Findings; sense of the Senate

(a) Findings (1) Missile Defense review Congress finds that the 2022 Missile Defense Review found the following: (A) Since the release of the 2019 Missile Defense Review, missile-related threats have rapidly expanded in quantity, diversity, and sophistication. (B) United States national security interests are increasingly at risk from wide-ranging missile arsenals that include offensive ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic weapons. (C) In support of the homeland missile defense mission, continued modernization and expansion of all current deployed systems with capabilities guarding against the homeland threat, including the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, will remain essential to our comprehensive missile defeat approach. In addition, the United States will also continue to improve defensive capabilities to address the threat of evolving hypersonic missile, cruise missile, and unmanned system strikes by any adversary against the homeland. (D) The continued evolution and progress of missiles and unmanned systems as a principal means by which adversaries seek to project conventional or nuclear military power makes missile and unmanned system defense a core deterrence-by-denial component of an integrated deterrence strategy. (E) Missile and unmanned system defense capabilities add resilience and undermine adversary confidence by introducing doubt and uncertainty into strike planning and execution, reducing the incentive to conduct small-scale coercive attacks, decreasing the probability of attack success, and raising the threshold of conflict. (F) Should deterrence fail, missile defense capabilities sufficient to negate long-range missile threats of any type are among the most critical national security capabilities for the United States. (2) Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States Congress finds that, in its October 2023 report, the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States recommended the following: (A) The United States should develop and field homeland integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) that can deter and defeat coercive attacks by Russia and China, and determine the capabilities needed to stay ahead of the North Korean and Iranian threat. (B) The Secretary of Defense should direct research, development, test and evaluation into advanced integrated air and missile defense capabilities leveraging all domains, including land, sea, air, and space. These activities should focus on sensor architectures, integrated command and control, interceptors, cruise and hypersonic missile defenses, unmanned systems, and area or point defenses. The Department of Defense should urgently pursue deployment of any capabilities that prove feasible. (3) Commission on the National Defense Strategy Congress finds the following: (A) In its July 2024 report, the Commission on the National Defense Strategy found the following: (i) There is an increasing threat from expanding ability of China, Russia, and North Korea to deliver nuclear weapons against the United States, including the territories of the United States. (ii) The military planners of the Department of Defense and United States Northern Command need to prepare for a worst-case scenario in which nuclear and other strikes are launched against the United States, which could be done in large numbers with specialized delivery systems. (B) In the report described in subparagraph (A), the Commission shared the same threat assessment about missile attacks as the Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States and agreed with the recommendation that the United States should enhance missile defense for the homeland. (4) Policy Congress finds that it is the policy of the Federal Government that— (A) the Federal Government will provide for the common defense of the citizens of the United States and the United States by deploying and maintaining a next-generation missile defense shield; (B) the Federal Government will deter and defend the citizens and critical infrastructure of the United States against any foreign attack on the United States homeland; and (C) the Federal Government will guarantee the secure second-strike capability of the Federal Government. (b) Sense of the Senate It is the sense of the Senate that— (1) as the advanced long-range missile and unmanned system threat continues to evolve, the threat of attack by ballistic, cruise missile, hypersonic missile, and unmanned system remains a significant threat to the United States with potentially catastrophic consequences; (2) China is rapidly expanding and modernizing its conventional forces to include ballistic missile systems posing an increasing threat to citizens, forces, and allies of the United States; (3) over the past 40 years, the sophistication and quantity of threats, including ballistic, hypersonic, cruise, and unmanned systems has become substantial; (4) contending only with rogue nation threats and accidental or unauthorized missile launches is no longer sufficient in the current and reasonably foreseeable future threat environment; (5) by empowering the United States with a second-strike capability, the Golden Dome will deter adversaries from attacks on the homeland; (6) to improve capabilities to defend adequately against increasing numbers and sophistication of threats to the homeland, rapid development and deployment of space-based sensors and interceptors which take advantage of lower cost and technical commercial advances in recent years must be among the Defense Department’s highest priorities; (7) there is a need to fully integrate undersea, ground, air, and space-based sensors, interceptors, and command nodes through a secure and redundant communications architecture; (8) there is a need to clearly delineate and appropriately empower the leaders and agencies responsible for development, integration, and execution of the Golden Dome; (9) the United States must make achieving total domain awareness, from the seafloor to Outer Space to cyberspace, to provide early warning and defeat of missile threats from both the northern and southern hemispheres across all warfighting domains a top priority; (10) a central component of Golden Dome will be the network and command and control systems; (11) substantial command and control and fire control capabilities exist now, but require investment to support any Golden Dome reference architecture; (12) a flexible, open-architecture approach for the Golden Dome will support spiral development; (13) Golden Dome prioritizes the defense of United States citizens in the homeland against all air and missile threats from all countries and requires prioritization of critical assets to inform the Commander of United States Northern Command and the Commander of United States Indo-Pacific Command; and (14) significant additional missile defense modeling and simulation tools that measure friendly and adversary effects, such as kinetic, non-kinetic, directed energy, are required.