USNORTHCOM and NORAD Commander Gregory M. Guillot told lawmakers in April 2025 that fighter jets will remain a crucial part of missile defense as the United States develops its Golden Dome for America space-based missile defense system. OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
THE WATCH STAFF
The Golden Dome for America missile defense system, which envisions space-based technology deterring and destroying missile threats to North America, will have a large role for fighter jets, the commander of the U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) told Congressional lawmakers in April 2025.
Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, during an appearance before the House Armed Services Committee, said fighter jets form an important part of the United States’ strategy of layered defense. “As we envision the entire network, it would include space-based AMTI — airborne moving target indication — which would detect and track aircraft and cruise missiles; a land-based capability such as Over-the-Horizon Radar; and certainly, fighter aircraft with capable interceptor missiles to defeat cruise missiles,” Guillot told committee members, according to Air & Space Forces, a military affairs news site.
NORAD regularly scrambles fighters to confront Chinese and Russian warplanes that enter the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). A week before Guillot’s April 30 testimony, U.S. Air Force F-16s and F-35s confronted five Russian warplanes operating for several hours over the Bering Sea within the Alaskan ADIZ. Guillot told the committee he is still trying to find the right balance of force projection for his warplane fleet. Those comments echoed remarks he made in August 2024 at the Army Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “In some cases, I think we might have too many just-in-case forces, which are truly necessary, but if you have too many of them, you start to have capability just sitting on alert,” Guillot said at the symposium, according to Air and Space Forces. “The fighters, tankers and AWACS [Airborne Warning and Control System planes] that sit on alert, I think there can be some adjustments there, where we can take some of the forces that are sitting on alert, hand them back to the services to increase readiness,” he said. As long, he added, “as we have the right triggers and authorities to bring them back.”
The Golden Dome defense system was announced in January 2025 and is a high U.S. defense priority. The $27 billion proposal to fund the early components of the system is winding its way through Congress. The money will be used to develop prototypes of kinetic, dynamic energy and space-based interceptors, officials have said.
Proponents point to a smaller, Earth-based system, Israel’s Iron Dome, as an encouraging model. Guillot and Lt. Gen. Sean A. Gainey, head of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command, pointed to the crucial role played by jets in support of the system during 2024 Iranian missile attacks on Israel where warplanes from the U.S., NATO and other allied nations shot down almost all the first wave of hundreds of Iranian missiles, allowing time and space for Israel’s ground-based systems to defeat subsequent waves. “If there’s anything that we’ve learned over the last year or two years in Israel, the eastern Mediterranean and Ukraine, it’s that a layered missile defense approach and design is paramount to the large-rate sizes that we’ve seen,” said Gainey, referring to the large-scale Iranian attack.