President Trump has issued an executive order that calls for deploying and maintaining a “next-generation missile defense shield”, an “Iron Dome for America”.
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EXECUTIVE ORDER
The Iron Dome for America
January 27, 2025
Sec. 2 Policy. To further the goal of peace through strength, it is the policy of the United States that:
(a) The United States will provide for the common defense of its citizens and the Nation by deploying and maintaining a next-generation missile defense shield;
(b) The United States will deter – and defend its citizens and critical infrastructure against – any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland; and
(c) The United States will guarantee its secure second-strike capability.
Sec. 3. Implementation. Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense shall:
(a) Submit to the President a reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield. The architecture shall include, at a minimum, plans for:
(i) Defense of the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries;
(ii) Acceleration of the deployment of the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor layer;
(iii) Development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept;
(iv) Deployment of underlayer and terminal-phase intercept capabilities postured to defeat a countervalue attack;
(v) Development and deployment of a custody layer of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture;
(vi) Development and deployment of capabilities to defeat missile attacks prior to launch and in the boost phase;
(vii) Development and deployment of a secure supply chain for all components with next-generation security and resilience features; and
(viii) Development and deployment of non-kinetic capabilities to augment the kinetic defeat of ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks…
…the Secretary of Defense shall direct a review of theater missile defense posture and initiatives to identify ways in which the United States and its allies and partners can:
(a) Increase bilateral and multilateral cooperation on missile defense technology development, capabilities, and operations;
(b) Improve theater missile defenses of forward-deployed United States troops and allied territories, troops, and populations; and
(c) Increase and accelerate the provision of United States missile defense capabilities to allies and partners.
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The American Union of Concerned Scientists reacted to the order via the following statement:
Calls for U.S. Iron Dome “a Fantasy”
Statement by Dr. Laura Grego, Union of Concerned Scientists
CAMBRIDGE [Mass.] (January 28, 2025)—Late yesterday President Trump issued an executive order mandating development of a hugely expensive, unrealistic and counterproductive homeland missile defense system. Comparisons to Israel’s Iron Dome are inaccurate and such a system has a low likelihood of success, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Below is a statement by Dr. Laura Grego, research director and senior scientist for the Global Security Program at UCS.
‘President Trump’s vision of an Iron Dome over America is a fantasy. The apparent successes of Israel’s Iron Dome system are not relevant to US homeland defense. Iron Dome defends small areas from short-range nonnuclear missiles. It’s a vastly easier task than defending the whole country against missiles that travel 100 times further and seven times faster than those Iron Dome is built for. Homeland missile defense requires an entirely different kind of defense, and because ICBMs carry nuclear-armed missiles, it needs to be very reliable and effective. Invoking Iron Dome is just marketing, trying to manufacture credibility for something that has never worked.
Over the last 60 years, the United States has spent more than $350 billion on efforts to develop a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs. This effort has been plagued by false starts and failures, and none have yet been demonstrated to be effective against a real-world threat. A UCS-MIT technical analysis found that even a less-developed country such as North Korea could use long-understood countermeasures to fool midcourse defenses like the current homeland defense system, the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. Proposals to get around those weaknesses by building space-based missile defenses have repeatedly been abandoned because they are expensive, very technically challenging, and readily defeated. Trump’s idea of a space-based missile defense is a bad investment.
Longstanding US 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. 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 US safe from nuclear weapons.
What President Trump gets absolutely right is that nuclear weapons present a catastrophic threat, and that as he said in Davos, nuclear disarmament is an urgent priority and is achievable. That is where the United States should be putting its efforts.’
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“The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derisively nicknamed the Star Wars Program, was a proposed missile defense system intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic nuclear missiles. The program was announced in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan. Reagan called for a system that would render nuclear weapons obsolete, and to end the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD)…..
Declassified intelligence material revealed that, due to the potential neutralization of its nuclear arsenal and resulting loss of a balancing power factor, the Soviet Union… viewed SDI with grave concern. Following the Cold War, when nuclear arsenals were shrinking, political support for SDI collapsed. SDI ended in 1993.”