Lockheed Martin has developed a prototyping environment to support the U.S. government’s Golden Dome for America program, which aims to create a layered, integrated air and missile defense system for the homeland.
The environment, based at the company’s Center for Innovation in Suffolk, Virginia — known as The Lighthouse — brings together combat-proven command and control systems to connect sensors, shooters and platforms across all domains, from seabed to space.
Daniel Nimblett, vice president of layered homeland defense at Lockheed Martin, said the rapid C2 prototyping effort is one of several Lockheed Martin initiatives aimed at supporting the U.S. government as a Golden Dome for America mission partner.
“Through a series of demonstrations, we’ll fuse existing C2 capabilities from across industry and government into a scalable baseline that delivers real-time situational awareness and enables informed decision-making to defend the nation.” he added. “This phased approach reduces risk and delivers capabilities early by accelerating integration, reducing redesigns, and lowering lifecycle costs.”
Prototyping is already underway, testing real-world capabilities against current and future threats. The environment enables threat evaluation, battle management, mission planning, sensor tasking, artificial intelligence and machine learning integration, joint planning and robust data link sharing to improve decision timelines and optimize engagements.
Lockheed Martin Golden Dome C2 Director Thad Beckert said Golden Dome for America is an unprecedented challenge in both scale and timeline, and the company is moving quickly to integrate connected C2 capabilities that are operational today.
“This prototyping approach is a novel method to provide evolutionary capability for an unprecedented effort,” he added. “This environment offers the government the ability to experiment and exercise with technologies that weren’t originally built to work together and make them operate cohesively.”
Lockheed Martin said it plans to work with government and industry partners to integrate additional technologies into the environment, with the goal of delivering the command and control layers for Golden Dome for America before 2028.