The Space Force general, recently confirmed to lead the Pentagon’s new Golden Dome office, outlined his views on his new role and the threats that prompted the office’s formation on Tuesday.

Gen. Mike Guetlein, President Donald Trump’s pick to serve the Golden Dome for America Direct Reporting Program Manager, was confirmed by the Senate last week and said the primary need for such a comprehensive air defense system is due to China and Russia “building out their nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the Earth numerous times over.”

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The Golden Dome will be a multi-layered air defense system capable of defending the entire U.S. homeland against ballistic, hypersonic, and advanced cruise missiles, as well as other aerial attacks from near-peer adversaries or rogue nations.

“They’ve been creating ballistic missiles that have decoys, jammers, spoofers, etc. in order to try to fly around our national missile defense capabilities,” he said at the Innovate Space: Global Economic Summit at Amazon’s HQ2 building in Arlington, Virginia, on Tuesday. “They’ve been building stealth cruise missiles. They’ve been building hypersonic missiles capable of traveling in excess of 6,000 miles an hour and maneuvering in endgame. They’ve been building satellites or weapons that look like satellites on launch, fly around the Earth, and it can navigate into any point on the Earth that they want.”

“The list of threats keeps going on: submarines that can sneak up on our shores, launching hypersonics or cruise missiles,” he continued, also pointing to the use of drones in conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. “The adversary has been watching the way we fight, and they’ve become very determined to counter us in many different domains. But worse yet, they have become very capable and very determined in doing that, and that includes holding the homeland at risk, and it has come to a point where we have got to address those threats.”

Guetlein, who will report directly to Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, said he had a 60-day window “to come up with the objective architecture” for the project, which he admitted he has not “built” yet.

“I firmly believe that the technology that we need to deliver Golden Dome exists today. It has just never been brought to bear on this problem set to protect the homeland, nor has it been brought to bear on this form factor,” he added.

Trump signed an executive order during his first week in office directing the military to create a continental air defense system similar to the Israelis’ Iron Dome and President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.

The president said the administration believes the project will cost roughly $175 billion, while the Congressional Budget Office has estimated it could cost between $161 billion and $542 billion over the next 20 years. Trump expects it will be “fully operational by the end of my term,” which will end in January 2029.

Guetlein said “the biggest challenge” he sees in the creation of the Golden Dome will be fighting against the “culture” he “grew up” in through the Air Force, in which military officers do not trust defense contractors.

“I had grown up in an Air Force where we’re always keeping industry at arm’s length. We weren’t really having transparent conversations either direction, and that was a cultural-based problem. It wasn’t bound by law,” he said, adding that something that had changed was the “sheer magnitude of our problem” because “space is too big for the Space Force to go alone.”

Trump picked Guetlein, then the second-highest-ranking Space Force officer, in May to lead the department’s effort to build the Golden Dome.

Rep. Jeff Crank (R-CO), cochairman of the Golden Dome Caucus in the House of Representatives, noted that the “Chinese have some distinct advantages over the United States in a lot of ways.”

“They don’t have a Congress that they have to worry about, or continuing resolutions or any of that. If they want to invest more in space, they invest more in space. They have a command economy, and they can turn it on a whim for what they see fit,” he said at the Space Foundation event. “The free market system is such a great system. It’s our greatest advantage, but sometimes we crush it with Pentagon bureaucracy or government bureaucracy.”

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Aerospace company Northrop Grumman Corporation is testing space-based interceptors, CEO Kathy Warden said during a quarterly earnings call on Tuesday.

“As we look to Golden Dome for America, we see Northrop Grumman playing a crucial role in supporting the administration’s goal to move with speed and have initial operating capability in place within the next few years,” Warden said, according to The War Zone, adding, “It will also include new innovation, like space-based interceptors, which we’re testing now.”