Inside Golden Dome: How Booz Allen plans to connect U.S. missile defense

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Tuesday, August 18, 2026

How do you glue together a missile shield as complex as Golden Dome? “The secret sauce” is connecting the force, says Booz Allen’s Trey Obering.

At the 2026 Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, he and Michael Davenport join Threat Status to tell National Security Editor Guy Taylor how the company plans to link America’s next-generation missile shield.

[TAYLOR] I’m lucky to be with retired Air Force Lieutenant General Trey Obering. He’s a former director of the Missile Defense Agency. He’s currently an executive adviser to Booz Allen, an advanced technology company that’s really at the center of space and missile defense and a very important U.S. defense contractor.

I’ve also got Mike Davenport. He’s a senior vice president at Booz Allen. We’re going to talk a little bit about missile defense.

Trey, when we look at the global threat landscape right now, the missile threat facing the United States, whether here in the U.S. homeland or somewhere around the world, we’re all over the world, it looks really different in 2026 than it did, say, in the late 1990s. You’ve been doing this for a while. How has it changed?

[OBERING] You’re exactly right. The threat has gotten, first of all, much more complicated and much more advanced in terms of scale. I remember when we began to roll out some of the capabilities that you see today operating in the Middle East back in the early 2000s, 2004 time frame, we started deploying the theater house area defense weapon, the THAAD interceptors, the sea-based,interceptors on the Aegis ships, Patriot PAC-3, and those, and then we rolled out in 2004, homeland defense, against — at that time we were gearing it toward a North Korean or potentially an Iranian ICBM threat to the United States — but it was designed for simple threats, low numbers, not very complicated and not very sophisticated.

And obviously today we found ourselves in a very, very different world where we have a panoply of threats that include not just ballistic missiles, but maneuvering missiles, cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles. And then we’ve seen in Ukraine and in Iran and Israel, we’ve seen the drone warfare that has begun.

[TAYLOR] Here we saw General Mike Guetlein, President Trump’s Golden Dome czar. There’s a lot of discussion about this futuristic space-based Golden Dome for America missile shield. Why does the United States need Golden Dome? We’re talking about a multi-billion dollar future Star Wars style missile defense system. Why do we need it?

[OBERING] It’s an interesting question because what you see happening is, for example, you’ve seen a much more aggressive Russia and what they’ve done in Ukraine. And if you look at the hundreds of missiles that were fired in that war, you’ve seen the Iranian warfare with Israel, what’s happened there targeting U.S. bases, U.S. ships, and that type of thing there. A very aggressive China that’s emerging, that is becoming more and more aggressive and fielding hundreds of missiles.

And so what’s happened is, the calculus has begun to change. And there’s a specific dynamic that we began to see back in the 2018-2020 time frame where they started talking about the Russians especially and later the Chinese about “let’s escalate to de-escalate,” meaning that instead of launching everything at once they would launch a limited number of missiles to try to shock the United States into either not involving themselves in something that was going on or whatever. And that type of an attempt to try to shock the U.S. or to try to decapitate the U.S., that’s the kind of thing that Golden Dome would prevent.

[TAYLOR] China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, the so-called CRINK global power threat.

[OBERING] Right. It’s a global defense.

[TAYLOR] Mike, I want to bring you into this. I mean, Booz Allen doesn’t make and manufacture weapons, but it is like this glue company that’s really in the middle of a lot of things. Where does Booz Allen fit into integrated air and missile defense architecture? I mean, what does the company do there?

[DAVENPORT] First, our role is to connect the force. Let me explain what I mean by that. We talk about advances in modern warfare, advances in drone technology, advances in electronic warfare, cyber warfare, especially autonomous systems, air, land, and sea, and when we’re talking about long-range and short-range munitions and weapon systems, all of these capabilities need to be connected.

As far as what’s going to happen in the future, the future of modern warfare, the one who can take advantage of that, all those capabilities, for offensive and defensive missions, is going to be unmatchable against our adversaries. And I truly believe, and that is our North Star, that’s why we’re all here. And our focus is really to develop solutions and technologies that integrate those systems, those networks and those weapon systems into an integrated capability because we specialize in battle management, command and control, cybersecurity, and edge compute, and assured communications.

[TAYLOR] We’re also in this artificial intelligence moment. Is there any way that Booz Allen is harnessing AI and missile defense?

[DAVENPORT] We believe that AI is not a differentiator. We believe AI is essential. So what does that mean? When we look at our systems that we’re developing, if you go onto the floor and you see our MDK Fire system, for example, we’re looking at the fundamental level and what can AI do to improve those capabilities to match the speed of modern warfare.

[TAYLOR] Booz Allen recently announced its acquisition of a company called Ultra Mission Solutions. Tell me a little bit about that and how it relates to what we’re talking about here.

[DAVENPORT] The acquisition of the Ultra Mission Solutions fit nicely in the investment thesis that we had as far as developing mission technologies for the modern warfare. Their capabilities in battle management, their capabilities in edge compute and cryptographic technologies, I think matched with our products and solutions that we’re developing within mission systems, allows us to create more capability that we can deliver to our soldiers and to our defense customers. And the other important aspect of that is they are invested in Huntsville. And it also does sell into our investment in Huntsville and our support to the missile defense community and the Army and our defense partners.

[TAYLOR] Why Huntsville? Why is it so important to space and missile defense?

[OBERING] First of all, it goes back to Huntsville’s origin as the name Rocket City actually does fit, going all the way back to Wernher von Braun and really the birth of the entire Apollo Moon program here in terms of space. So the space history goes back, it’s very deep rooted.

You also have Redstone Arsenal and the air defense and air defenders, and the Missile Defense Agency is located here. And then you fast forward to today, you’ve got elements of the Space Force that are coming in and you’ve got elements of, for example, the space-based interceptors program office will be located in Huntsville, a combination of Space Systems Command and Missile Defense Agency located here. So you’ve got all the government agencies that are located here that are directly involved in Golden Dome. On top of that, you have a workforce that’s incredible, the workforce in this area and all the wide variety of companies that you can choose from for that talent, and that’s why it makes it very attractive.

[TAYLOR] If people leave this year’s Space and Missile Defense Symposium remembering one thing about Booz Allen, what is it?

[OBERING] From my perspective, it would be the fact that this Golden Dome architecture that will be built in the next several years, it’s very complicated, it’s very layered, it’s very intricate, and the secret sauce of it is how do you glue all that together with the command and control, the fire control that’s necessary to achieve the mission.

And the capabilities that Booz Allen has fit very nicely into those demands, the demanding challenges that you need to try to integrate that kind of an architecture.

[DAVENPORT] And we’re continuing to invest in that mission as far as improving the capabilities to address those future missions in the future modern warfare.