President Donald Trump’s executive order to create a “next-generation missile defense shield” that can “defend its citizens and critical infrastructure against—any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland” is technically and budgetarily difficult at best, experts said.
One disconnect between the dream and the reality appears in the order’s title: “The Iron Dome for America.” Taken literally, this suggests the use of the Iron Dome anti-missile system made by Raytheon and Rafael and used effectively in recent conflicts by Israel. But Iron Dome is designed to protect cities or installations from missiles and drone threats of relatively short range, about 50 miles. Given the terrain and geography of the United States, the system might be useful for protecting a city like, say, El Paso, Texas, from a rocket attack emanating from Mexico, but not much else.
“Each Iron Dome system can defend an area of roughly 150 square miles. 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. At $100 million per battery, that would be approximately $2,470,000,000,000”—and that $2,470 trillion system would be good only against relatively small and slow weapons, not incoming ICBMs, nuclear analyst Joe Cirincione wrote last year for Defense One.
Trump’s order, however, appears to use “Iron Dome” as branding for a different kind of system entirely—one that, among other things, puts interceptor weapons in orbit.
The idea of space-based interceptors has been around since the 1960s, when the Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept, or BAMBI, was proposed but never built.
The concept resurfaced in 1983, under President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, with the proposal of Brilliant Pebbles, which envisioned a network of small, autonomous satellites designed to intercept ICBMs. The idea was eventually scrapped due to technological hurdles, as well as concerns about the escalation cost of putting weapons in space—a cost Russia has already shown it is willing to pay.
The first Trump administration floated a space weapon concept in March 2018: a neutral particle beam in space. But it ultimately shelved the idea because of the massive amount of power needed to destroy a missile with directed energy.
The idea becomes more feasible with space missiles, rather than lasers or particles—but it’s still incredibly difficult and expensive.
Laura Grego, a senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, on Tuesday called Trump’s idea a “fantasy.”
“The Iron Dome is designed to intercept short-range rockets and artillery shells, which is a very different threat than the long-range ballistic missiles that would be aimed at the U.S.,” Grego said. Intercepting ICBMs requires “a completely different and much more complex system,” she said, adding that adversaries could develop countermeasures that render the defense system less effective.
Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, on Wednesday analyzed the financial and logistical challenges of a space-based missile interceptor system. Such a system would necessitate overcoming significant technical hurdles to put “hundreds of satellites in orbit” at “astronomical costs,” Harrison said.
And if adversaries targeted the satellites, they could compromise the entire defense architecture, he said.
Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, offered a more supportive perspective, viewing the executive order as a “monumental leap in policy.” She said the current U.S. missile defense posture is “insufficient,” given the advancements in missile technology by adversarial nations. Instead, she said, the U.S. needs a layered missile defense system that includes space-based sensors and interceptors to “provide the necessary coverage and effectiveness” to protect the homeland.
Trump also calls for additional interceptors on the ground, which is much easier. And with sufficient space tracking capabilities, they can be effective against even the most advanced new hypersonic missiles. Consider how Ukraine was able to down one of Russia’s next-generation super missiles with a U.S.-supplied Patriot battery in September 2023.
The missile threats are real. China and Russia have both developed next-generation, highly-maneuverable hypersonic missiles that are very difficult to intercept—nearly impossible with the ground-based midcourse defense interceptors the U.S. has that were designed to defeat conventional intercontinental ballistic missiles that fly in predictable paths.
That’s one reason the United States is already building a constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit: to help track and intercept these missiles.
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