A look at L3Harris’ role in building Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield

Video

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

What will it take to build Golden Dome?

Rob Mitrevski, President of Golden Dome Strategy at L3Harris, and Ken Bedingfield, President of Missile Solutions, join Threat Status National Security Editor Guy Taylor at the 2026 Space and Missile Defense Symposium to break down the company’s billion-dollar role in America’s next-generation missile defense system.

[TAYLOR] L3Harris actually recently got an almost billion-dollar contract to build Accelerated Missile Defense Tranche-3 space vehicles. What exactly is that, and how would you explain its importance to the Golden Dome project?

[MITREVSKI] AMDT-3, as we call it, is just a follow-on to the tracking layer that the Space Development Agency has been acquiring for a few years now. This is the fifth contract in a row for us that continues to augment that tracking layer… missile warning, missile tracking, all the way to fire control quality capability, which means that you can inform an interceptor exactly where to go on the intercept path.

So that AMDT-3 is really very well tied to the original executive order for Golden Dome that demands the acceleration of the HBTSS contract, the hypersonic and ballistic space tracking sensor. And this is really an augmentation of that capability, and bringing it to a proliferated capability in space following our on-orbit demonstrations that we did.

[TAYLOR] We’re in North Alabama. L3Harris employs more than a thousand people in manufacturing operations in North Alabama. What kind of investment is L3Harris making with its own money, also in partnership with the Pentagon, to actually be prepared to deliver on this order?

[BEDINGFIELD] In Huntsville, Alabama, we currently have 1,000 employees. We’ve increased that headcount about 60% in five years. It is the headquarters for our missile propulsion business, most of our engineering team, as well as two centers of excellence for our inert production. So think cases, nozzles, components that go into our solid rocket motors.

[TAYLOR] Are there wider investments in space technology?

[MITREVSKI] Specifically for our space layer sensing capabilities, we have really two very large investments that we made ahead of the demand signal. We saw this day coming. We knew that we needed to drive ourselves to a wartime footing capacity and scale. We invested about $225 million in two facilities. One in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for the infrared payloads that do that missile warning, missile tracking, and then another one in Melbourne, Florida, that do the space vehicle integration and getting it ready for launch.

[BEDINGFIELD] So Guy, we’re very much investing ahead of need. We’re in many respects acting like a commercial company, building the demand and the capacity that we see is going to be needed. Not waiting for contracts. I think partnering very well with the Department of War.

[TAYLOR] Well, you actually brought up the expanding production for THAAD, right? And THAAD and Patriot missiles are in the news all the time now because of munitions being used by the United States in the war with Iran, the conflict in Ukraine. The Ukrainian government is always asking for Patriot missiles.

You’ve announced a partnership with Lockheed Martin to dramatically increase THAAD production. How does that work right now? And how important is private sector collaboration to meet that demand?

[BEDINGFIELD] We announced a couple of weeks ago with Lockheed Martin to accelerate a PAC-3, nearly triple, and THAAD, a quadrupling of production capability. Much of that work will be done. The inert components will be done, much of it here in Huntsville, Alabama, and then in Camden, Arkansas, and Orange, Virginia, we will do the propulsion elements. We are modernizing factories, building new factories, bringing in automation, robotics. We will truly have the most advanced solid rocket motor production facilities in the world, which… makes sense given that we are the leading producer of solid rocket motors today, and we certainly expect to continue to maintain that position, and most importantly, get the warfighter the product that they need.

[TAYLOR] We’re talking about solid rocket motor fuel?

[BEDINGFIELD] Solid rocket motor, solid rocket motor fuel, as well as the motors themselves, as well as supplier companies as well.

[TAYLOR] How do you maintain a supplier base when you’re talking about the type of expansion that you’re going through?

[BEDINGFIELD] We’ve been investing closely with the suppliers, ensuring that they are making the investments to capacitize with us. At times, we are investing in or with our suppliers to ensure that they can deliver on the capacity expansion. And then certainly working with the government to see what they can do to fund suppliers for new factories, new equipment. So the entire ecosystem is being brought along with us. We’re really excited about it.

And again, this is really about getting the warfighter the product that they need, to the demand that we see coming from the primes and the Department of War. Importantly, it’s not just solid rocket motors. It’s also divert and attitude control systems. So how do you precisely control a missile to get where it’s going? Again, we are the world’s leader in that capability and technology. A lot of investments there, again, ensuring that the entire ship set of capability gets to the primes and ultimately to the warfighter.

[TAYLOR] Golden Dome, President Trump’s signature initiative for futuristic missile defense for the entire U.S. homeland. What’s next for Golden Dome and L3Harris as we kind of move into the second year of this generational system seemingly actually being built?

[MITREVSKI] What’s first is to execute on the contracts we have. One, so I think first and foremost we have to make sure that we maintain the trust of our customer, as they’ve trusted us with their contracts. We need to maintain that trust by delivering on schedule, at scale, meeting our promises.

I think beyond that, what’s clear to us, and the equities that we have at L3Harris, is that we have a significant part to play in the architecture. If you look at the way our company is structured, you’ll see three major segments: one representing the sensing layer in an architecture like Golden Dome, one representing the communications layer, one representing the interceptor, effector layer. And for each of those, we have either key contributors in the capability as primes or as enablers.

Our Space Development Agency contracts that we just talked about are really about our sensing layer and our prime position in warning and tracking. We have key enablers in tactical data links, waveforms, software-defined radios in the communications layers. And then we just heard from Ken about the propulsion systems that we use to power our nation’s interceptors in the effector layer. So for each of those, there’s today and what we’re doing today, and there’s a future in how we get this capability to its final operating capabilities.