Golden Dome, the Distributed Defense Industrial Base, and the Authority that Must Survive System-to-System Handoffs

This White Paper examines how Golden Dome’s distributed, multi-vendor architecture creates challenges for preserving execution authority across system-to-system handoffs. As government organizations, defense contractors, commercial technology companies, laboratories, and other partners contribute interconnected capabilities, technical interoperability alone cannot establish permission to act. The paper argues that authority must remain specific, current, attributable, and enforceable as information and execution requests move between sensors, processing services, command systems, and effectors. It identifies requirements for maintaining authorization across vendors, interfaces, changing conditions, degraded communications, and machine-speed operations.