A missile-defence task force takes on cyber

Joint Task Force-Gold, the US Northern Command unit that coordinates the Golden Dome homeland air and missile defence programme, has been given a cyber mission, its deputy commander told reporters on Wednesday at the Association of the US Army's annual meeting, according to Breaking Defense and Air & Space Forces Magazine. Col. Kevin "Stoney" Stonerook said cyber warfare "has become a new mission set for us".

"We are helping put together the team of teams, all the different stakeholder communities — be that vendors and other government agencies — to really provide a cyber warfare capability for GDA, and that's one of the main things that we're really focused on," he said, using the abbreviation for Golden Dome for America. In later comments to Breaking Defense, Stonerook said the task force's cyber work is limited to defending Golden Dome against adversary attacks and does not include offensive operations. Air & Space Forces Magazine likewise described the work as building a defensive cyber capability.

The task force is small and new. Northern Command set it up in January with little public detail. It is led by Lt. Gen. John Rafferty, head of the Army's Space and Missile Defense Command, and is based with that command at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado, with about 100 personnel, both outlets said. Rafferty has held the Army post since April, according to Breaking Defense. Stonerook said it was created "out of the ashes" of US Space Command's former component command for integrated missile defence.

So far its work has been mostly planning. The task force helped with siting and construction for Golden Dome's first operational site, at Fort Story in Virginia, and will do the same at future sites, Breaking Defense reported. A planning sprint in February drew more than 300 people to Colorado Springs and produced a concept of operations. The next, at the end of October, will take up the roles of Golden Dome's three main operations centres, at Peterson, Schriever Space Force Base in Colorado and Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. "What those roles and responsibilities are and where those lines are drawn, where there's necessary redundancy, is still an active discussion," Stonerook said.

Stonerook was candid about the gaps. "But there's a lot we still have to figure out," he said. Space Command's old component managed all the assets of the missile defence system, and with the task force now under Northern Command those responsibilities have to be divided. "But our team is responsible for asset management, but the clear delineation of which assets are included and not included has not been completed," he said.

Rafferty, in an interview published by Air & Space Forces Magazine on Friday, put the emphasis on operating what is being built. "They're in a sprint to deliver materiel," he said of the programme. "We better be ready to train it, to man it, to have the right organization, the sustainment for it." The magazine said the planning sprints support the Pentagon's push to field an initial Golden Dome capability by 2028, and noted that Golden Dome's director, Gen. Michael Guetlein, has called its command-and-control network the programme's "glue layer".

That glue layer is why cyber follows. A system that links sensors, satellites, command centres and interceptors is also a network, and the operations centres the task force is helping to define are where a compromise would matter most. Defending it means asset inventories, access control and monitoring, the disciplines commercial operators of critical infrastructure already apply; we covered the reporting side of that in our report on critical infrastructure reporting rules.

Much is not public. Neither outlet said who will supply the defensive tooling, how the task force's cyber staff will work with US Cyber Command or the services' cyber units, or what counts as a Golden Dome capability for this mission. For vendors, the timing signal is the sprint at the end of October: the cyber requirements are likely to follow the decision on who runs which operations centre, not precede it.