The event took place as part of the Defense Department’s Technology Readiness Experimentation, or T-REX, a semiannual showcase and evaluation staged at Camp Atterbury in Indiana. The event aims to validate prototypes built to fill urgent capability gaps across the military services and combatant commands.

Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry, commander of the Pentagon’s Rapid Assessment or Prototype Technology Task Force, told Defense News in an interview Monday that DOD plans to host at least two Top Drone schools each year.

The goal, he said, is to provide a chance for service members, industry and academia to prove out tactics, operational procedures and drone capabilities on a test course that mimics the kinds of terrain and adversary effects an operator might see in the field. It also allows the department to validate and refine its own counter-uncrewed aircraft system sensors.

“It’s a dual effect of data collect but also benefits the warfighter and industry flying through this threat-represented and emulated environment,” Limeberry said.

For the inaugural, four-day event, the task force set up a training course at the Muscatatuck Training Center just south of Camp Atterbury, designing it to imitate an urban setting and focusing on maneuverability, endurance and reconnaissance. Two companies, Vector and Code 19, flew drones alongside two service partners — the Army’s Combat Lethality Task Force and its Aviation Center of Excellence.

The drones were a mix of untethered first-person view systems and fiber-optic-connected drones.

The department also staged a trial at a separate test range at Camp Atterbury that was supporting T-REX where the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team conducted live fire demonstrations.

Limeberry said he was impressed with how well service members participating in Top Drone performed, navigating and identifying targets. For future events, he hopes to expand the trials over multiple weeks to allow operators to “refine” their tactics against more complex obstacles.

The department is also building a secondary Top Drone course at Camp Atterbury to emulate a more dense, wooded environment.

“As we continue to scale the complexity, it will be an a la carte menu of [electronic warfare] jamming and providing a real-world, adversarial threat-informed environment that we need to fly with and through to make sure that we’re staying competitive,” Limeberry said.

Senior leaders in the Pentagon in recent months have ramped up their drive for what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called “drone dominance.” The intent is for the military services to not only field more drones to operators, but also develop the organizational and training infrastructure to support broader adoption by 2027.

Top Drone supports that push as did much of last month’s T-REX event, which focused on low-cost, attritable attack drones as well as counter-uncrewed aircraft system technologies like interceptors and sensors.

Over the course of the two-week showcase, the department assessed 58 technologies, some of which were sponsored by a military service or combatant command and others brought by firms that had never engaged with the Defense Department but had technology with the potential to address a critical capability gap.

Of those technologies, some number will progress into joint, rapid experimentation and others will require further development and iteration or experimentation. Limeberry noted that DOD has a number of innovation pathways aimed at further maturing technology and T-REX is a good way to identify which route makes the most sense for a particular capability.

“The goal of T-REX is to come out and you find your best transition partner, an innovation pathway that fits the need of your company or fits the need of the government, depending on where the gap and critical need is,” he said.

Decisions about which technologies will transition into the rapid experimentation phase are pending, Limeberry said. He expects the team will brief Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael in the coming weeks and have a determination before the end of September.

Along with the technology demonstrations, T-REX also featured static displays from another 50 companies whose capabilities are in an early stage of development. Those capabilities may be considered for participation in future T-REX assessments.

“They were showcasing emergent and urgent capabilities but didn’t have the capacity yet to fully assess and put their prototypes into the environment, so we put them on a prototype technology display,” Limeberry said.

The mid-August special user demonstration at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington was part of a project called Launched Effects, a term the Army coined to describe a class of autonomous system that isn’t quite a drone or a loitering munition but can be launched from the ground or a vehicle to provide a range of effects — from targeting and surveillance to kinetic strike. The systems are designed to scout high-value targets in hard-to-reach terrain where a soldier might not have a clear picture of what’s happening on the battlefield.

The service plans to field short, medium and long-range Launched Effects, or LEs, in the coming years, and a key part of its strategy is to continuously iterate on and update those systems based on soldier feedback and mission requirements. That’s a departure from more traditional acquisition programs that can take years to set a requirement, develop and test a system — all before an operator ever touches it.

The Army’s approach closely aligns with a push from senior leaders in the Pentagon to significantly ramp up efforts to arm U.S. military units with drones and other unmanned systems. In late April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed Army leadership to equip every division with launched effects by the end of next year. Following Hegseth’s memo, the Army announced a new strategy, the Army Transformation Initiative, that emphasizes the need for more autonomous systems.

Then in June, Hegseth issued a broader directive, instituting a wave of acquisition reforms aimed at making it easier for the services to buy and field unmanned systems. The goal, he said, is “drone dominance” by 2027. While the Pentagon hasn’t defined what that end state looks like from a quantity perspective, the message is clear: Senior leaders want to get autonomous systems into the hands of operators, and fast.

In an interview after the demonstration, the Army’s program manager for uncrewed aircraft systems, Col. Danielle Medaglia, said that while the service’s Launched Effects initiative predates these Pentagon directives, the urgency and high-level tasking from Hegseth is key to aligning priorities within the service and making sure the program sticks to its delivery timelines.

“What this did was really allowed us to get the advocacy we needed to issue launched effects as quickly as possible to the soldiers,” Medaglia told Defense News. “We have been given that flexibility from the Army acquisition executive to do exactly that, and by saying, ‘field to each division by 2026,’ that also helped align all of our teammates.”

Soldier feedback

The three-week event here had multiple aims, but chief among them, officials said, was soldier feedback on whether the first batch of short-range Launched Effects systems is user friendly and relevant to their mission needs.

In March, the service chose three off-the-shelf short-range systems that will serve as a baseline for the effort: RTX’s Coyote Block 3, Anduril’s Altius 600 and AEVEX Aerospace’s Atlas. It bought a limited number of each vehicle and distributed them to three units during the user demonstration in August, with each unit focused on a single system.

Brig. Gen. Cain Baker, director of the Army’s Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, said in an interview that while the service has experimented with Launched Effects at several exercises, the user demonstration was the first time it gave them to operators for hands-on training.

“Getting that feedback from the soldiers, from the commander in the field, helps us drive industry from the standpoint of what are the pros and cons of the capability,” Baker said. “From a larger perspective across the Army, it drives our doctrine, our organization, the materiel solution, the training aspect.”

During the first week of the demonstration, each of the three 7th ID units participating in the event conducted initial equipment training on their assigned system. They learned how to set up the LEs, integrate them into their mission planning and use the flight controllers. They also conducted simulated flights.

In week two, they operated the systems live for the first time, running through the setup protocol and tracking their flight path.

For the third week, the units once again flew their systems but this time they applied them to a tactical scenario and had a chance to operate multiple vehicles at one time.

According to soldiers and service officials, the demonstration was largely a success. Army leaders — from engineers to program executive officers — said they were impressed with how quickly soldiers adapted to the new equipment and their enthusiasm around incorporating them into operations.

Medaglia said it’s too early to provide a distilled rundown of the lessons learned, but she noted that the event provided invaluable data that will shape future training, requirements and operational concepts.

“Each of those units did not interact with each other and you saw them fight it in their specific way, with their experience and their type of expertise,” Medaglia said. “It really opened our aperture on how we could leverage LE moving forward.”

Defense News was on site during the second week of the demonstration, when units were transitioning from the classroom to the training ground.

Spc. Jacob Richter, whose unit experimented with AEVEX’s Atlas, said he came into the demonstration with no experience operating drones. He said the classroom and simulation training prepared him well for the live flight and described the system as easy to use.

“It was a seamless transition,” Richter said. “The flight simulator they had mimicked the flight almost perfectly. There was almost no change.”

Access to LEs means units can use an autonomous system to scout a target or gather other intelligence, and then a second vehicle can act as an attack drone for the strike mission. Richter and 1st Lt. Zach Glenn said the scout capability could allow them to fly further into restricted spaces and lessen some of the security concerns that come with sending human operators to perform that mission.

“We can use the scout drone to know what’s ahead of us, and we can also use the attack drones with the scout to eliminate the assets we’re worried about,” Glenn said. “If we’re worried about the enemy detecting any type of [electromagnetic] signature we’re putting off with our radios, we can eliminate that ahead of time. It’s just added security. It’s another tool in the toolkit we can use.”

Lt. Col. Michael Wallace, battalion commander for the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, said getting feedback from soldiers like Glenn and Richter allows him to refine operational concepts based on their experience with the system.

“They’re identifying some of the limiting constraints of employing it, they’re seeing what the capabilities are, how to integrate it into their operations,” Wallace said. “They’re providing that to guys like me that have a little bit more experience on how to refine that and nest it with how we fight and how we do operations.”

Wallace noted that getting systems in the hands of soldiers is about more than familiarizing soldiers with how they work — it’s a chance to let them experiment and decide how the technology might augment or support their mission in a way someone on the outside might not have envisioned.

“I think that’s what all these great civilians are out here trying to do is get the items in the hands of the warfighter so that we don’t see it for the first time when we’re downrange,” he said. “We’ll continue to iterate on it, provide feedback and ultimately they can help inform a capability that’s going to make the whole Army more lethal and more ready.”

Continuous iteration

The Army plans to leave some number of systems behind with units at Joint Base Lewis-McChord to continue training and improving the capability, but the service is still defining its longer-term strategy for fielding the first round of Launched Effects.

In late July, the Army approved the program’s acquisition strategy, which uses what’s called an urgent capability acquisition pathway — an approach reserved for high-need programs slated to field in two years or less. That label, according to LE Product Manager Lt. Col. Hunter Gray, gives the program flexibility to move fast, regularly update its requirements and reopen competition to new vendors.

“It’s something that allows us to move very quickly, to adopt technology that’s ready to issue to units today and to iterate — to provide a continuously upgraded capability that’s driven by user feedback and the most current state of the technology that we’re seeing in industry,” Gray told Defense News.

That level of openness will require the service to find a balance between leveraging commercially-available equipment and making sure the systems it delivers are operationally relevant. The plan right now is to initially field off-the-shelf platforms like those it demonstrated last month and then survey industry every six months to see what new capabilities might be available, never committing to a single vendor but rather always soliciting new ideas solutions.

Maj. Chris Dudley, assistant product manager for Launched Effects, said in an interview at the event that the Army’s strategy is a significant departure from other acquisition programs that spend years on the front-end building an exquisite system with little to no operator input.

“We’re sort of inverting the process and trying to get it into the soldiers’ hands first, and then we’ll iterate and develop on the findings that we have,” he said.

As the Army makes its plans for fielding the baseline short-range LE systems, the service is also eyeing medium and longer-range systems using the same acquisition approach. Officials said the recent special user demonstration will inform the process for buying, fielding and crafting training plans for those platforms as well.

At the same time, the service is working to make sure that its architecture for Launched Effects is modular — from the launchers they fly from to the controllers used to operate them. Having a plug-and-play infrastructure not only makes the system versatile and simpler to integrate, but it makes it easier for vendors to design systems that fit those specifications.

Baker, director of the Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, said the plan is to have that architecture defined over the next 18 to 24 months.

“What we want is really an agnostic capability to launch from air to ground,” he said. “What we don’t want is to buy one type of specific launched effect to do one type of mission set and then another launched effect to do another mission. We want modularity with the program.”

Each company received a contract worth up to $200 million, according to a notice from the Chief Digital and AI Office. The firms will help the Defense Department develop agentic AI workflows for key national security missions.

“Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems,” Chief Digital and AI Officer Doug Matty said in a statement.

The military services have adopted generative AI tools to varying degrees and for a range of tasks — from tech support to finding files. Agentic AI uses more advanced reasoning to address and act on more complex challenges.

The Pentagon didn’t specify what missions the program would support, but the department has said it wants to use AI in areas like intelligence analysis, campaigning, logistics and data collection.

Following the announcement, Elon Musk-owned xAI — whose conversational AI chatbot goes by the name Grok — unveiled a U.S. government-specific production line called Grok for Government.

Grok has come under scrutiny after an update generated a slew of racists and antisemitic comments. In one instance, the chatbot referred to itself as “MechaHitler.”

The award follows Musk’s months-long push from within the White House to slash federal spending. Amid a public falling out earlier this summer, President Donald Trump has threatened to cancel government contracts awarded to Musk’s companies. Under this new deal, however, the billionaire’s federal work would expand.

Hegseth announced the policy changes in a video recorded on the Pentagon’s front lawn. With Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” playing in the background, a quadcopter delivered a memo announcing the policy changes, which Hegseth then signed.

“While our adversaries have produced millions of cheap drones, before us we were mired in bureaucratic red tape,” he said in the video, which he posted from his official X account. “Not anymore.”

The memo lists three broad goals: bolstering the U.S. drone manufacturing base, delivering thousands of low-cost systems to military units over the next few years and integrating drone operations into training programs.

“Next year I expect to see this capability integrated into all relevant combat training, including force-on-force drone wars,” Hegseth wrote in the memo.

The announcement builds on a June 6 White House executive order that calls for normalizing drone operations and integration into the national airspace as well as investment in production and emerging technologies across commercial, civil and national security sectors.

Specifically, Hegseth’s expansive memo rescinds past policies established by the Defense Department in 2021 and 2022 that provide guidance for implementing congressional mandates that restrict the U.S. military from buying drones and components produced by Chinese companies. It gives procurement authority to combat units to buy, test and train with small UAS that comply with statute and encourages “local innovation” like 3D printing parts.

The memo also references a Defense Innovation Unit-led effort called Blue UAS — established in 2020 as a process for certifying commercial drones for military use. According to the memo, DIU will now work with the Defense Contract Management Agency to scale its “Blue List,” an inventory of compliant drones.

“The Blue List will be dynamic, retaining all previous component and supply chain findings, and including updated performance evaluations from testing and key lessons learned from training,” the memo states.

The document says that DOD has failed to field UAS at speed and in the numbers that the modern battlefield requires. It calls for department-wide reforms to how the military services buy drones and directs the secretaries of each department to “modify or delete” any policies that overregulate testing, training, procurement and fielding.

Further, it directs the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps to each create active duty formations by September, built for the sole purpose of scaling the use of small drones across DOD — with initial systems delivered to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command by 2026.

The services must also create and resource “unsubordinated program offices” focused entirely on rapidly acquiring drones. The memo also tasks them to identify, by September, any existing programs whose requirements would be better met by uncrewed systems. The services will be required to detail improves they’ve made to acquisition processes as part of their fiscal 2027 budget submissions.

Hegseth also tasks the Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Strategic Capital with presenting financing options — like direct loans or advance purchase commitments — to inject funding into the U.S. drone industrial base.

“Our adversaries have a head start in small UAS, but we will perform a technological leapfrog and establish small UAS domain dominance by the end of 2027,” Hegseth wrote. “We will accomplish this urgent goal by combining the Nation’s best qualities, including risk-taking. Senior officers must set the tone. Accelerating this critical battlefield technology requires a Department of War culture.”

In a memo released Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced plans to restructure the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, known as DOT&E, and reduce its 94-person staff to 46 — a mix of civilians, military personnel and one senior executive. The memo also put an end to all contractor support to the office.

The decision sparked concerns from some congressional Democrats, including Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed, D-RI, who called the move “reckless and damaging.”

“With staffing reduced to a skeleton crew and limited contractor backing, DOT&E may be unable to provide adequate oversight for critical military programs, risking operational readiness and taxpayer dollars,” Reed said in a statement. “This kind of politically motivated interference undermines independent oversight and leaves warfighters and the public more vulnerable to untested, potentially flawed systems.”

Hegseth said the reorganization is tied to the Pentagon’s “America First” strategy and was backed by an internal review that identified “redundant, non-statutory functions” within the office. The analysis, he said, found that reducing personnel could save more than $300 million per year.

But multiple sources familiar with the decision and granted anonymity to speak freely told Defense News the circumstances are more complicated than the scenario the secretary described in his memo. They pointed to perennial tensions between the military services and the office, stoked in recent months by an atmosphere of touting quick, programmatic successes that is antithetical to the exacting mission of verifying performance claims over time and under varying conditions.

The sources also cited senior leadership’s frustration with DOT&E’s recent decision to add Golden Dome to its “oversight list” as being the final provocation.

“It’s a perfect storm,” one source said.

Mandated oversight

The DOT&E office was created by Congress to provide independent oversight of major defense acquisition programs. Its leaders are required by law to approve testing plans and report results for all Defense Department programs whose total research and development cost exceeds $525 million —in 2020 dollars — or whose procurement is expected to cost more than $3 billion.

The list of efforts under DOT&E oversight currently features over 250 programs, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon and the Navy’s Aegis modernization program.

The office’s role as an overseer means its recommendations are sometimes unpopular with military service leaders and major defense contractors alike. But the aim of its rigorous, and often arduous, validation is to prevent the department from fielding faulty systems that could put service members in harm’s way.

Golden Dome’s cost — estimated at $175 billion over the next three years — and its complexity make it a clear candidate for DOT&E oversight, the sources said.

The process for initiating DOT&E oversight of a program is fairly straightforward, but when DOT&E’s Acting Director Raymond O’Toole notified senior leaders in a recent memo that he planned to add Golden Dome to the list, the decision drew an unusual level of scrutiny.

Officials worried the office’s involvement would slow the program down and drive up its cost. They eventually elevated their concerns to the White House.

That extra attention appears linked to President Donald Trump’s interest in the program, one source said, noting the office was told the program “needed to be successful for Mr. Trump.”

Pet project

Golden Dome became the president’s signature defense project early in his second term. In a Jan. 27 memo, he directed the Pentagon to draft a plan for a layered network of ground-and space-based interceptors and sensors to detect, track and defeat a range of missile threats.

Initially calling the project “Iron Dome for America” after Israel’s missile defense system of the same name, Trump rebranded it to “Golden Dome” — a nod to his vision for a “golden age in America” and perhaps his own penchant for the precious metal.

In an Oval Office meeting last week, flanked by Hegseth and a top Space Force general — as well as multiple images depicting a map of the U.S. covered in gold — Trump said the Pentagon would deliver “the best system ever built” before the end of his term.

While there is wide agreement among defense officials and outside experts that the U.S. needs a more focused investment in its missile defense architecture, Trump’s schedule and cost projections have raised eyebrows.

With actual details on the project still slim, some have questioned whether Golden Dome’s biggest technological lifts are feasible and worth the long-term cost.

“I don’t think we should read much into the $175 billion figure because no details or caveats were provided,” said Todd Harrison, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. “I want to see something on paper that shows what’s included, what’s not included, and the time frame of the estimate.”

This week’s DOT&E cuts likely mean the office will be under-resourced to oversee all of the Defense Department’s major programs, let alone Golden Dome.

One source familiar with the office speculated the “drastically reduced” staff could allow the Pentagon to get away with slimming down the office’s oversight list.

Reduced testing oversight could allow Golden Dome to move faster, but sources said it would be concerning for a program with such high-stakes ambitions to escape scrutiny.

“It would be hundreds of warheads coming in with all kinds of countermeasures, cyber attacks,” another source said. “That’s usually beyond the scope of a program and a service test office to be able to orchestrate all that.”

In the document, released publicly today, Hegseth said the move to restructure the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, or ODOT&E, supports the Pentagon’s “America First” defense strategy. The memo would reduce its staff to 30 civilians, 15 military personnel and one senior leader.

“A comprehensive internal review has identified redundant, non-essential, non-statutory functions within ODOT&E that do not support operational agility or resource efficiency, affecting our ability to rapidly and effectively deploy the best systems to the warfighter,” Hegseth said.

The reduction would amounts to a more than 50% cut to the office, a defense official told Defense News. Prior to the reorganization order, the office was staffed with 94 personnel — 82 civilians and 12 military members. The department estimates the changes will save more than $300 million annually.

The Pentagon’s test and evaluation office oversees the process for validating weapons and platforms across the Defense Department. While the military services have their own test teams, the DOD-level office sets policies, provides oversight for major programs and serves as an adviser to the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, among other responsibilities.

One of the office’s more public-facing tasks is publishing an annual testing update on the department’s major weapon systems, including the F-35 fighter jet, the Navy’s Columbia-class submarine and the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon. The report also assesses the health of the test and evaluation enterprise, including its equipment, ranges and other testing facilities. The most recent report was released in January.

In a statement Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, said the cuts to the independent testing organization put servicemembers — and the nation’s security — at risk.

“How is it ‘efficient’ to gut the office responsible for testing our equipment and making sure it’s safe for servicemembers to use?” Warren said. “This dangerous decision should be immediately reversed.”

The personnel cuts will come through a “targeted, deliberate and expeditious” civilian reduction in force, according to the memo. RIF notices will be distributed early next week and personnel who are not retained will be placed on administrative leave. All leadership currently classified as senior executive service will also be put on leave.

ODOT&E civilians who are employed by one of the military services will transfer back to those offices.

Beyond the workforce reductions, Hegseth calls for ending all contractor personnel support within seven days of the memo’s release.

“If ODOT&E decides it needs to support contractor personnel after adjusting to its base statutory mission set, ODOT&E may request such contract support with Deputy Secretary of Defense review after an initial 60-day acclimation period,” the document states.

The memo also appoints Carroll Quade, currently the Navy’s deputy for test and evaluation, to perform the duties of ODOT&E director effective immediately. Quade replaces Raymond O’Toole, who has served as acting director of the office since January, following two prior tours in the acting role.

“Mr. Quade will assume all duties of the Director, overseeing the transition and ensuring ODOT&E’s statutory requirements remain effective and in compliance with statute,” the memo states.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include new information from the Defense Department and reactions from lawmakers.

“I’m pleased to announce that we have officially selected an architecture for this state-of-the-art system that will deploy next-generation technologies across the land, sea and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors,” Trump said. “Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they’re launched from space. And we will have the best system ever built.”

Trump also announced he has appointed Gen. Michael Guetlein, the Space Force’s second in command, to oversee the effort, which has become one of the president’s signature defense projects just months into his second term.

Guetlein, currently vice chief of space operations, previously led the Space Force’s primary acquisition organization, Space Systems Command. There, he oversaw major development efforts and helped streamline the space enterprise’s notoriously fragmented acquisition system. Earlier in his career, he served as deputy commander of the National Reconnaissance Office and program executive officer for programs and integration at the Missile Defense Agency — two of the organizations that will play a significant role in building out the Golden Dome architecture.

“I greatly appreciate your trust in me … and your trust in the team to deliver this,” Guetlein told Trump. “It is a great day for America.”

Trump first announced plans to develop an advanced, layered homeland missile shield in the early days of his second presidency, issuing an executive order that called for a 60-day study of architecture options. The capability is expected to include a mix of ground and space-based interceptors designed to defeat a spectrum of threats — from lower-end weapons to advanced hypersonic and cruise missiles.

While the current homeland missile defense system focuses on threats from rogue nations like North Korea and Iran rather than from peer adversaries like China or Russia, Trump’s homeland missile defense shield would focus on addressing threats from peer adversaries, as well as those rogue threats.

Beyond his cost and schedule projections — and an assertion that Canada had signed on to be part of Golden Dome — Trump was light on details about the architecture and approach to fielding what many analysts and officials have called a bold and challenging endeavor. He alluded to fielding space-based and hypersonic interceptors but offered little more about the scope of the project.

Trump’s promise Tuesday to deliver the layered, integrated system in around “two-and-a-half to three years” would require the Defense Department to field the more advanced elements of the architecture years ahead of schedule. For example, the space-based missile interceptors that he said will be part of the effort have not yet been developed. Meanwhile, hypersonic interceptors are not expected to be developed and delivered until the mid-2030s.

While the more advanced elements of Golden Dome will take time to deliver, several pieces of the architecture are already in various stages of development.

That includes a space-based missile defense and tracking layer comprised of satellites and sensors that can identify and monitor high-end missile threats, which MDA and the Space Force are currently developing and fielding. Those capabilities are part of the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture and could potentially be scaled to support Golden Dome.

Republicans in Congress have largely been supportive of Golden Dome.

In February, Sens. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. — both of whom were in the Oval Office for Tuesday’s announcement — introduced a bill that proposes $19.5 billion for Golden Dome in fiscal 2026.

Their bill, the Golden Dome Act, proposes the addition of Aegis Ashore Systems for U.S. territory — which took years to install in Romania and Poland — and the use of blimps for detecting complex threats. The Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD, at Fort Greely, Alaska, would be expanded and upgraded with next-generation interceptors along with a brand-new interceptor site on the East Coast.

Meanwhile, the House GOP included $25 billion for the project in its budget reconciliation package for fiscal 2025 — a number that Trump referenced and validated in his remarks Tuesday.

Asked how confident he is that Congress will fully fund Golden Dome given the administration’s $175 billion cost projection, Trump called the process “easy.”

“It’s amazing how easy this one is to fund,” he said. “Some funding is tough and some is easy. When we say we’re going to save everyone’s lives in a crazy world, it seems to be very easy to get.”

Trump noted that Golden Dome systems will be made in the U.S., but didn’t confirm whether contracts had been awarded. Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., highlighted the work that L3Harris, which is based in his home state, is doing to build out the current space-based sensor architecture.

Sullivan also referenced Lockheed and RTX, who have developed ground-based missile interceptors, while noting that the project will also likely involve more nontraditional defense contractors. Lockheed won the contract last year to build the interceptors that will replace the current ones.

“It’s all across the board in terms of companies. Sen. Cramer and I just met with a bunch of them last week that are interested in this,” he said. “Our technology sector is head and shoulders above any other place in the world, and they’re going to be a key part of this.”

The Senate passed a six-month continuing resolution, or temporary spending bill Friday, after Congress failed to reach a budget deal before a midnight deadline. The bill includes an extra $6 billion for the military, but otherwise freezes spending at the last fiscal year’s levels, or around $825 billion.

Considering Congress didn’t pass a supplemental defense bill, as it has in recent years for Ukraine, that amounts to a 10.6% drop in military spending, according to data provided by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

The massive cut comes at a bizarre moment for Pentagon spending, which is being pushed in multiple directions by multiple parts of the government.

On one side are those pushing to cut, or at least reallocate, parts of that budget. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said he plans to fire 5% to 8% of the civilian workforce and also shift around $50 billion in future funding requests toward his priorities. Add to that the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s attempt to slash the federal government, which is already identifying cuts to defense spending.

On the other end are officials calling for massive increases to the defense budget. Senate Republicans, including Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi, want to add $150 billion to the military starting in fiscal 2026 and are in negotiations to do so. The White House, meanwhile, has pledged to surge America’s sluggish shipbuilding industry and build a “golden dome” missile defense system so ambitious that a general last week likened its goals to the Manhattan Project.

“It’s pushing on the gas with one foot and the brakes with two feet,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, an expert on defense spending at the American Enterprise Institute.

Temporary spending bills, such as the one passed Friday, usually stunt the military’s growth, halting new programs and production lines. This one is different. In order to limit the damage to the military, the bill allows such flexibility for weapons programs included in the House and Senate’s proposed defense spending bills, which are now otherwise obsolete.

Congressional aides said these exceptions will help the Pentagon avoid the whiplash involved in these short-term spending bills, which have become a chronic issue as Congress fails to pass budgets on time.

Military leaders were less sanguine.

“We are seeing an enormous amount of threats emerging every single year, and it is very hard to get after those threats when you have to wait two to four years to get the budget,” said Gen. Michael Guetlein, vice chief of space operations, in a Senate hearing last week.

Appearing alongside him, the vice chief of naval operations argued that the lack of a full budget will further delay maintenance for America’s warships, one-fifth of which are on track to miss their schedules.

“It’ll certainly be a setback,” said Adm. James Kilby.

The Trump administration has promised a reindustrialization of America, and in response started slapping tariffs on countries from China to Canada to members of the European Union. Those last two include 25% levies on steel and aluminum, which will likely increase costs for American arms makers and, by extension, the Pentagon.

That said, analysts who study defense spending said it was still too early to tell how much those costs will grow.

“It’s unmeasurable” at this point, said Mark Montgomery, an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

A massive surge in the military’s budget, like Wicker is calling for, could help limit the issues caused by the continuing resolution’s sudden drop in spending, Montgomery argued. But military leaders would need to know how much money is coming and how it will be divided among the services.

Those factors haven’t yet been decided in Congress, and without answers, the Pentagon is planning its future budgets without knowing how much money it will have or what programs it might need to sacrifice.

“It’s pretty devastating,” said Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the Air Force’s acting head of space acquisition and integration.

The drop in funding is one problem, Purdy said, speaking with reporters last week. But a much bigger one is the stiff rules about how the military can spend its money, forced by temporary spending bills like this one.

The continuing resolution allots more authority than usual to the Pentagon, including the ability to carry over more money from the previous fiscal year without letting it expire. It also allows more flexibility for the administration to move around funds without Congress’ approval.

But the extent to which that freedom will help is not yet clear, leaving officials like Purdy confused and discouraged.

“If we’re not allowed to move money where we need to move with congressional approvals … we’re basically just going to run off a cliff on many programs, and we’re going to be all-stop across the board,” he said. “It’s going to be kind of a disaster.”

“It’s going to take concerted effort from the very top of our government,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said Wednesday. “It’s going to take national will to bring all this together. It’s going to be a heavy lift across all the organizations that are going to be participating.”

In an executive order signed just one week into his second term, Trump directed the Pentagon to start making plans for a “Golden Dome” missile defense capability made up of advanced sensors and interceptors designed to track and neutralize both traditional and high-end missile threats.

In response, the Space Force, Missile Defense Agency, National Reconnaissance Office and other Defense Department agencies have been crafting options for achieving that vision. They plan to provide a response to the White House by the end of March.

Experts and officials have pointed out the technical challenges the Golden Dome presents — particularly when it comes to space-based interceptors. But speaking this week at the National Security Innovation Base conference in Washington, D.C., Guetlein said he thinks the biggest hurdles will be collaboration among the various organizations tasked with contributing to the project.

“Without a doubt, the biggest challenge is going to be organizational behavior and culture,” he said. “We are not accustomed to having to integrate at the level that’s going to be required.”

The Pentagon hasn’t yet delegated responsibilities for the Golden Dome. And while Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman has said the Space Force will likely play a central role, Guetlein noted that the effort must be collaborative because of the different expertise each organization offers.

The Missile Defense Agency, for example, specializes in defending against ballistic missile threats and integrating complicated systems. MDA also has a robust testing enterprise, Guetlein said, with advanced modeling and simulation capabilities that will be crucial for the project.

The Space Force, on the other hand, has a fleet of missile-warning satellites in orbit now, and the service is launching a proliferated low Earth orbit constellation developed by the Space Development Agency. Those spacecraft will provide key communications capabilities to link the space sensors that detect a target to the “shooters,” or weapon systems, designed to attack it.

“All of that kit has got to come together and be integrated in a system-of-systems type fashion,” Guetlein said.

Trump’s executive order also directed DOD to consider whether it would need additional authorities to deliver these capabilities quickly. One of the biggest needs from the Space Force perspective is the approval to conduct on-orbit testing and training, Guetlein said.

“It’s a very constrained set of authorities that we have to do on-orbit test and on-orbit training, and we would ask that that open up so that we can increase our readiness of our forces on the front line to be able to do that protect and defend mission,” he said.

Based in Los Angeles, California, Space Systems Command manages the process for buying and building most of the satellites, sensors and ground systems the Space Force operates. Speaking with reporters Monday, SSC’s Commander Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant said the compounding effects of the new administration’s workforce reduction orders, combined with the prospect of a yearlong continuing resolution — which freezes funding at prior-year levels and stalls the start of new programs — is “incredibly challenging.”

“There is a lot of concern,” Garrant said during a media roundtable at the Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. “As a command and as a commander, we are going to focus on how can we continue to deliver the mission with the human resources that we have.”

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and his team have issued a slew of orders aimed at significantly reducing the size of the federal civilian workforce. On Jan. 28, the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, offered employees a voluntary deferred resignation program that would allow those approved to leave their government job but receive a paycheck through Sept. 30.

OPM has also directed many agencies to fire probationary employees — most of whom carry that designation because they’ve been in their positions for less than one or two years — and plans to implement a sweeping reduction in force across the federal government in the coming months.

Garrant said SSC “had a considerable number” of employees apply for the deferred resignation program, which is being implemented this week. The command also has a number of probationary employees who could be affected, and SSC is expecting those cuts to take effect in the next week or two. An SSC spokesperson did not respond by press time to a request for details on the number of affected employees.

“The intent is to decrease the size of the federal government,” Garrant said. “As the commander of SSC, I’m committed to executing the administration’s direction and vision.”

Garrant said SSC is planning ahead as much as possible for what he described as a “rapid offramp” of personnel. The goal of the plan is twofold — to make sure affected employees are “taken care of” and to ensure that the work they were doing is absorbed elsewhere in the command.

“Just because someone leaves doesn’t mean that work doesn’t get done. It just means the billet that they were sitting on goes away,” he said. “We’re being pretty deliberate in our planning, to the extent we can, to minimize those impacts.”

In a separate briefing with reporters, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said he worries about the impact of workforce cuts on a service that’s still growing. However, he added, the service is designed to be flexible and has performed its mission with fewer personnel than it has today.

“I’m always worried about making sure we have the right workforce to do the positions that we’ve been given,” he said. “The good news is we were to be lean and agile. So, if you start cutting back, we kinda know how that works.”