Lockheed Martin Establishes Command and Control Prototyping Hub for Golden Dome Air Defense

Lockheed Martin has built a new prototyping hub to support Golden Dome for America, the U.S. government’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) initiative aimed at defending the homeland against evolving multi-domain threats.

The work is being carried out at the company’s Center for Innovation in Suffolk, Virginia—known as The Lighthouse—where command and control (C2) systems are being integrated to connect sensors, shooters, and platforms across land, sea, air, cyber, and space.

The C2 systems under development aim to fuse data from multiple sources, coordinate direct actions such as interceptor launches, enable cyber-resilient communications, and support synchronized decision-making in real time.

Prototyping is already underway, testing capabilities like threat evaluation, battle management, mission planning, sensor tasking, AI/ML integration, joint planning, and data link sharing against current and future threat scenarios.

Lockheed Martin says the phased approach accelerates integration, reduces redesigns, and lowers lifecycle costs.

The Lighthouse supports multi-level classified testing, modeling and simulation, wargaming, live-virtual-constructive (LVC) experimentation, tailored demonstrations, tabletop exercises, and analytical workshops.

Lockheed Martin plans to bring in additional government and industry technologies to help deliver the C2 layers for Golden Dome for America before 2028.

Golden Dome is the U.S. effort to create a unified, layered IAMD architecture. Lockheed Martin, with operational systems from seabed to space, aims to partner across the industrial base to provide sensing, tracking, early warning, and weapons capabilities to counter current and future threats.