeks and really came clear in Quad-A, that army Aviation is really taking a big hit to the level that it surprised even the top leaders of Army Aviation themselves. 

We were talking ending the improved turbine engine program was probably one of the biggest things, the re-engineering program for the Black Hawk and the Apache, we have some less surprising moves like retiring AH-64D Apaches moving to an all AH-64E fleet, cutting the Gray Eagles, which will leave a big gap in ISR for the army. We have the ending of the Future Tactical Uncrewed Aerial System. One thing that I thought was pretty notably that broke while we were at Quad-A is the direction to halve the projected fleet of the HADES, high altitude ISR jet. What Army leadership was saying at the event was they were expecting some of these cuts. They put forward some of these suggestions, especially the Delta model Apaches, but they were very surprised by how deep they came. 

One thing that I thought was surprising that some of the Army leaders was talking about is they were just preparing with a few days after Quad-A ended to go to an AROC—an Army Requirements Oversight Council meeting—that was going to go over planned cuts. They were going to go deeper into what some of these impacts were, but instead these came out right before they really had a chance to really wrap their heads around them. The mood was definitely pretty subdued. 

You had some people saying that, "Oh, they're going to walk this back." Even some of the Army leaders saying, "Oh, this will probably eventually be walked back." Or kind of putting some programs on notice, putting some companies on notice so you have... One thing I was asked about repeatedly from industry down on the floor was Army Secretary Driscoll's comments on a podcast about a week before saying he would put it as a success, a point of pride if a prime contractor went out of business. 

The Army leadership is really trying to put industry on notice, and the understanding is within the communities, there's not really an understanding of what the impacts are going to be from this. We have the budget coming up here in a few weeks, I hope, knock on wood, we will get some more understanding on it. But the takeaway as of now is some of these big programs, ITEP, FTUAS, HADES, are going to get hit or be cut, but FLRAA for now is still going to go forward. Say FLRAA for now is the top priority so we'll see how that goes. 

The schedule has really gotten jumbled and at Quad-A, they laid out a new approach trying to accelerate the fielding to the first unit by about two years. But getting there is kind of a complicated process where they've pushed back major acquisition milestones, they've pushed back Milestone C. They've pushed back the CDR, Critical Design Review when putting a lot of faith in the maturity of the prototypes going through tests so there's a lot of confusion and there's an expectation that more is coming. We'll see how that plays out. 

Steve Trimble: I think we have to look at this not just as a budget exercise or light items in a budget. This goes to the core of how the Army wants to operate and how they're going to be able to operate in a modern conflict. What the Army wants to do with multi-domain operations, use their long-range precision fires to open up gaps in enemy ground-based air defense system, exploit that with these high-speed future vertical lift. Now the MV-75 Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft that Bell is working on to insert small teams deep behind enemy lines, cause chaos in those areas, and then be supported by Apaches, be supported allegedly by Gray Eagles launching air-launched effects these little small mini drones that are capable of doing various types of things. That was the idea that they've been laying out, they've been selling.  

The question is, does the new administration in particular buy that approach? Do they think that it is viable in the context of the conflicts we've seen in Ukraine versus Russia where you've seen helicopters and UAVs like the Gray Eagle take a real beating? This extends even to Yemen and the Houthi struggle where we've lost 20 MQ-9s in the last several months. The battlefield is becoming much more lethal to especially low flying, slow, not very agile type aircraft with no ability to really make them stealthy in any part of the spectrum. It's a hard place right now for army aviation.  

This has been a trend. I mean, as Robert was pointing out, we've seen this happen before. It really goes all the way back to Cheyenne. That was what they were trying to make Army Aviation more survivable by getting to that higher speed. It was way beyond their capabilities in the early 1970s so that got canceled. Then they turned to stealth and then in 1980s with the Commanche and that got canceled in 2004 after an investment of a lot of money, including a brand-new engine, which they brought up to fully developed the HTS 800 from Honeywell ready to turn that into a production aircraft. But they walked away from the program and walked away from that engine. And then they went back to a mix of distributed effects and speed with rotorcraft, with Future Vertical Lift. That started with the future attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, which of course was canceled, that was going to be powered by the ITEP engine, the GE T901, which is another engine that the Army has funded, poured billions of dollars into in decades to fully develop. And basically it's ready for production cutting. I mean, there's still some more testing that has to be done, and now they're going to walk away from that too. I mean, two fully developed turbo-shaft engines that we're never actually going to use, apparently, if these cuts go through. Not to mention the airframes so this is not the first time this happened. 

Army aviation is always getting picked on. I think some of that is just where it sits bureaucratically in the organization. Some of that seems to also be this recognition of the threat that you're dealing with in a modern conflict, not against insurgents or paramilitary type operations. But even there, it's getting a little dicey as we've seen with the Houthis. We'll see how this plays out. Congress still has a lot to say about where this goes with army aviation, and it's just the start of the process. The administration doesn't get to call the shots necessarily on these types of things. In an absolute sense, Congress does have a say. So we'll see how this works out, but there's a lot going on in that whole area, I think. 

Robert Wall: Brian, what's your sense on the, you mentioned it, Steve mentioned it, how much pushback is there going to be from Congress? I mean, we've seen occasionally hearings where one lawmaker and another will push back on an administration initiative, but we really not seen any big moves, certainly. And maybe it's too early. 

Brian Everstine: I think there will be some pushback. I mean, we've already seen, was it a week or two ago with Congresswoman DeLauro bickering with Secretary Driscoll about the Blackhawks. I think that there'll definitely be some more pushback on long-term Blackhawks, potentially ITEP. I've already started to hear some rumors of Haiti's getting a little bit of support. So it's inevitable that there will be some congressional pushback. It's hard for me to not think that this is just the beginning for all the services. The Army is just the first out of the gate. 

I think Secretary Driscoll, I don't remember the timing if he was the first confirmed, but he's really been the first to be really active going out and shape his service. You got to see this coming soon with the Air Force. We've already talked about the wedge tails. There's got to be more coming there, especially as you have huge bills coming on. Nuclear modernization with Sentinel. The Navy is even potentially a bigger problem with shipbuilding. So it's hard not to see this as kind of a model for where the other services are going to go as well. 

Robert Wall: All right. Well, why don't we leave it there for now. Lots more to come on this. Clearly lots of fodder for future episodes, that's for sure. Thanks Steve and Brian. Thanks also to Guy Ferneyhough, our podcast producer for putting all this together. Thank you all for listening in and tuning in. If you have a moment, you've heard me say this before, please take a few seconds and give us a five-star review ideally on Apple or wherever you get this podcast. As always, please check back soon for another episode of Check 6.