“Defense wins world championships, and you’re seeing that today. And the defense that’s in place has come from here, you’re the heartbeat. And we are grateful for what Huntsville, Alabama has done over the past 30 years to be able to defend 13 nations, 170.5 million people. Your systems are defending that. Without that, this would not be a war, we would not be able to do it, and millions of people would be dead. So there is a lot to be thankful for on the legacy systems that are out there today, doing what you designed it to do, and the engineering of what took place to make that happen. And as we know, one of ours, there is sacrifice. And I just want to reach out and recognize Sergeant Benjamin Pennington. Day one, day one, Air Defense, SMDC Command, gave the ultimate sacrifice for the defense of those 170 million.
I’m Riki Ellison. I have a love affair with Alabama a little bit.
I first came to Alabama on September 23, 1978, and played on Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama, against Bear Bryant and the number one team in the country. And came from a University of Southern California, which was a different culture than Bear Bryant’s culture. To say the least, right? We were not the junction boys in suits and ties and all that. We were undisciplined off the field, hippie-ish, all of that. But we brought a beating to him, and we won the national championship that year. But Bear Bryant and Alabama have a relationship of change of culture with USC. Years earlier, Bear Bryant had an all-white football team in 1970, and came out and played USC. We had an integrated team, and we beat them. And the next year, he started integration.
I’m saying to you in this community, you have to change your culture. Just like Nick Saban did. Because you’re not going to win with the culture you’ve got today. You have to change it. And that’s already in motion.
The Secretary of War, before this war happened, this administration is forcing change to bring in innovation rapidly and to give what the war fighters want in the field. The days of being fat and happy for 25, 30 years with a limited opponent and doing risk-adverse oversight bureaucracy is done. You cannot win that way anymore. We are playing against China, against Russia. And for the reality of losing four TPY-2 radars, four THAAD systems that are about a billion dollars apiece by $20,000 drones, the revolution has happened. I highly doubt that we’ll end up ever having set radars like that that are not mobile. Those days were over.
And the issue I have, a lot of us have with this community, not with this community, because you’re not to blame here. It’s the requirement, guys, in the building that are to blame. And they have to be held accountable for a loss of that magnitude. And that loss is not only the ability to coordinate THAAD and MSE missiles under attack, but it’s early warning that’s gone from seven minutes to no minutes. And if you cannot defend a fixed-site radar, why would you replace that? Why would you even build any more? This is the reality of what we’re fighting right now. And Russia and China are giving Iran targeting information intel on how to defeat our systems.
So two years ago, because innovation is it, we’ve watched three years of Ukraine crush it in innovation and implementation of rapid technologies that are proven, that are deployed from a $5 50 Cal bullet on an automated machine gun locked into acoustic sensors to take out Shahed threes every day. Yet we’re too big, too smart. Nothing else better than that here to take those lessons and to be able to do what they’re doing. Why didn’t we do that?
And I was there two years ago, and I took it right to the building, to R&D, to A&S, to our co-colleagues. And it went down to the valley of death because either there’s no cost margin in it and the majors were threatened, or we had something else better and promised, like we always do, a year out, two years out, but they didn’t produce. They didn’t produce. You have to be able to do a complete layered missile defense all the way down, and our gap, you can talk about Coyote Roadrunner and all that, but when you are attacked by 700 Shahed drones, that ammo goes out quick.
This community has to change to be able to put small innovation, quick innovation, that’s happening. That’s happening. You can’t stop it. You can’t stop it. So I just got a little fired up about it because of that cost ratio of a $20,000 drone on a $300 to $500 million radar that takes out.
Okay, so anyways, let me just back up a little bit, and I think one of the best ways to communicate the overall situation with missile defense, from Golden Dome all the way down to the war in Iran, is I like to just go through what I’ve done in the last four weeks.”
—Riki Ellison, SMDWG Special Session. Huntsville, Alabama. March 12, 2026.
Executive Summary
I. Introduction
The March 2026 Strategic Missile Defense Working Group discussion featured MDAA Chairman Riki Ellison in a wide-ranging exchange on the urgent need to transform U.S. missile defense culture, acquisition, and architecture in light of recent combat lessons and the accelerating push for Golden Dome. Ellison argued that current wars have exposed a dangerous underlayer gap in U.S. and allied defenses, especially against low-cost drones and lower-tier air threats, even as legacy high-end systems continue to prove their value. His central message was that the United States now has both the strategic opportunity and the operational necessity to move faster, take more risk, and build a more layered, mobile, data-driven defense enterprise.
II. Strategic Context: War Has Changed the Missile Defense Problem
Ellison framed the current moment as a turning point. Drawing on combat lessons from the Middle East and Ukraine, he argued that the United States and its allies can no longer rely on exquisite, fixed, high-cost systems without adequately defending them against cheap, massed threats such as Shahed-type drones. He emphasized the stark cost imbalance between low-cost attacking systems and billion-dollar radars or major air defense assets, warning that recent battlefield experience has made clear that static architectures and slow acquisition cycles are no longer survivable. In his view, the operational environment has shifted decisively, and missile defense must now account for attacks from the top layer down to the lowest-cost underlayer threats.
III. Culture Change as the Core Requirement
A recurring theme of the discussion was Ellison’s argument that technology is not the main limiting factor; culture is. He praised the missile defense community’s legacy achievements but argued that the existing acquisition and oversight culture remains too risk-averse, too slow, and too comfortable with long timelines, high costs, and bureaucratic protection of legacy processes. He contended that the nation cannot win future conflicts with a system that resists rapid innovation, delays adoption of practical capabilities, and prioritizes career safety over battlefield urgency. For Ellison, the necessary culture change must come from both top-down leadership and bottom-up pressure from industry and operators willing to challenge stagnation.
IV. Golden Dome: Opportunity, Momentum, and Internal Resistance
Ellison described Golden Dome as the central organizing initiative for the future of homeland and wider missile defense. He portrayed himself as actively engaged in White House, congressional, and defense-community discussions to help push the concept forward, while also warning that Golden Dome still faces resistance within the bureaucracy and skepticism from parts of the political system. He argued that Golden Dome must outlast partisan politics and become a durable national defense priority. He gave the initiative a grade of “B,” saying its core architecture is taking shape, especially in the space and command-and-control layers, but that vulnerabilities remain in the lower-tier defense of fixed sites and terminal nodes.
V. The Underlayer Gap: The Most Urgent Operational Weakness
The discussion repeatedly returned to what Ellison described as the most urgent deficiency in U.S. missile defense: the inability to defend major systems and fixed assets against large volumes of cheap drones and other lower-tier threats. He argued that adversaries have identified and exploited this gap, while U.S. efforts to solve it have lagged behind battlefield reality. He pointed to Ukraine’s use of layered, low-cost defensive solutions and argued that the United States should be learning faster from those examples. He also stressed that homeland defense cannot be credible unless the country can protect critical infrastructure and military sites from the kinds of drone attacks that are already reshaping wars abroad.
VI. Mobility, Layering, and Data-Centric Architecture
Ellison argued that future missile defense must be layered, distributed, mobile, and deeply integrated through open command-and-control systems. He expressed strong skepticism about the long-term viability of fixed-site radars and defended a future architecture built around mobile sensors, containerized launchers, integrated missile mixes, and data-sharing across services, agencies, and allies. He emphasized that Golden Dome’s true value lies not only in interceptors but in the ability to process massive volumes of sensor data, connect disparate systems, and enable faster fire-control decisions. He suggested that commercial data and cloud expertise from major technology companies will be essential to making such an architecture work at scale.
VII. International Dimension: Canada, Europe, and the Eastern Flank
Ellison also situated Golden Dome within a broader international defense framework. He described engagements in Brussels and Wiesbaden focused on what he called the Eastern Flank deterrent line, a proposed architecture stretching from Norway to Turkey that would link sensors, cloud infrastructure, command and control, and allied contributions across Europe. He argued that this effort reflects a new model built around open, non-classified data-sharing rather than traditional closed bilateral command systems. He further stressed that cooperation with Canada is essential, describing it as the foundational test case for any broader “global Golden Dome” concept. His position was that allied integration will be easier than internal U.S. alignment, because the harder political and budgetary fight is within the American system itself.
VIII. Acquisition Reform and the Role of Small Innovators
Another major theme was Ellison’s call for faster contracting, more risk tolerance, and greater inclusion of small innovative firms. He said the current environment offers smaller companies a rare opportunity to break in, particularly if they can demonstrate real, credible, field-relevant products rather than paper concepts. He suggested that current leaders are deliberately trying to shift work away from sole reliance on major primes and toward more open competition, especially in data and C2. At the same time, he acknowledged that access remains difficult and that speed requirements are already closing some doors. His advice to industry was blunt: get products tested in real operational environments, prove they work, and move quickly.
IX. Lessons from Ukraine and the Middle East
Throughout the session, Ellison pointed to Ukraine as the leading example of practical adaptation to modern air and missile threats. He highlighted Ukraine’s layered, distributed, low-cost approach to tracking and defeating drones before they reach defended areas, contrasting that with the far more expensive U.S. model. He argued that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are now directly shaping Golden Dome by proving the need for open data-sharing, rapid iteration, left-of-launch thinking, and cheap counter-UAS capacity. In his view, these wars are accelerating change by exposing vulnerabilities that can no longer be ignored.
X. Conclusion
The discussion’s central conclusion was that missile defense is entering a new era defined by urgency, adaptation, and disruption. Ellison’s message to the working group was that the opportunity is real, but only if the defense community breaks from legacy habits and embraces a culture of trust, speed, realism, and innovation. Golden Dome, in this view, is not merely a new program; it is a forcing function for a broader transformation in how the United States builds layered defense for the homeland, supports allies, and integrates low-cost and high-end capabilities into a single architecture. The challenge now is not conceptual. It is whether the defense enterprise can move fast enough, honestly enough, and boldly enough to meet the threat.
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