Rebuilding Arctic Defenses Will Be Key to Golden Dome: Report
Sept. 4, 2025 | By Matthew Cox
The U.S. homeland is vulnerable to air and missile attack across the Arctic because the network of ground, air, and space-based defenses guarding those approaches have atrophied over time, according to a new paper from AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome defensive shield will have to modernize those systems if the system is to counteract threats like hypersonic missiles and waves of hard-to-detect cruise missiles flying across the polar region.
U.S. defenders would have less than 60 minutes to stop a hypersonic missile launched from a Russian aircraft against couldNew York or Washington, D.C., wrote retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Houston “Slider” Cantwell, a senior resident fellow for Airpower Studies at the Mitchell Institute, in the policy paper. Titled Homeland Sanctuary Lost: Urgent Actions to Secure the Arctic Flank, the paper calls for securing the country’s Arctic flank. Russian bombers could launch a salvo of advanced KH-101 cruise missiles over the Arctic and “return to base without detection by the existing radar system, the North Warning System,” Cantwell said at a Sept. 4 Mitchell Institute event releasing the paper. “The missiles would also likely remain undetected due to their low altitude flight paths. Existing early warning radar detection systems are simply inadequate given these modern threats.”
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/golden-dome-requires-modernized-warning-systems-in-arctic/
