As Trump had a press conference about the "Golden Dome", the US Military received it's first radar for the Golden Dome project a few days ago: an upgraded AN/TPY-2 radar with a Gallium Nitride (GaN) front-end. Radars, unlike logical processors in consumer electronics, are one of the areas where GaN is actually highly useful

US takes delivery of first upgraded AN/TPY-2 radar

The new version of AN/TPY-2 has a longer range and can provide targeting coordinates to other missile defense interceptors beyond just the Army’s THAAD batteries, Jon Norman, Raytheon’s vice president for Air and Space Defense Systems Requirements and Capabilities, told Breaking Defense.

“What the TPY-2 does now, with the Gallium Nitride front-end in it, is it can see things twice as far, so we can make that command and control decision a lot earlier on which effector to use, whether it’s an SM series or it’s a Patriot, or it’s a THAAD,” he said.

The radar can be deployed as a standalone, mobile unit rather than being directly wired into a THAAD battery, Norman explained, which positions it as a potential contribution to President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome plan to create a comprehensive missile shield for the US homeland.

Double the range means a 6000km range, and given the inverse square law, much more power and target tracking capabilities at closer ranges, differentiating the target from decoys much sooner.

“If they have anything else falling off, you can discriminate very accurately and say, ‘This is the warhead. This is what we need to shoot. All the other stuff is just junk. It’s like litter on the road, so don’t waste the missile on the junk. Hit the thing that we want to hit,” he said.

The upgraded AN/TPY-2 can now “detect these very, very small targets, and you can detect them at the separation when the booster separates from the warhead,” he said, adding that with the longer range “we can shoot sooner, and we can hit it before it starts maneuvering.”

That last paragraph is what the US Navy was doing to ballistic missiles launched from Yemen towards Israel when they had the opportunity and SM-3s to spare. Early midcourse phase or late boost phase intercepts. A recent Senate meeting revealed that the US had fired "dozens" of SM-3s at missiles from Yemen. I came to this conclusion very early on in the US bombing campaign against Yemen. Now imagine the US doing the same thing, but to hypothetical Chinese or Russian ICBMs that would fly over the Pacific towards the USA... Place a GaN front-end AN/TPY-2 radar in East Asia, and some US Navy missile destroyers armed with SM-3s in the West Pacific, or an AEGIS Ashore facility in Guam, and this is possible with the massive increase in range and power of the upgraded AN/TPY-2.

China and Russia have said as much in a joint statement, that this aspect of the "Golden Dome" undermines deterrence and makes arms control and treaties like the previous INF treaty impossible:

Deeply destabilizing in nature is also the recently announced “Golden (Iron) Dome for America”, a large-scale program designed to establish unconstrained, global, deeply layered and multi-domain missile defense system to protect against any missile threats, including all types of missiles from “peer and near-peer adversaries”. First of all, this means a complete and ultimate rejection to recognize the existence of the inseparable interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms, which is one of the central and fundamental principles of maintaining global strategic stability. The project also provides additional impetus to the further development of kinetic and non-kinetic means providing for the left-of-launch defeat of missile weapons and the infrastructure that supports their employment.