Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Saturday, February 22nd.

Today on Forbes, Trump wants the next generation of military satellites.

Pentagon turmoil is endangering that.

If President Donald Trump wants his Iron Dome, the space-based missile defense shield for the United States he proposed last month,

it's going to require tens of billions of dollars and a lot of new satellites.

For the last six years, the Pentagon's Space Development Agency, or SDA,

has been working on a key part of what's needed,

a first-of-its-kind constellation of over 1,000 small satellites in low-Earth orbit,

designed to detect hypersonic missile launches and keep tabs 24-7 on mobile launchers

and other threats on the ground.

SDA was set up with a mandate to move fast and skip many of the snarls of red tape

that have bogged down U.S. weapons development and

inflated costs. However, in the last month, S.C.A. has been engulfed in crisis.

Derek Tornear, the head of the agency, was put on leave a week before Trump's inauguration,

and marched out of the Pentagon. Now a bureaucratic power struggle over the program is slowing progress

on the constellation and the future of the agency itself is in doubt. A senior staffer, speaking

on the condition of anonymity, told Forbes, quote, it seems like they're just going to dismantle us.

SDA has faced long-simmering resentment among acquisitions bureaucrats over the agency's alleged circumvention of their authority,

as well as turf concerns among Space Force brass.

This according to what current and former staffers and a former Air Force official told Forbes.

Tournier has openly acknowledged that he rubbed some officials the wrong way, writing in

2023 that he was happy to play the, quote, bad cop, and stiff arm attempts to make the agency

...