‘We’re all focused on the Golden Dome’: Pentagon official looks to new technologies
LAUREL, Md. — A Pentagon official said today his office is pursuing advances in a wide range of technologies from scaled directed energy to hypersonics to contribute to the Golden Dome initiative.
“We’re all focused on the Golden Dome,” Joseph Jewell, the U.S. Defense Department’s assistant secretary for science and technology, told me in an interview after speaking at AIAA’s DEFENSE Forum here. Golden Dome is the Trump administration’s plan for a multilayered missile defense shield, which President Donald Trump has said will be operational before his term ends in early 2029.
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Scaled directed energy and hypersonics, Jewell said, are among several key “areas where we felt that investments could be made to push us within the couple of years timescale into technologies that could actually be fielded.”
Jewell’s office focuses on the earliest stages of research, such as basic research, applied research and initial prototypes or demonstrations. He noted that Golden Dome will integrate existing technologies, but “we’re also introducing a lot of new technology.”
One such technology is directed energy, which Jewell highlighted for its potential in counter-drone demonstrations.
“You talk about what’s happening tomorrow or next week or next month, many of them are going to be in that area,” he said, “because that’s an area of immediate need” where technology investments “can potentially be very beneficial.”
He added: “Lasers are not a complete solution to homeland defense or defense against any particular system, but I think they can be a very important part to include.”
Jewell also said his office is working with nontraditional and newer providers of hypersonic technologies. “Some of the emphasis that we’re making on new entrants is their potential to deliver — potentially through different manufacturing techniques [or] different design techniques — more scalable capability,” he said.
“A new entrant might have a great piece of [hypersonic] technology, but they might not have the full picture of how their piece of technology might, first, fit into a system and, second, how that system might apply to the threat landscape,” Jewell said. “We can help them make those leaps.”
In these and other research areas, the Pentagon must “make at least some portion of aggressive bets against future technology,” he said, noting that “this is the innovation engine that feeds forward into the technologies that go into small businesses, that go into venture-funded businesses and eventually potentially go into large primes.”
