THE FIX
Recurring competitive on-ramps that allow any company to demonstrate capability against a real requirement on a standing basis.
Integration environments where technology can be evaluated for interoperability before acquisition decisions are made.
Pre-positioned funding and contract vehicles so successful demonstrations do not stall between validation and contract.
Incentives aligned to architecture performance, rewarding program managers, acquisition professionals, and prime contractors for strengthening the whole, not protecting their piece of it.
Integration as a leadership value. The four structural reforms above can be written into acquisition guidance. None of them change behavior on their own. That is the cultural transformation Golden Dome requires.
The United States already owns much of what Golden Dome needs. What it lacks is a culture that can integrate it at mission speed.
Everyone hears “Golden Dome” and pictures an interceptor.
But the man charged with delivering it has been pointing to a different challenge.
At the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in September, Gen. Michael Guetlein, Golden Dome’s direct report program manager, described an enormous integration problem. Much of the kit the mission needs already exists, he said, but it was “built for a different fight, a different customer, and never meant to be integrated, networked together.”[1]
His assessment gets to the heart of it: “This is not a technology challenge. This is an organizational behavior and social engineering challenge.”[1][2] He has made the same point since at least last December’s Reagan National Defense Forum.[3]
Organizational behavior and social engineering are, in plain terms, culture.
That distinction matters.
Golden Dome will unquestionably demand new technology. It will also require advances in sensing, command and control, space systems, interceptors, manufacturing and other capabilities. But the Department of War already possesses significant pieces of the architecture. The harder question is whether the acquisition enterprise and defense industrial base can integrate those pieces, and continuously incorporate new ones, at the speed the mission requires.
I spent much of my 22 years at the CIA deploying secure technology and nurturing innovation across classified and unclassified environments, often leading specialized teams of experts and managing multimillion-dollar programs.
One of the most important lessons I learned wasn't technical. New capabilities rarely struggled because the technology failed or funding was insufficient, although both were certainly challenges. More often, they struggled because the organizations responsible for adopting them failed to evolve. Established processes, outdated assumptions, and institutional resistance to change became greater obstacles than the technology itself.
That's ultimately a leadership challenge.
When I assumed leadership positions, I often found myself on the X, exposed, with competing priorities, institutional resistance, and expectations coming from every direction. Standing still wasn't an option. I may not have been responsible for the circumstances I inherited, but I was responsible for what I did about them.
Retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink speaks to this principle in his TEDx talk on Extreme Ownership.[4] His message is that leaders must accept responsibility for their teams, their mistakes, and the solutions needed to move forward. Ownership isn't about assigning blame. It's about putting ego aside, acknowledging what isn't working, and taking responsibility for changing it.
But ownership alone isn't enough.
In his TED Talk, Listen, Learn... then Lead, General Stanley McChrystal describes the importance of building trust and shared purpose among people with different experiences, generations, and skill sets.[5] His lessons reinforce something I learned throughout my career: leadership requires listening to the people closest to the problem, learning from and valuing their expertise, and building the trust necessary to navigate change and failure together.
That was especially important when leading teams of highly specialized experts. I didn't need to be the smartest person in the room or have every answer. I needed to understand the mission, establish clear priorities, remove obstacles, and create an environment where people could challenge assumptions, take calculated risks, and contribute their expertise safely.
And I never did it alone. Meaningful change required the commitment of those I led, the support of those above me, and a shared willingness to challenge how we had always done things.
Extreme ownership meant accepting responsibility for the outcome. Listening and learning meant recognizing that achieving it depended on the people around me.
Innovation gets attention. Integration earns trust. Leadership makes change possible.
Process can tell people what to do. It cannot make them want to do it, because process often lacks the why. Change takes hold when people understand why it matters and believe in where the organization is going, because leadership has enabled them to succeed in doing what they are charged to do. That defines a healthy, agile culture.
Given the rapid scale and democratization of innovation and new information that keep our national security leaders up at night, the old way of doing things is no longer relevant. Golden Dome will require new processes, authorities, contract vehicles, and technical standards. Those are necessary. But none of them, by themselves, changes organizational behavior.
People do.
WHY THIS MATTERS, AND TO WHOM
A Technical Architecture Requires a Cultural Architecture
Systems integration sounds technical. At its core, however, integration requires organizations to make choices.
Who owns the data? Who controls the interface? Who accepts the risk of connecting a new capability? Who has the authority to make the decision? What happens when a better solution comes from outside the incumbent program or contractor? And what incentive does an organization have to surrender some control over its individual system to perform the larger mission?
These are not engineering questions alone.
They are questions of culture, incentives, authorities, and genuine action-based leadership, rather than title-based leadership.
Executive order established Golden Dome in January 2025, and the FY2027 budget request includes $17.9 billion for it.[6][7] Guetlein has said an initial operational capability could arrive as early as summer 2028, built first on hardware and technology the government already has, with next-generation capabilities added afterward.[2]
That means Golden Dome cannot become a collection of individually successful programs that struggle to operate as a system.
The mission demands something different: a culture of operational readiness tradecraft.
From Program Success to Operational Readiness
For years, I have argued that preparedness is fundamentally different from paranoia. As I told Sentaku in interviews for its January and February issues, “Operational readiness is about preparedness, not paranoia.”[8][9] Preparedness is deliberate. It is built through training, accountability, governance, practiced decision-making, and a clear understanding of risk.
The same principle applies to acquisition.
A culture of operational readiness asks a different question than a traditional program-centric culture.
It is not simply checking boxes: Did we deliver the system we contracted to deliver?
It is purpose-driven: Can the joint force integrate it, employ it, sustain it, and adapt it when the mission demands?
Those are very different measures of success, because the latter requires silos to be broken down and horizontal collaboration and healthy compromise to occur.
A program can meet its technical requirements and still create integration problems for the larger architecture. A demonstration can succeed without producing a fieldable capability. A company can build remarkable technology that never reaches the operational user.
Golden Dome creates an opportunity to change those incentives.
If integration is central to the mission, then interoperability, modularity, data accessibility and the ability to incorporate new capabilities should become measures of acquisition success rather than downstream problems someone else is expected to solve.
The Defense Industrial Base Has to Change Too
Cultural transformation cannot stop at the government boundary.
America’s large defense primes bring capabilities that will be indispensable to Golden Dome: extraordinary engineering expertise, production capacity at scale, systems integration experience, security infrastructure, and decades of knowledge about complex weapons systems.
But the scale and pace of Golden Dome also demand an industrial culture that can continuously absorb innovation from outside traditional program structures.
A prime contractor should not have to develop every component of a successful architecture. A small company should not have to replace a prime contractor to contribute meaningful capability.
The cultural architecture should allow both to succeed.
That requires incentives for large contractors to integrate technologies they did not develop when those technologies improve mission performance. It also requires technical and acquisition architectures that prevent proprietary boundaries from unnecessarily becoming operational boundaries.
The objective is not to diminish the role of the primes. It is to make the entire industrial base more responsive to the mission and our warfighters’ needs, maintaining superiority across every domain and lethality against adversaries of the United States.
Small Businesses Need a Real Path Into the Architecture
The United States has no shortage of entrepreneurs developing artificial intelligence, autonomy, sensing, communications, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, software, data integration, and other technologies relevant to national security.
The tragedy is how much of that innovation stays trapped in the commercial market, partially because the defense acquisition community has too often focused more on process and procedure than on purpose and potential.
The war with Iran has shown what that costs. The United States struck Iran with precision. Defending against what came back proved far harder. Within days, a drone strike at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait killed six American service members.[10] Iran relied on waves of inexpensive Shahed drones, and defenders found themselves firing interceptors worth millions at targets worth a fraction of that.[11] As the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance put it, “Few weapons have reshaped the economics of aerial attack as quickly as the Shahed-136.”[12]
None of this was a surprise. Of the gaps in U.S. air and missile defense, the Hudson Institute’s Timothy Walton said, “This has been well understood. However, it hasn’t been addressed.”[13]
The demand signal had been visible since 2022. Ukraine spent four years learning to defeat mass drone attacks, and by this spring its interceptor industry included more than 100 domestic manufacturers producing roughly 1,000 interceptors a day, many funded through a single procurement platform built to bring new makers in quickly.[14] The United States ended up turning to Ukrainian counter-drone technology to help defend its own bases.[13] We are playing catch-up.
And the ability to move quickly existed all along. Within about eight days of the conflict starting, the Army bought 13,000 low-cost interceptor drones through a streamlined process that short-circuited a years-long, multi-agency effort.[15] The acquisition system can move that fast. It took a war to make it.
The department’s own leadership has named the problem. Announcing the Warfighting Acquisition System last November, Secretary Pete Hegseth described a system in which “speed replaces process, money follows need.”[16] The department has since directed its buyers to favor commercial technology first and to expand Other Transaction Authorities (OTA) and Commercial Solutions Openings (CSO) to reach a broader vendor base.[17] The policy is now on paper. The culture still has to follow.
Yet building relevant technology and delivering operational capability are not the same thing.
A small business still has to identify the right mission owner, understand an operational requirement, gain access to RDT&E pathways or an integration environment, navigate security requirements, demonstrate interoperability, find an acquisition pathway, and survive financially long enough to transition from prototype to production.
Each additional barrier consumes something defense innovation cannot afford to waste: time.
This is where acquisition reform becomes operationally consequential.
Golden Dome should have recurring competitive on-ramps that allow small and nontraditional companies to demonstrate capabilities against real requirements. Successful technologies need pathways into integration environments where government and industry can determine whether they improve the larger architecture. When they do, mechanisms must exist to fund, contract, integrate, and scale them with calculated risk.
Competition should not end when the architecture is established.
An architecture designed to defend the United States against rapidly evolving threats must itself be capable of evolving.
That requires keeping the door open.
NEAR-TERM CATALYSTS: WHAT TO WATCH, AND WHO NEEDS TO ACT
Watch
FY2027 appropriations: whether Congress sustains the $17.9 billion requested for Golden Dome.[7]
Summer 2028: Guetlein’s target for initial operational capability, built first on hardware the government already has.[2]
Warfighting Acquisition System implementation: whether commercial-first direction and expanded OTAs and CSOs reach small and nontraditional companies in practice, not only on paper.[16][17]
Act
Program managers should be rewarded for making the broader architecture stronger, not merely protecting the boundaries of their individual programs.
Acquisition professionals should have pathways to move quickly when operationally relevant technology emerges.
Prime contractors should have incentives to incorporate the best available capabilities, including those developed elsewhere.
Small businesses should have meaningful opportunities to compete, integrate, and scale based on mission value.
VISION SCAN
Integration Is a Leadership Decision
A broader pattern is emerging across the defense enterprise.
Senior leaders increasingly acknowledge that the United States cannot simply engineer its way out of the problem. Acquisition processes must move faster. Industry must be integrated differently. The government must become more comfortable with iteration and calculated risk. New entrants need viable paths from promising technology to operational capability.
The technology will continue to evolve and change exponentially.
The harder transformation is changing the organizations that acquire and integrate it.
That brings us back to where this started. People are not transformed or moved by process and procedure alone. Sustainable change comes when leaders across all verticals establish the values, priorities, and behaviors that an organization rewards.
For Golden Dome, one of those values should be a culture of operational readiness tradecraft.
And throughout the enterprise, leaders must be willing to accept that integration sometimes requires giving something up: control of an interface, exclusivity over data, ownership of a solution, or simply the institutional comfort of doing things the way they have always been done.
That is cultural transformation.
Golden Dome will be one of the most sophisticated integrated defense architectures ever assembled. But its larger significance lies in what the effort demands of the organizations building it.
If we get that cultural transformation right, Golden Dome can do more than protect the homeland. It can help create a defense acquisition enterprise built around operational readiness, one that rewards integration fairly between primes and small businesses, preserves healthy competition, and gets the best capability into the warfighter’s hands before it’s needed, not “just in time,” regardless of who built it.
FUTURE MAX
Technology enables Golden Dome. Integration makes it work. Culture will determine whether integration happens fast enough.
