Trump signs executive order to establish an ‘Iron Dome for America’

President Trump late Monday signed an executive order to establish an “Iron Dome for America,” a 21st-century missile shield that would fulfill a campaign promise by establishing a sweeping homeland defense system to counter missile threats.

In the order, Mr. Trump directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to submit within 60 days “a reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield.” That shield, which would rely primarily on space-based interceptors rather than ground-based capabilities, will defend “the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries,” the order says.

Some critics cast the approach as both unrealistic and prohibitively expensive. But Mr. Trump’s executive order serves as an acknowledgment of a reality that national security insiders and defense analysts have long warned about: Right now, the U.S. cannot stop well-armed adversaries from hitting the homeland with ballistic, cruise or hypersonic missiles.

“The threat of attack by ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks, remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States. President Ronald Reagan endeavored to build an effective defense against nuclear attacks, and while this program resulted in many technological advances, it was canceled before its goal could be realized,” the order reads in part, referencing Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative program.

“Over the past 40 years, rather than lessening, the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex with the development by peer and near-peer adversaries of next-generation delivery systems and their own homeland integrated air and missile defense capabilities,” the order says.

Some specialists praised the order as a key first step in overhauling America’s missile defense capabilities to match today’s threats. These threats include the fact that U.S. adversaries — mainly China and Russia — already have the weapons and the strategic arsenals to defeat the country’s defense systems.

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“For robust missile defense, the Department of Defense will need to design and build a comprehensive architecture that mixes satellites, dirigibles equipped with sensors, and long-range ground-based radars to detect and track threats. The Pentagon then needs to integrate this network of sensors with a mix of engagement systems to shoot down incoming missiles,” said retired Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, now the senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.

“To make America secure again, President Trump will have to make the investments in missile defense that America has postponed for far too long,” he told The Washington Times.

While being cast as America’s version of the Iron Dome, Mr. Trump’s vision is actually quite different from the Israeli system. The Israeli missile defense network primarily protects against shorter-range rocket and mortar attacks. Mr. Trump’s proposal will focus on much longer-range threats and even the most advanced, superfast hypersonic weapons.

But it is that shared terminology that is fueling at least some of the criticism of the order, especially by those who say that the underlying concept is a pipe dream.

“Invoking Iron Dome is just marketing, trying to manufacture credibility for something that has never worked,” said Laura Grego, research director and senior scientist for the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Longstanding U.S. policy has been to focus on defense against a small number of missiles from a non-peer state like North Korea because trying to build a defense against the missile arsenals of an advanced state like Russia is technically unachievable, economically ruinous and strategically unwise,” she said in a statement. “Russia and China already appear to be building new types of weapons with the purpose of defeating or avoiding missile defenses. Missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for keeping the U.S. safe from nuclear weapons.”

Virtually all analysts agree that no missile defense shield, no matter how high-tech or well-funded, could stop every single weapon if a nation, such as China, decided to launch thousands of missiles toward the U.S. at once.

But there’s a strong belief among many in national security circles that a 21st-century shield could stop many of them. To that end, Mr. Trump’s order lays out a host of specific goals for the Defense Department. Chief among them is the principle that the U.S. must have the capabilities it needs “to defeat missile attacks prior to launch and in the boost phase.”

Specialists generally agree that the only way to do that is through space-based missile interceptors. The order calls for the “development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept.”

There is no price tag on the order. But national security sources recently told The Washington Times they believe that it’s possible to put as many as 1,000 space-based interceptors in orbit for a cost in the tens, not hundreds, of billions of dollars.

The order includes a host of directives related to establishing the American version of an Iron Dome. One of the most complex and potentially difficult is likely to be Mr. Trump’s order for the “development and deployment of a secure supply chain for all components with next-generation security and resilience features.”