Trump Is Right about Creating a U.S. Iron Dome

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

 

One of Donald Trump’s most consistent, if relatively neglected, policy promises during the campaign was to build an “Iron Dome” for America.

 

Trump included the proposal in the Republican platform — “A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY” — and he talked about the “greatest dome of them all” at rallies.

 

The idea got some more attention this week when Trump’s national security adviser–designee, the Florida congressman Michael Waltz, mentioned it in a Sunday show interview regarding the mystery drone sightings over the East Coast.

 

I’m doubtful that the drones that people are reporting seeing at night are a threat, but Waltz — and Trump — are absolutely right about the imperative of creating a U.S. defense shield.

 

Trump can be all over the map on policy, sometimes during a single interview, but he’s been remarkably consistent on this one. As Rebeccah L. Heinrichs points out, he was talking about a missile shield as far back as 1999, praising Ronald Reagan’s push for SDI, and he set out a highly ambitious vision for missile defense while president.

 

At the 2024 Republican convention, Trump pledged to “replenish our military and build an Iron Dome missile defense system to ensure that no enemy can strike our homeland.” He noted that “Israel has an Iron Dome,” and asked, reasonably enough, “Why should other countries have this, and we don’t?”

 

Critics will snipe, “Doesn’t Trump know that Iron Dome is defending against short-range rockets and only works because Israel is a very small country? And that the cost of replicating that system here makes no sense because we aren’t threatened by our neighbors — is someone going to rocket us from Toronto or Mexico City? — and would be prohibitively expensive in any case?”

 

Trump, though, shouldn’t be taken literally when he speaks of Iron Dome. That’s clearly shorthand for a more robust system appropriate for our particular defensive needs. As he said in a 2019 speech, “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.”

 

If it is easy to dismiss this as overpromising, it is an ambition that is more achievable than ever and should be one of the highest priorities of the United States government. A nuclear attack against the homeland is one of the most foreseeable threats to the existence of our society as we know it, and defending against it should be undertaken with a commensurate urgency and seriousness.

 

How much progress Trump can actually make depends on whom he puts in charge, how much of a personal emphasis he makes the project, and what kind of funding he insists upon from the Pentagon.

 

The opponents of missile defense will be out in force, saying — as always — that stopping incoming missiles is technologically impossible, and too expensive to contemplate, regardless.

 

As longtime arms-controller Joseph Cirincione recently wrote:

 

Since President Ronald Reagan announced his ambitious Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, the country has given more than $415 billion to our best military contractors, employed tens of thousands of workers and the best scientists in the effort. Nothing has worked.

 

All we have to show for the effort is a basic system of 44 ground-based interceptors deployed in Alaska and California. Under ideal test conditions they have been able to hit a target only half of the time. The program is essentially on hold while a new interceptor is designed.

 

Well, we’d have more than 44 interceptors if we’d been more determined to enhance our defense and if Democrats in particular hadn’t repeatedly sabotaged the project.

 

Nonetheless, those several dozen interceptors aren’t nothing. They can potentially protect against a North Korean or Iranian launch and limit the ability of those countries to blackmail the U.S.

 

It’s also not as though those interceptors are all we have to show for our efforts over the decades. When we started out we had no short- or medium-range defense like the Patriot missile (now shared with multiple allied nations). We had nothing like THAAD, either its radar or interceptors. We didn’t have any capability that was mobile and deployed on ships. We didn’t have the space-based sensors we have now.

 

If you consider the first Persian Gulf War way back in 1991, our defenses were already making a difference — Patriot missiles helped keep Israel out of the war when Saddam launched his Scuds against the Jewish state and preserved the coalition against him.

 

It is never a good idea to bet against the most technologically proficient society in world history solving engineering problems — which is what we are talking about with missile defense — and it makes less sense than ever.

 

The reason this moment is so promising is that technological advances have made a layered, space-based defense system increasingly plausible. It is true that ground-based interceptors have inherent limits, but such interceptors shouldn’t be the main line of effort. Tracking and destroying missiles in space and from space offers the opportunity for a quantum leap in capability.

 

We are witnessing an extraordinary reduction in launch and platform costs, thanks to the exertions of Elon Musk and other new-generation satellite providers. Sensors are becoming more capable, and communications between sensors and other technological elements that would play a role in defense are better and faster. If a private entrepreneur, namely Musk, can deploy thousands of satellites to create his own communications network out of scratch, surely the U.S. government can do a version of the same in furtherance of its fundamental national security.

 

That doesn’t mean it will be easy. Trump will have to make sure that the usual forces in the bureaucracy don’t chip away at and stymie any new initiative. Four-star generals who aren’t working on space tend to oppose missile defense — not theater systems to protect troops and sailors, but defenses devoted to protecting the homeland; they prefer to spend on tanks, ships, and the like. Pentagon budget offices always look to cut from spending on missile defense. And the widely held superstition that space can’t be “weaponized” — never mind that the V-2 rocket was the first man-made object to enter space — will have to be smashed.

 

Although no one wants to talk about Operation Warp Speed anymore, it should be the model. It showed that, with enough resolve and urgency coming from the very top, a group of creative people can achieve what’s considered impossible, provided they get the requisite resources and freedom from red tape.

 

In this regard, the incoming administration should be looking to tap the new defense firms, born in Silicon Valley, that lack the genetic disposition toward slowness and caution of the big legacy defense firms.

 

In short, Iron Dome is the appropriate goal, and it is within Trump’s power to catalyze transformational progress toward realizing it.