A former U.S. Northern Command leader warned on Thursday about the “incredible gaps” facing U.S. homeland defense, specifically referencing air defense below space.
Retired Gen. Glen VanHerck, who served as NORTHCOM’s commander from 2020 to 2024, said during a Mitchell Aerospace event that he’s “not satisfied at all” with the current balance of the military’s posture, arguing that the “expectations in policy exceed the capacity for the forces that we have.”
“Although the national defense strategy has said homeland defense is No. 1 over the last two administrations, both sides of the aisle, when it comes down to executing the policy that has not been the case, capacity is a major challenge,” he explained.
There are many different weapons that the United States must be prepared to intercept, ranging from small drones to cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic missiles, as well as space-based weapons, which U.S. adversaries are pursuing.
“I think the nuclear deterrent is the foundation … of homeland defense. Where we have incredible gaps is in below the space-based layer. We have space-based gaps, but in the hypersonic realm, in the cruise missile defense realm, and those are the areas that are going to create concerns for strategic stability and increase the risk of deterrence failure,” VanHerck added.
VanHerck retired before the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, but he expressed his support of the president’s Golden Dome plan for homeland defense, a multi-layered air defense system capable of defending the entire U.S. homeland against aerial and space-based attacks from near-peer adversaries or rogue nations.
Trump picked Gen. Mike Guetlein to serve as the Golden Dome for America Direct Reporting Program Manager in July. He was previously the second-highest-ranking Space Force officer.
Guetlein has about two-and-a-half weeks left in the 60-day window set for him “to come up with the objective architecture for the project,” he said during an event in late July.
“I would go after a dome that allows us to go after the cruise missile and the hypersonic missile threats. If you could do nothing else but provide threat warning and attack assessment for hypersonics, then that would even induce a lot of strategic ability for continuity of government, survival of your nuclear forces, your command and control, and your posture,” VanHerck, who now does work with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, added. “But if you’re not able to do those things, the risk of deterrence failure goes up dramatically.”
“There’s technology still to be developed,” he said regarding the Golden Dome. “Certainly it will be expensive, but I do think it’s realistic.”
U.S. adversaries are simultaneously working to ensure their offensive weapons can outmaneuver the U.S.’s defensive measures. They are working on “creating ballistic missiles that have decoys, jammers, spoofers, etc,” Guetlein said in July at the event, adding, “the list of threats keeps going on.”
VanHerck, during the event, also touched on the Russia-Ukraine war and expressed what he believes are takeaways for the U.S. In particular, he highlighted how Russia’s possession of nuclear weapons has served as a deterrent for the West against deploying troops to help Ukraine.
He praised the mass Ukraine drone operation, Operation Spider Web, in which they had trucks filled with drones driven by Russians into the country — without their knowledge — where the drones then took off from and hit multiple Russian military bases.
Uncovering such a plot in the U.S., VanHerck said, would require the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, the intelligence community, and local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies all working together and sharing information. He said it wasn’t only up to them, but also key commercial sectors, such as energy, ports, and transportation, to “have to defend themselves from [drone] threats.”
VanHerck appeared alongside Brig. Gen. Houston Cantwell, a retired airman who is now a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute, who briefed the audience on his new policy paper about how the U.S. has insufficient Arctic domain awareness now,” leaves it “vulnerable through the most likely avenue of attack, through the Arctic.”
The U.S. benefits from geography, having two oceans, one on either side, but evolving technology in weapons has blunted what had been a significant positive for the country.
HEAD OF GOLDEN DOME OFFICE STRESSES THREATS POSED BY CHINA AND RUSSIA
“The enemy is going to get a vote here, and technological advance makes the natural barriers of our oceans on either side less significant than ever. Advanced and precise cruise missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles hold vital American interests at risk, and our existing radar systems simply are unable to detect many of the inbound threats,” Cantwell said. “In many cases, we wouldn’t know of an aerial attack until the missiles impacted the targets.”
His paper said the advanced missile threats posed by China and Russia “are more acute than ever, and North America’s Arctic approaches remain the most likely avenue for attacks against the U.S. homeland.
