On January 27, 2025, President Donald J. Trump issued Executive Order 14186, establishing the “Golden Dome” — a sweeping U.S. air and missile defense initiative. Reviving elements of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative while borrowing from Israel’s successful Iron Dome, the program aims to shield the American homeland from a range of threats, including intercontinental ballistic missiles, maneuverable hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), advanced cruise missiles, and loitering munitions.
But while the Golden Dome’s scope is ambitious, legal and cybersecurity dimensions of this initiative remain unclear. As the Pentagon races to meet a three-year deadline, policymakers risk repeating past mistakes: launching a rushed national defense system without embedding legal safeguards or baking cybersecurity into every layer. “Move fast and break things” may work in Silicon Valley, but it’s a dangerous creed when applied to an Apollo-type homeland defense program with space-based assets and cyber weapons.
The Golden Dome raises urgent questions: What are the legal boundaries for deploying weapons in orbit? How can the United States prevent its missile defense architecture from becoming a cybersecurity liability? And what happens if secure-by-design principles are treated as a bureaucratic afterthought?
The Golden Dome: Scope and Promise
The United States is currently postured to detect and intercept ballistic missiles. The U.S. ballistic missile defense arsenal relies on a diverse portfolio of ground-based intercept platforms. These include the stationary Ground-based Midcourse Defense sea-based Aegis systems, and mobile Terminal High Altitude Area Defense batteries.
Most ballistic missile defense systems can intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles midcourse, meaning, before impact. However, HGVs travel exceptionally swiftly and are highly maneuverable, therefore capable of evading traditional radar and ground-based intercept platforms. With tensions vis-à-vis other militarily-capable States rising and near-peer competitors racing to field these technologies, HGVs have become a growing concern for U.S. military officials and planners alike.
In response, the Golden Dome is envisioned as a multi-layered, sensor-to-shooter architecture for intercepting threats in every phase of flight — and in some cases, even pre-launch. It includes boost-phase intercept capabilities such as space-based interceptors (SBIs), terminal-phase intercept capabilities such as glide-phased interceptors for hypersonic missiles, the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture to route data and capabilities, persistent tracking via the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor and left-of-launch tools to “threat hunt” for missile launches before they even happen. It will be capable of conducting navigation warfare against satellites, including cyber operations (spoofing signals), electronic warfare operations (jamming communications), and employing direct energy alternatives for missile defeat. It also must ensure its supply chain is secure with anti-tampering mechanisms that deter attempts of reverse engineering and intellectual property theft.
Parts of what is to become the Golden Dome’s overall architecture are already established. Two Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor satellites and the first tranche of 27 low-Earth orbit Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture satellites have already been deployed, with plans for incorporating a hybrid collection of government and commercial assets. Tactical data exchange communications and integrated battlefield management systems are undergoing testing.
In sum, the Golden Dome is already underway and promises several impressive features. But key architectural and legal blind spots remain — particularly when it comes to compliance with international space law and cybersecurity.
Space War Isn’t Out of Reach
With over 12,000 satellites currently in orbit, space has become an increasingly congested and contested domain. Which is why the most controversial element of the Golden Dome is the potential reliance on SBIs — kinetic weapons placed in orbit to destroy threats at the early stages of their ascent, often within seconds of launch. SBIs are not weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but they raise legal and diplomatic issues under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the placement of WMDs in orbit and mandates the “peaceful use” of outer space. The Treaty is ratified by 95 countries, including China, Russia, the United States and its European allies, and all other space-faring nations.
Although the Treaty doesn’t explicitly ban conventional weapons, many legal scholars argue that deploying SBIs undermines its purpose and destabilizes the international norm against space weaponization. China and Russia have condemned the Golden Dome as a violation of these principles, saying it invites a superfluous arms race in space — even as both continue to grow their nuclear inventories and develop dual-use counterspace capabilities.
The United States takes a different stance. It has long argued that military activities in space are lawful so long as they don’t violate the U.N. Charter, particularly Article 2(4), which prohibits the threat or use of force. On this view, the Treaty’s “peaceful purposes” principle is compatible with non-aggressive actions (even if of a military nature), rather than only strictly non-military actions. That interpretation leaves room for defensive systems such as SBIs, provided they are deployed transparently and used only in proportionate self-defense.
The U.S. military has also clarified its view that international humanitarian law (IHL), or the law of armed conflict, applies to space operations alongside the Charter’s obligations. The Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual mentions that the law of war governs the conduct of hostilities in outer space too. This underscores that space operations must still follow the principles of proportionality, distinction, and necessity. Importantly, the U.S. position also reflects the broader international law principle that treaty obligations continue to bind States even during armed conflict — meaning the Outer Space Treaty’s ban on WMDs remains operative in wartime.
Russia, and some legal scholars, adopt a stricter view that interprets “peaceful” to exclude all military activity, aggressive or otherwise, rendering SBI deployment incompatible with the Treaty’s spirit. NATO, by contrast, has avoided a definitive legal stance, emphasizing deterrence, defense, and resilience. The Woomera Manual likewise confirms that the Outer Space Treaty, the U.N. Charter, and IHL all apply to SBI operations — but stops short of imposing a categorical ban.
The legal ambiguity among near-peer threats, combined with the rapid development of orbital weapons, underscores the strategic challenges the United States faces with the Golden Dome.
The Case for Secure-by-Design and Information Assurance
Even if Golden Dome clears legal hurdles in orbit, it still faces a more practical and equally existential problem: cybersecurity by neglect.
History offers ample warning. U.S. critical infrastructure has been targeted by ransomware campaigns, state-sponsored espionage, and foreign supply chain manipulation. Retrofitting security into deployed systems has proven costly and often incomplete. Executive Order 14186 emphasizes the need for a secure supply chain, including anti-tamper measures and component authentication. But threats lie not only in counterfeit parts, but also in exploitable code, outdated protocols, and flawed designs.
Incomplete or lacking approaches to cybersecurity, even in the most serious defense contexts, would also not be new. In 2018, the Missile Defense Agency failed multiple cybersecurity audits, with issues ranging from poor password hygiene to lack of encryption. A secure-by-design approach means embedding cybersecurity principles at every level of the missile defense architecture — from orbital sensors and communication links to the fire control algorithms and supply chain processes. Therefore, a crisp, mandated approach to ensuring effective cybersecurity is essential to avoid these problems.
While there is awareness of these issues, Congress should consider requiring all homeland missile defense programs to meet minimum cybersecurity and resilience standards before acquisition and deployment. It has been done for civilian systems with the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, and for defense contractors with the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program. Applying similar mandates to missile defense systems would help ensure that cybersecurity is not an afterthought, but a foundational requirement for programs critical to national survival.
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The Golden Dome represents a bold step toward a more resilient homeland defense. But policymakers must ensure that speed doesn’t come at the cost of legality or survivability. Otherwise, America’s next moonshot may crash back to Earth.
For now, mutually assured destruction remains a viable deterrent. But if the United States is to lead in the defense of its homeland, it must also lead in the responsible, lawful, and secure design of the systems that make that defense possible. America’s cyber attacks, supply chain breaches and critical infrastructure vulnerabilities makes this clear: secure by design is no longer optional.
The time to get this right isn’t after a breach, malfunction or international incident. It’s now.
