President Donald Trump’s executive order to develop a next-generation homeland missile defense shield marks a shift in the United States’ long-standing homeland missile defense strategy, which has focused on threats from rogue nations like North Korea and Iran rather than from peer adversaries like China or Russia.
The order — titled “The Iron Dome For America” in a nod to the successful, lowest tier of Israel’s multilayered air defense system of the same name — also addresses a broader array of complex threats from hypersonic weapons to cruise missiles.
Further, the order revives the pursuit of space-based interceptors for missile defense, a concept that has been scrapped multiple times in recent history due to technological challenges and high costs associated with the development.
The executive order requires the defense secretary to submit an architecture design, outline requirements and develop an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield within 60 days of its signing.
Not just high-end threats
“The foundation of an Iron Dome for America needs to be air- and cruise-missile defense, and then we work our way up from there,” Tom Karako, a missile-defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Defense News. “Those are the gaps that we’re most vulnerable with and that we need to fill and work on filling most urgently. … It’s not just the high-end hypersonic stuff or the ICBMs, it’s all this other stuff.”
The Pentagon has worked for years, including in Trump’s first term, trying to come up with a plan to defend the U.S. homeland from cruise missiles. Officials were said to be closing in on a design framework for the mission as the Defense Department was formulating its fiscal 2024 budget request, yet the work appeared to have lost some traction in favor of other defense priorities.
Land-attack cruise missiles can be launched from the air, ground or sea, and because they fly at low altitudes under powered flight it is difficult for radars to detect them.
Ballistic missiles, on the other hand, can be detected much earlier, which allows more time to track, decide and act on a threat. Meanwhile, for cruise missiles, decision-makers may have only a couple of minutes to respond, and salvos of cruise missiles can attack from different directions, complicating the approach to defeating the threat.
Currently, the United States’ homeland missile defense posture consists of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense System. The system, developed to counter intercontinental ballistic missile attacks aimed at the continental U.S. from North Korea and Iran, is made up of ground-based interceptors primarily in Alaska, with a few silos at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The Missile Defense Agency is developing a new interceptor capable of addressing more complex threats, which will ultimately replace the current interceptors.
Additionally, the defensive architecture includes radars positioned in places like Clear, Alaska, and at sea in the Pacific, and a constellation of space-based detection capabilities is also in development.
While the U.S. has focused on ballistic missile defense of the homeland from rogue states, near-peer adversaries Russia and China have made investments over several decades to develop cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons.
The 2019 Missile Defense Review highlighted the need to focus on near-peer cruise missiles and directed the Pentagon to recommend an organization to have acquisition authority of cruise missile defense for the homeland. The designation requirement also appeared in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act.
Shooting from space
Much of the architecture would include capabilities already well under development, including the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor layer, solutions to address threats prior to launch and in the early “boost” phase of flight, and nonkinetic and kinetic defeat capabilities for advanced threats.
Yet, the order renews a push made in Trump’s first administration to develop and deploy “proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept,” the order states. The concept for space-based interceptors to take out missiles launched from the earth was first championed in the Reagan administration.
The fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act required the MDA director to establish a space test bed to conduct research on an intercept layer in space, but Congress agreed to repeal the requirement in the fiscal 2020 policy bill after Trump’s Missile Defense Review released in 2019 did not include investment in the pursuit.
Instead, the Pentagon planned to launch a study, lasting potentially six months, to look into the most promising technologies and come up with estimates for cost and time. The Pentagon would then consider the findings before choosing whether to move forward.
Following that, the MDA did little to fund research and development in the space-based interceptor arena in its FY20 budget, aside from allocating less than $15 million toward feasibility studies.
Congress turned its focus to backing the budget for a space-based sensor layer, now in development and making progress toward an ability to track complex threats like hypersonic missiles that can fly under ground-based sensor radars.
Putting interceptors in space has been controversial for myriad reasons, including its technological feasibility to the likelihood of high development costs to the idea that it could trigger an arms race in space.
Developing space-based interceptors is difficult, Karako said.
“Furthermore, there are a number of threats that space-based interceptors are not useful against, like cruise missiles, maybe hypersonic stuff,” he said. Those threats would fly outside of the range of a space-based interceptor, closer to the earth’s surface.
“The implications of what it means to treat space as a warfighting domain are just beginning to sink in,” he said. “We are now at the advent of a new national conversation about space-based interceptors.”
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
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