Trump is right about an ‘Iron Dome’ missile shield for the US homeland

During former President Trump’s freewheeling rallies, he regularly brings up his aim to build an “Iron Dome” missile shield for America. It is one of the few itemized priorities in the Republican National Committee platform, which calls for “a great Iron Dome missile defense shield over our entire country.” 

Some national defense commentators pounced, deriding the idea as infeasible and calling it “snake oil” and a boondoggle that won’t work. They described the technical characteristics of Israel’s Iron Dome system and waxed tediously about how impractical the literal system would be for a big country like America that is separated from its enemies by vast oceans.

But Trump is right on the policy, and all one must do is note that he has been arguing for a missile shield for 25 years. He is likely using the “Iron Dome” name as shorthand because average Americans are aware of Israel’s system since it’s regularly protecting Israelis from the rockets of Iran and its proxies. 

Trump has been persistent about the unacceptability of enemies threatening the United States with nuclear missiles. In a 1999 interview with Charlie Rose, he repeatedly emphasized his view that the proliferation of nuclear weapons was the biggest problem facing the United States. He said it would be wise to preemptively strike the North Korean nuclear weapons and delivery program if diplomacy failed. 

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The same year, he told Wolf Blitzer that the United States must focus on the threat of nuclear weapons, urging a focus on the North Korean nuclear program. Again, he emphasized the need to try to negotiate, and said negotiation would only be possible if Pyongyang knew the United States was serious about preemptively destroying the illicit program with conventional weapons if it would not negotiate. 

When pressed for a historical parallel, Trump praised the Israeli decision to take out the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981.

And, given the growing complexity of the nuclear threats, the younger Trump said, with certainty – that the United States must have a missile defense shield to defend the American homeland. He credited President Ronald Reagan for being right about that, alluding to Reagan’s famous Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and rightly noted that modern technology had made it more feasible.

It was a feature of Trump’s bid for the presidency. And on Jan. 17, 2019, President Trump laid out his vision for missile defense in a speech at the Pentagon. 

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He said, “[W]e will recognize that space is a new warfighting domain, with the Space Force leading the way. My upcoming budget will invest in a space-based missile defense layer. It’s new technology. It’s ultimately going to be a very, very big part of our defense and, obviously, of our offense. 

“The system will be monitored, and we will terminate any missile launches from hostile powers, or even from powers that make a mistake. It won’t happen. Regardless of the missile type or the geographic origins of the attack, we will ensure that enemy missiles find no sanctuary on Earth or in the skies above.”

This was an extraordinary break from U.S. policy, and it was even more ambitious than the official Missile Defense Review, the policy document that would be the blueprint for the Pentagon. There was no plan for a defensive inceptor layer in space to intercept missiles launched from anywhere and headed toward Americans. And others inside the administration choked out this initiative in favor of a lower budget than the one Trump’s initiative would require. 

By the time Trump left office, the homeland missile defense system was not significantly improved. There were silos empty when interceptors could have filled them, canceled promising next-generation technologies, and the Trump administration failed to initiate programs that could have provided the scientific and technological demonstrations to qualitatively improve the layered missile defense system.

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The Biden administration has kept the homeland defense system on life support but the U.S. homeland missile defense is struggling to keep up with the current missile threats facing the country. It has ground-based long-range interceptors in Alaska and California. This system is designed to intercept a North Korean attack. North Korea’s record-breaking missile testing schedule during the Biden administration underscores the need to bolster the U.S. missile defense system so that rogue nations cannot overwhelm it.

But to qualitatively improve homeland defense, it should have an interceptor layer beyond the sea- and ground-based systems. On this, Trump is particularly right about the need to upgrade the U.S. missile defense shield by adding an interceptor layer in space. This layer would provide the optimal vantage point for intercepting ICBMs from nations with missile arsenals far more numerous than the ones North Korea or possibly Iran could possess.

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It would not be possible to build an impenetrable shield that obviates the need to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent, however. Rather, the scope and aim of such a new layer for the current system would be to bolster the success of deterrence, much like Israel’s Iron Dome has for Israel.

The system should be designed to protect the most critical areas in the United States from Chinese and Russian missile threats so that neither peer adversary could successfully coerce the United States from projecting power abroad and coming to the aid of our allies. 

Trump could respond to his critics by pointing to the 2023 report of the U.S. Strategic Posture Commission, which said, “DOD [Department of Defense] must look at new approaches to achieving U.S. missile defense goals, including the use of space-based and directed energy capabilities, as simply scaling up current programs is not likely to be effective.”

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The commission did not recommend specific technologies. But thanks to the advances of technology, and the lower cost of satellite launches, space-based solutions are promising a far more capable system than America has ever had, and in the long run a more cost-effective system than a strictly ground- and sea-based interceptor architecture.

Israel is bracing for what could be another attack by Iran or by one of its proxies, and the Iron Dome missile defense system stands ready to defend. The last time Iran tried this, Iron Dome performed impressively, causing Iran to succeed in none of its military aims before being on the receiving end of an Israeli retaliatory precision strike.

The Iron Dome missile interceptor gave Israel time to respond in a way of its choosing and made this kind of attack against Israel far less appealing.

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Likewise, adapting U.S. homeland missile defense would strengthen America’s advantage. Like Iron Dome, it would cause enemies to doubt the success of the possible strike, protect U.S. leaders’ ability to resist enemies’ coercive threats to attack and, if deterrence fails, it would limit the damage of an attack. 

During the time Trump has been talking about this concept, the threat environment has deteriorated further, and now the United States is facing down multiple nuclear adversaries. Rather than mocking an “Iron Dome Missile Shield for America,” it is time we built one.

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