Staying Ahead of The Threat

How quick-reaction threat modeling can accelerate Golden Dome progress

As adversaries deploy air and missile capabilities with greater speed, maneuverability, and stealth, U.S. defense programs must move even faster, not just to keep pace, but to get ahead.

That’s where modeling and simulation (M&S) comes in. Accurate threat models are the foundation for designing effective defense systems, assessing performance, training warfighters, and planning operations across the Department of Defense (DOD)’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) systems.

This need is especially urgent as development begins on Golden Dome for America, an integrated system of sensors, effectors, and command-and-control technologies built to counter sophisticated, fast-evolving missile and aerial threats.

However, the pace of threat advancement creates a critical problem: traditional intelligence and modeling cycles can take months or even years to capture and validate new threat characteristics. By the time updates are complete, the threat environment will have advanced.

That lag leaves warfighters and system developers at risk of planning, training, and testing against outdated assumptions – an unacceptable vulnerability when seconds matter in real-world engagements.

Why quick-reaction threat modeling is so important

High-fidelity threat models built from all-source intelligence are essential for developing robust air and missile defense systems. But on their own, these models often lag behind the pace of threat advancement.

Lower-fidelity effects-based models, while faster to develop, can only reproduce what has been observed in the field. Quick-reaction threat modeling offers a best-of-both-worlds solution, using physics-based methods to predict how threats may behave under different conditions, not just what they’ve done before.  

This approach can adapt baseline validated models with new or partial data – drawing on open-source intelligence, emerging technical data, and classified inputs – to provide a realistic surrogate while awaiting full intelligence assessment cycles.

By modeling each subsystem and their interactions, Astrion’s Systems Engineering Group (SEG) solution center can simulate performance impacts of modifications such as propulsion upgrades, altered payloads, different aerodynamics, or upgraded guidance systems, and then update existing threat models accordingly. We incorporate statistical variation and produce Monte Carlo data sets to strengthen robustness of the threat representation.

This allows system developers and warfighters to test performance, refine mission plans, and train against scenarios that reflect the latest adversary capabilities.

Astrion’s approach: Tools that keep pace

Astrion’s SEG solutions center has spent decades supporting the Missile Defense Agency and U.S. Navy with intelligence-based, government-validated models that capture the physics of advanced threats. That foundation is what makes quick-reaction updates possible.

We build physics-based threat models from the ground up. These models simulate each subsystem – propulsion, flight operations, physical characteristics, and radio frequency (RF) / infrared (IR) signatures – and analyze how they interact to form a predictive baseline for rapid adaptability.

Two of Astrion-SEG’s government-furnished tools play a central role:

• PULSE: a simulation framework that generates integrated sensor scene data precisely synchronized with all objects and phenomenology in complex air and missile defense scenarios, including debris, clutter, electro-magnetic effects, and an extensive library of vehicle models. It produces both RF and IR scene outputs, enables rapid analysis of threat and weapon system performance, and integrates easily with other M&S tools through a flexible, federated architecture with a stable consistent user interface layer.

• GENESIS: a modular, fully coupled 6-DoF (six degrees of freedom) trajectory simulator designed for flexibility. Simulated threat vehicle subsystem components can be swapped or updated, similar to real-world threat systems, allowing new threat behaviors to be modeled quickly.

By solving for all six degrees of freedom together (i.e., how a system moves and rotates in 3D space), GENESIS delivers high-fidelity, predictive representations of threat performance. GENESIS is integrated as a module within the PULSE simulation framework, representing the kinematic behavior of the threat systems, and supporting easy integration of new threat capabilities into PULSE for a complete scene representation.

Together, these tools allow Astrion to adapt validated models quickly as new information emerges. A similar approach can ensure Golden Dome assessments stay current, with threats recreated and tested in days or weeks instead of months.

A real-world demonstration

The value of quick-reaction modeling isn’t theoretical; it’s already in use. In one recent demonstration, Astrion-SEG developed a model of the Iranian Fatah-2 missile system using only open-source information.

Engineers broke down publicly available data into the elements required to model a missile: physical description, propulsion, aerodynamics, materials, flight operations, and RF/IR signatures. When data gaps appeared, surrogate information from similar, validated threat models was used to fill them in. The result was a physics-based model benchmarked against observed behavior. This benchmarked quick reaction threat model can be used to predict yet-unseen scenarios or theoretical flight behaviors where adversary missiles are launched from/to additional geographic locations.

For Golden Dome, exercises like this show how quickly emerging threats can be translated into usable models. Even when complete intelligence assessments are months away, warfighters and system developers can still plan, train, and test against a realistic representation of what they may face in the field. Quick-reaction, physics-based threat modeling is essential to staying ahead of rapidly evolving missile and aerial threats. By combining validated intelligence, predictive simulations, and flexible tools like PULSE and GENESIS, Astrion enables warfighters and system developers to plan, train, and test against the most current threat scenarios. As DOD advances Golden Dome, this approach can accelerate decision-making and ensure system performance, even as adversaries innovate at unprecedented speed.

Author

Pete Grossman
Threat & Weapon System Engineering Modeling & Simulation Lead

SEG, an Astrion Company