In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced he was launching a Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars,” with the goal of rendering nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” He imagined lasers in space shooting down Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, effectively creating a space shield to save America from nuclear Armageddon.
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More than 40 years and hundreds of billions of dollars in missile-defense spending later, the United States has not come close to achieving Reagan’s lofty aspirations. Space lasers did not prove practical. Neither did a madcap scheme known as Brilliant Pebbles for lofting thousands of interceptors into space. The Airborne Laser — a Boeing 747 equipped with a laser — got to the testing phase before being canceled as too impractical.
The United States did develop and deploy effective defenses, such as the Patriot battery and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, for use against short- and medium-range missiles. But attempts to stop a nuclear missile strike on the United States have never advanced much beyond President George W. Bush’s deployment in 2004 of 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California. This system was designed to defend against a few missiles launched by a rogue state, not a massive nuclear attack from Russia or China. And it isn’t clear the system could achieve even that objective: In tests, the interceptors hit their targets only 50 percent of the time.
But faith in national missile defense never dies. On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create an “Iron Dome for America.” He directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to submit a plan within 60 days for “a next-generation missile defense shield” that would defeat “any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland” by employing, among other methods, “space-based interceptors.”
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The catchy name comes from Israel’s Iron Dome, a system designed to defend against rockets that travel up to 44 miles. That’s not very useful for the United States, unless Canada were to launch missiles at Detroit. As security analyst Joe Cirincione pointed out on the Defense One website, “We would need to deploy more than 24,700 Iron Dome batteries to defend the 3.7 million square miles of the continental United States.” That would cost nearly $2.5 trillion and wouldn’t “even protect Mar-a-Lago from missiles fired from the Bahamas, some 80 miles away.”
Of course, “Iron Dome for America” is just a marketing slogan. Presumably, like a lot of what Trump says, it is supposed to be taken seriously, not literally. But, even making allowances for Trump’s trademark hyperbole, a serious problem remains: Despite all the technological developments of the past four decades, building a “missile defense shield over our entire country” (as promised in the GOP’s 2024 platform) is no more practical today than it was in 1983.
“There is zero possibility of a comprehensive missile defense of the United States in the foreseeable future,” James N. Miller, who served as undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, told me on Tuesday. “We are not going to escape mutual assured destruction vis-à-vis Russia or China.”
He added that “a lot of studies have shown space-based interceptors to only have value if the adversary doesn’t take obvious steps to defeat them. I don’t think we can count on our adversaries being that stupid.” Indeed, satellites are relatively easy to shoot down; Russia just launched what is believed to be a new satellite capable of knocking out U.S. satellites.
That doesn’t mean there is no need for missile defense. It does mean that the objective must be more modest than trying to protect the entire U.S. population.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/27/trump-congress-national-service-program/
Robert Soofer, who served in the Defense Department during Trump’s first term, just issued an Atlantic Council report, written in conjunction with other missile-defense experts, outlining a more realistic vision. Soofer aims to preserve nuclear deterrence by making it more difficult for an adversary such as China or Russia to stage a decapitating first strike against U.S. nuclear forces. The report recommends, therefore, focusing missile defenses on U.S. nuclear forces, national leadership targets, and nuclear command, control and communications, all with an eye to “enhance US nuclear survivability.”
To achieve this objective in the next five years, the report proposes upgrading the existing ground-based interceptors (something the Biden administration was planning to do) and networking them with the Navy’s Standard Missile-3 system and the THAAD system to create a multilayered missile defense for key strategic targets. With that goal in mind, the report recommends increasing homeland missile defense spending from roughly $3 billion to as much as $8 billion a year.
Many well-respected defense experts are skeptical that even this more modest program could achieve much success in shooting down ICBMs, which travel at 15,000 mph and can be equipped with multiple, independently targetable warheads. An attacker can also employ countermeasures such as decoys, jammers and chaff to confuse missile defenses. And ballistic or cruise missiles can be launched from submarines off the U.S. coast, reducing warning time to almost zero. The spread of highly maneuverable hypersonic cruise missiles and glide vehicles (which fly at over 3,800 mph) further complicates the picture. Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists calls Trump’s Iron Dome plan a “fantasy” and a “bad investment.”
In an email to me, Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace expressed another concern: that Trump’s plan could lead to “nuclear arms-racing.” In other words, China and Russia will react by further boosting both the quality and quantity of their own nuclear forces to maintain the ability to overwhelm U.S. defenses.
Those concerns are valid, but there is a strong case to be made for upgrading homeland missile defense to intercept a limited attack from a rogue state such as North Korea, or to discourage a first strike from China or Russia. If that’s what the Trump plan winds up doing, it could be a worthwhile investment. But if Trump insists on spending countless billions of dollars in a futile attempt to protect every inch of U.S. territory from nuclear attack, it is likely to be a costly boondoggle that will drain defense dollars from more urgent priorities — such as rebuilding America’s dilapidated defense-industrial base.
Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter
More than 40 years and hundreds of billions of dollars in missile-defense spending later, the United States has not come close to achieving Reagan’s lofty aspirations. Space lasers did not prove practical. Neither did a madcap scheme known as Brilliant Pebbles for lofting thousands of interceptors into space. The Airborne Laser — a Boeing 747 equipped with a laser — got to the testing phase before being canceled as too impractical.
The United States did develop and deploy effective defenses, such as the Patriot battery and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, for use against short- and medium-range missiles. But attempts to stop a nuclear missile strike on the United States have never advanced much beyond President George W. Bush’s deployment in 2004 of 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California. This system was designed to defend against a few missiles launched by a rogue state, not a massive nuclear attack from Russia or China. And it isn’t clear the system could achieve even that objective: In tests, the interceptors hit their targets only 50 percent of the time.
But faith in national missile defense never dies. On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create an “Iron Dome for America.” He directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to submit a plan within 60 days for “a next-generation missile defense shield” that would defeat “any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland” by employing, among other methods, “space-based interceptors.”
Follow Max Boot
The catchy name comes from Israel’s Iron Dome, a system designed to defend against rockets that travel up to 44 miles. That’s not very useful for the United States, unless Canada were to launch missiles at Detroit. As security analyst Joe Cirincione pointed out on the Defense One website, “We would need to deploy more than 24,700 Iron Dome batteries to defend the 3.7 million square miles of the continental United States.” That would cost nearly $2.5 trillion and wouldn’t “even protect Mar-a-Lago from missiles fired from the Bahamas, some 80 miles away.”
Of course, “Iron Dome for America” is just a marketing slogan. Presumably, like a lot of what Trump says, it is supposed to be taken seriously, not literally. But, even making allowances for Trump’s trademark hyperbole, a serious problem remains: Despite all the technological developments of the past four decades, building a “missile defense shield over our entire country” (as promised in the GOP’s 2024 platform) is no more practical today than it was in 1983.
“There is zero possibility of a comprehensive missile defense of the United States in the foreseeable future,” James N. Miller, who served as undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, told me on Tuesday. “We are not going to escape mutual assured destruction vis-à-vis Russia or China.”
He added that “a lot of studies have shown space-based interceptors to only have value if the adversary doesn’t take obvious steps to defeat them. I don’t think we can count on our adversaries being that stupid.” Indeed, satellites are relatively easy to shoot down; Russia just launched what is believed to be a new satellite capable of knocking out U.S. satellites.
That doesn’t mean there is no need for missile defense. It does mean that the objective must be more modest than trying to protect the entire U.S. population.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/27/trump-congress-national-service-program/
Robert Soofer, who served in the Defense Department during Trump’s first term, just issued an Atlantic Council report, written in conjunction with other missile-defense experts, outlining a more realistic vision. Soofer aims to preserve nuclear deterrence by making it more difficult for an adversary such as China or Russia to stage a decapitating first strike against U.S. nuclear forces. The report recommends, therefore, focusing missile defenses on U.S. nuclear forces, national leadership targets, and nuclear command, control and communications, all with an eye to “enhance US nuclear survivability.”
To achieve this objective in the next five years, the report proposes upgrading the existing ground-based interceptors (something the Biden administration was planning to do) and networking them with the Navy’s Standard Missile-3 system and the THAAD system to create a multilayered missile defense for key strategic targets. With that goal in mind, the report recommends increasing homeland missile defense spending from roughly $3 billion to as much as $8 billion a year.
Many well-respected defense experts are skeptical that even this more modest program could achieve much success in shooting down ICBMs, which travel at 15,000 mph and can be equipped with multiple, independently targetable warheads. An attacker can also employ countermeasures such as decoys, jammers and chaff to confuse missile defenses. And ballistic or cruise missiles can be launched from submarines off the U.S. coast, reducing warning time to almost zero. The spread of highly maneuverable hypersonic cruise missiles and glide vehicles (which fly at over 3,800 mph) further complicates the picture. Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists calls Trump’s Iron Dome plan a “fantasy” and a “bad investment.”
In an email to me, Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace expressed another concern: that Trump’s plan could lead to “nuclear arms-racing.” In other words, China and Russia will react by further boosting both the quality and quantity of their own nuclear forces to maintain the ability to overwhelm U.S. defenses.
Those concerns are valid, but there is a strong case to be made for upgrading homeland missile defense to intercept a limited attack from a rogue state such as North Korea, or to discourage a first strike from China or Russia. If that’s what the Trump plan winds up doing, it could be a worthwhile investment. But if Trump insists on spending countless billions of dollars in a futile attempt to protect every inch of U.S. territory from nuclear attack, it is likely to be a costly boondoggle that will drain defense dollars from more urgent priorities — such as rebuilding America’s dilapidated defense-industrial base.
