U.S. Missile Defense Agency Selects New SHIELD Partners for Golden Dome Homeland Defense.

Leonardo DRS announced on February 17, 2026, that it secured multiple awards under the Missile Defense Agency’s $151 billion SHIELD IDIQ contract vehicle, positioning the company to compete for future task orders tied to the Golden Dome homeland defense architecture. The move strengthens DRS’s role in integrating sensors, battle management computing, and defensive subsystems as the Pentagon accelerates layered missile defense against ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic threats.

Leonardo DRS says it has secured multiple awards under the Missile Defense Agency’s Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense SHIELD multiple-award IDIQ vehicle, a contract framework carrying a headline ceiling of $151 billion, as disclosed by the company on February 17, 2026. The announcement is not a single winner-take-all program decision. It is a competitive seat at the table that positions DRS to bid on future task orders where the Pentagon wants speed, modularity, and rapid transition from prototype to fielded capability. In practical terms, SHIELD is becoming the contracting backbone for the Golden Dome for America vision of a layered, multi-domain defense of the U.S. homeland and critical forward nodes.
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Leonardo DRS has won awards on MDA's $151 billion SHIELD IDIQ, positioning it for Golden Dome task orders linking sensors and battle-management computing with defensive subsystems to defeat ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and hypersonic threats (Picture source: U.S. Army).

IDIQ contract vehicles can look abstract, but their operational logic is concrete: they let the Missile Defense Agency and partner DoD organizations issue focused task orders without rebuilding the acquisition scaffolding each time a new sensor, interceptor, launcher, software baseline, or sustainment package is ready to compete. SHIELD has been structured as a 10-year framework intended to speed procurement across a wide span of missile defense work while keeping the vendor pool broad to drive competition and reduce lock-in. Government briefings describe SHIELD as spanning more than 19 work areas, from prototyping and weapon design to cybersecurity and systems engineering, reflecting a deliberate shift toward fast iteration under a common architectural umbrella. Industry summaries of SHIELD’s scope echo that breadth, including weapon design and development, integration and assembly, production and fielding, test and evaluation, and modernization.

Leonardo DRS is careful in its language, but the company’s portfolio hints at where it can plug into SHIELD’s kill chain. In its release, CEO John Baylouny emphasized DRS’s track record moving quickly to develop, integrate, and deliver next-generation air and missile defense capabilities to help MDA outpace rapidly evolving threats. That matters because Golden Dome is, at heart, an integration problem before it is a hardware problem: fusing disparate sensors into a fire-control quality track, pushing that track through resilient command-and-control, and pairing it with an effector that can arrive inside a shrinking engagement window. DRS already markets rugged battle management hardware at scale, positioning itself as a major supplier of rugged platform computers and display systems used to host battlefield command applications. In missile defense, it is where sensor fusion, track correlation, launch-on-remote, and engagement coordination live or die.

The armament side of SHIELD is best understood as a layered magazine of intercept options tied to the phase of flight and the threat set. Traditional homeland ballistic missile defense leans on hit-to-kill interceptors intended to collide with a warhead in space, coupled with discrimination sensors that can sort lethal objects from debris and decoys. The current homeland architecture relies on Ground-Based Interceptors deployed in Alaska and California, with the Next Generation Interceptor planned to begin fielding later this decade to handle more complex threats. The layered logic adds additional engagement opportunities using Navy and Army systems, including the Standard Missile family and terminal defenses, so a missed shot is not a missed battle. What changes under the Golden Dome is the ambition to widen that layered magazine beyond rogue state arithmetic and to include better coverage against modern cruise missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles that can maneuver and ride the edge of the atmosphere.

The envisioned construct includes a space layer and multiple land-based layers, with modular batteries and common launch concepts to distribute defenses across the continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii. A layered defense is not simply more interceptors. It is more geometry, more shots, and more chances to generate a fire-control solution early enough to act. Against hypersonic glide vehicles, the central challenge is continuous tracking through maneuvers and handoff to an interceptor that can still close the endgame. Space-based tracking sensors are intended to maintain custody and enable targeting handoff for hypersonic threats, a prerequisite for any glide-phase engagement concept. On the ballistic side, discrimination radars and improved sensor coverage buy time and confidence, and new radar assets in Alaska are viewed as key contributors to a future Golden Dome architecture. Meanwhile, infrastructure work on the ground continues, including the expansion of interceptor silo capacity at Fort Greely to support future growth of the defensive inventory.

Within this framework, Leonardo DRS’s most relevant technical value is likely to be in the sensor-to-shooter plumbing and in specialized defensive subsystems that harden the force against missile attack. The company has delivered advanced infrared sensor packages used in aircraft missile warning and hostile-fire detection, and it fields laser-based infrared countermeasure technology intended to defeat incoming missiles by disrupting their seekers. This approach effectively turns survivability into a repeatable deep magazine response rather than a limited inventory of expendables. On the radar side, DRS’s AN-SPQ-9B ship protection radar is optimized for low-altitude, high-clutter tracking of threats like sea-skimming cruise missiles and small air targets, the same class of detection problems that homeland and base-defense architectures increasingly face as cruise missiles and one-way attack drones proliferate. SHIELD’s work areas explicitly include integration, production, sustainment, and modernization, creating multiple on-ramps for companies that can rapidly manufacture, ruggedize, and support electronics at scale.

Washington’s motivation for SHIELD is ultimately strategic, but it is also brutally practical. The United States is watching adversaries diversify delivery systems: ballistic missiles paired with decoys, maneuvering hypersonic vehicles designed to complicate tracking, and low-flying cruise missiles that stress radar horizons and command timelines. Golden Dome’s promise, and SHIELD’s purpose, is to turn that complexity against the attacker by creating overlapping detection and engagement opportunities while moving faster than traditional acquisition cycles allow. The government’s language around SHIELD emphasizes a versatile vehicle that lets DoD issue orders rapidly and keep operational security tight while the architecture is still taking shape. For the industry, DRS’s SHIELD awards are a credential. For the warfighter, the real story will be which task orders follow, and how quickly they translate into sensors, launchers, interceptors, and battle management nodes that can close the kill chain before the next salvo arrives.

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.