“Good afternoon and welcome, ladies and gentlemen, from the heart of innovation in the world, Silicon Valley, here in Woodside, California, on a stunning day, as always in California.
I’m Riki Ellison. I’m the founder and chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. I’ve been involved with Missile Defense for 40 years, pre-SDI, all the way back to 1980, to founding MDAA 24 years ago. We only have one mission, and that is to make this world a safer place with the deployment, the development, and the evolution, revolution of missile defense to make our world safer. And over the last nine days, 170.5 million people are safer because of missile defense. That is a statement, and that is what every nation in the world must do. That revolution is happening, and we saw that 13 nations have been struck by ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones by one nation over the last nine days. That includes Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Iraq, Syria, Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Jordan, and today Turkey. So, congratulations to the layered missile defense capabilities of the legacy systems that were there and are there today in defending all of those countries.
This is our 93rd virtual Congressional Roundtable, our title, The Epic Revolution of Missile Defense in the Fury of the Middle East. We look over those past nine days, because we’re going to take an assessment from our perspective on missile defense. We’re not here to discuss how or why this thing happened or what the solution is. That’s not our mission. We are strictly missile defense to make that region safer than it is today and to focus on what the lessons are being learned drastically from that.
From my perspective and open-source material, we have intercepted over 1,000 ballistic missiles, intercepted a few hundred cruise missiles, and intercepted over 2,000 drones. And this aspect is that our offensive capability added another 30 percent defeat before those missiles could have been launched. And that is left of launch. This is one of the first times we’ve seen this in full operation with left of launch and right of launch. And it doesn’t really matter too much. Well it does matter some. It is not the capacity of the missiles and ammunition they have. It’s the launchers that enable that. And the offensive capability has done a tremendous job in taking out the launchers, the kill chain, the manufacturers. So that has been huge.
But with all this, we have to recognize the ultimate sacrifice. And I want to recognize and point out that one of the first casualties was a missile defense soldier out of Saudi Arabia on the first day. One of ours, Sergeant Benjamin Pennington. So I just want to recognize that and understand the sacrifices, the ultimate sacrifice it takes to do this phenomenal mission. That’s happened.
So I think there have been three to four major movements in the revolution of missile defense that has happened over the last nine days.
I think the first one is the offense defensive integration. I know we’ve done it and we do it great on Aegis ships with Tomahawks and SM-3s, SM-6s, and SM-2s. But this collaborative effort to be able to plan, strike, and be able to do missile defense together. I don’t think missile defense will ever be non-singular ever again. It’ll be an integration with our offense.
I think the second biggest thing is the absolute requirement for layered missile defense from ballistic all the way down to drones and terminal missile defense. That’s what we watched. And so this is an interesting message to Golden Dome. The Golden Dome has been predominantly space-based for space operational capability. And the world has maybe changed that perspective of what that priority is a little bit to make sure that the layered missile defense capabilities from land up are in place and have as much priority as a space-based capabilities.
I think the third biggest movement is the cost curve one. And this is probably the most frustrating one for us because we’ve been at the fight of this. But to have a cost curve revolution in our face in a drastic way, where I believe there are four billion dollar systems and TPY-2 radar THAAD systems that have been taken out. And the radar taken out, which is probably a $300 to $500 million radar, but it enables the entire batteries of all the THAAD missiles and the Patriot MSE missiles. But most importantly, the early warning time it gives. It gives Israel about nine minutes, they don’t have that anymore. It is just baffling that a $20,000 Shahed takes out a billion dollar system. It is shocking. People have to be held accountable for that. You better have 100% PK or you don’t have fixed radars anymore.
And the issue is bureaucracy. Ukraine, three years ago, has shown proven capabilities against drones with both detection and shooting them down with $5 machine gun bullets. That technology has been real, is working, and yet we, the United States, or those 13 countries, didn’t choose to do that. And I can say for the United States of America, we gave, personally, two years ago, that acoustic sensor capability and the automatic gun capability right into the building, right into R&E, right into the previous administration. We tested, developed it, and proved it. It didn’t need to be proven, but we did all the Death Valley things and it was taken. It was Death Valley because it probably didn’t have a cost margin of any significance, and it probably was a threat to the majors.
You can’t do this anymore. The revolution is here, and there’s no way you should deploy another system of this magnitude and take it from somewhere else in the world and not be able to defend it and send it there to lose another billion dollars. We got a problem, and it has to be solved, and it will be solved. I think that’s why you’ve seen this administration, this Department of War, Secretary of War, the Deputy Secretary of War, going as hard as they can to revolutionize our aged systems. They’re doing a good job. I’m not questioning what they’re doing. We’re congratulating them for what they’ve done and what they’ve done these nine days. But the evolution of missile defense has just happened, and we have to learn fast and furious with our ability to defend our people and the Middle East and the world.”
—Riki Ellison, 93rd MDAA Virtual CRT
Executive Summary
I. Introduction
The Virtual CRT “The Epic Revolution of Missile Defense in the Fury of the Middle East” brought together MDAA Chairman Riki Ellison with Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery and Lieutenant General (Ret.) Jon “Ty” Thomas to assess what recent combat in the Middle East reveals about the future of missile defense. The discussion was framed not as a geopolitical debate over causes or diplomacy, but as a lessons-learned session on what modern missile defense now requires in practice: offense-defense integration, true layering from ballistic missiles down to drones, and much faster adaptation to a battlefield where low-cost threats can impose strategic effects on high-value systems.
II. Strategic Context: Missile Defense Has Entered a New Combat Era
The speakers argued that the last several days of conflict demonstrated a genuine shift in the character of missile defense. Ellison described a battlespace in which ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones were employed across a broad regional footprint, while defensive systems intercepted large numbers of inbound threats and offensive actions also degraded launch capacity before weapons were fired. The session’s central premise was that missile defense can no longer be treated as a standalone activity: it must be understood as part of a broader combat system combining left-of-launch strikes, right-of-launch interception, and persistent operational adaptation.
III. Layered Defense Is No Longer Optional
A major theme of the CRT was that recent combat reaffirmed the absolute necessity of layered defense. The participants stressed that legacy systems such as Patriot and THAAD still matter and remain indispensable, but they also argued that existing architectures have exposed a dangerous missing layer: short-range air defense and point-defense counter-UAS capability against low-cost drones. In their view, the lesson from both Ukraine and the Middle East is clear: a defense architecture that can handle ballistic missiles but cannot cheaply and reliably defeat Shahed-type drones is incomplete and vulnerable.
IV. The Cost-Curve Problem: Cheap Drones, Expensive Vulnerabilities
The discussion repeatedly returned to the cost curve. Ellison argued that recent events exposed the strategic absurdity of allowing a low-cost drone to threaten or disable radars and defensive systems worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. Montgomery and Thomas agreed that the central failure was not the existence of the threat, but the failure to field low-cost defensive layers that have already been demonstrated elsewhere. Their shared warning was that missile defense cannot remain economically upside down, with exquisite, expensive systems exposed to attritable threats unless those systems are surrounded by cheaper protective measures.
V. The Real Failure Was Institutional, Not Conceptual
All three speakers emphasized that the technology gap is not the core problem. Their argument was that affordable counter-drone concepts, acoustic sensing, automatic gun solutions, and other point-defense approaches have already been visible in Ukraine and discussed for years. What prevented adoption, in their telling, was bureaucracy, cultural resistance, legacy thinking, and an acquisition system that remains too slow and too comfortable with old priorities. Thomas added that senior leaders often trust the systems they grew up with and are reluctant to embrace unfamiliar but workable alternatives, while Montgomery argued that the government had ample warning and still failed to act with urgency.
VI. The Indo-Pacific Warning: Adversaries Are Learning Too
Thomas pushed the discussion beyond CENTCOM and argued that the most important audience for these lessons may be the People’s Liberation Army. He warned that China is observing how relocatable but still vulnerable sensors and key nodes can be found, targeted, and degraded, and that similar pressures could be brought to bear against U.S. and allied architecture in the Indo-Pacific at far greater scale. His point was that this is not simply a Middle East problem or an Army problem. It is a theater-wide and joint-force problem that affects air base defense, key sensor survivability, maritime operations, and the ability to sustain air and missile campaigns under pressure.
VII. Golden Dome, Innovation, and the Need for a Different Acquisition Mindset
The CRT also connected these battlefield lessons to the larger Golden Dome conversation. Ellison argued that the recent fighting should rebalance attention toward layered defense from the ground up, not only toward space-based capabilities. Montgomery suggested that one path forward is to accept cheaper, less exquisite defensive weapons in larger numbers rather than insisting on near-perfect, high-cost interceptors. Thomas and Ellison both pointed to academia, small innovators, commercial cloud providers, and programs such as ARTEMIS and USC SHIELD as examples of how faster, cheaper, less-classified problem-solving can supplement the traditional defense process. The underlying message was that innovation must be pulled into the operational fight now, not admired from a distance.
VIII. Conclusion
The Virtual CRT concluded that missile defense has crossed into a new era shaped by mass, layering, speed, and affordability. The recent fighting in the Middle East showed that integrated offense-defense operations can be highly effective, but also that critical vulnerabilities remain wherever low-cost drone threats are not met with equally practical and layered defenses. The session’s central takeaway was that the future of missile defense will belong to those who can combine legacy systems with lower-cost point defense, adapt faster than bureaucratic processes normally allow, and build architectures resilient enough to survive in both the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. In the words and spirit of the panel, the revolution is already here; the real question is whether institutions will move fast enough to match it.
Speakers:
Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery
MDAA Board Member
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Jon “Ty” Thomas
MDAA Board Member
Mr. Riki Ellison
MDAA Founder & Chairman
Winners Associate with Winners to Win!