Accepting the GOP presidential nomination in Milwaukee on Thursday night, former President Donald Trump pledged to "build an Iron Dome over our country and we're going to be sure that nothing can come and harm our people. And again, from an economic development standpoint, we're going to make it all right here." Trump twice emphasized that the missile defense system would be made entirely in the United States.
This rhetoric surely sounds good to Americans who are fearful of escalating tensions with Russia and who have witnessed the striking success of Israel's Iron Dome air defense network against Hamas and Hezbollah. The problem is that building an encompassing missile defense system for the entirety of the U.S. is impractical. At the intersection of capability and costs, it just wouldn't work. It would also catalyze an already exacerbating nuclear arms race between the U.S., China, and Russia.
The capability concern looms largest.
Israel's Iron Dome system cannot intercept ballistic missiles of the kind that threaten the U.S. homeland. Instead, it is designed to intercept crude short-range rockets, drones, and missiles from terrorist groups. Those are systems without countermeasure systems designed to prevent their effective intercept. There's also the geography consideration.
Depending on the territory included in the calculation, Israeli territory totals between 8,100 and 8,630 square miles. In contrast, America's land territory totals more than 3.5 million square miles. The U.S. is more than 400 times larger than Israel. The Iron Dome is defensively positioned against bordering threat vectors. It can defend Israel only from relatively crude air attacks and only because Israel is small.
This is not to say that the U.S. is or should be neglectful of missile defense. Indeed, the U.S. already has a system of ballistic missile defenses. These include the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (designed to destroy ballistic missiles/warhead vehicles just before they strike their target) and both the sea-based Aegis and Ground-Based Midcourse Defense systems (designed to strike ballistic missiles as they fly outside the atmosphere toward the U.S.). But there are limitations on these capabilities. THAAD has a range of up to about 125 miles, and Aegis has a range of up to about 750 miles.
And while the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system is based around a heavy rocket that enables its feasible defense of the entirety of the U.S. (including Hawaii and Alaska), the military itself notes that it can cope with only "a small number of [ballistic missiles]." Notably, these systems are not designed to protect against cruise missiles or nuclear-armed hypersonic vehicle systems.
The central strategic concern is that Russia and China (which is massively building up its nuclear ballistic missile force) both have the ability to overwhelm the U.S. missile defense system. They would almost certainly continue to have that capability if Trump pursued this Iron Dome variant scheme. Even if the air and submarine elements of the Chinese and/or Russian nuclear triad were heavily degraded by U.S. forces in advance of an attack, those nations could fire hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Perhaps employing space-based capabilities to blind U.S. defenses, they would be able to devastate the U.S. homeland.
There's also the problem that the military will not be able to field an effective hypersonic vehicle defense system until 2029 at the earliest. As Sen. Angus King (I-ME) has repeatedly pointed out , the military's missile defense strategy is strange at best and wantonly idiotic at worst. Earlier this year, King asked the Pentagon why it is cutting laser-based missile defense investments, even though they offer a far lower cost basis for each successful intercept. The military offered no good answers.
There is a far better twofold alternative to Trump's Iron Dome idea.
First, the U.S. should build upon the current ballistic missile defense system that is designed to deter intercontinental ballistic missile attacks from nations such as North Korea (and, prospectively, Iran), which have a far fewer number of warheads.
Second, the U.S. should advance the potency of U.S. nuclear strike and active defense forces. U.S. ground-based and air-based U.S. nuclear forces must remain the best trained and most redundantly operable in the world. And as long as U.S. attack submarines can continue to hold Sino-Russian nuclear ballistic missile submarines at exceptionally high risk , and as long as U.S. ballistic missile submarines can hide from Sino-Russian attack submarines, the U.S. military can effectively deter nuclear attack and provide a high confidence of U.S. victory in the worst case event of nuclear war .
Trump should know this. That he does not or pretends he does not leads us to another supposition.
Namely, that there may well be another factor motivating Trump's Iron Dome agenda: political-economic cronyism. Recall Trump's excited assertion that his Iron Dome would be built in America. That speaks to why this idea will be so popular in Congress and with defense contractors. Put simply, it will cost a lot of taxpayer money and generate well-paid jobs for powerful congressional constituencies. In that regard, however, it would also bring into heavy question whether decisions about building out this system (which, again, would not provide effective total defense) were being made on the basis of defensive needs or political interests.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), for example, has repeatedly appropriated millions of dollars for a missile defense site to be built at Fort Drum (located in her district). The Pentagon previously assessed Fort Drum would be the best place for such a system. But when, earlier this year, military officers appeared to question whether Fort Drum would still be the best possible location, Stefanik insisted that the Pentagon build the defense site there anyway.
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Top line: The U.S. needs the means of deterring and defeating nuclear attack. But dreaming up a highly expensive, highly impractical missile defense umbrella is not the answer.
The answer is to maintain nuclear strike supremacy and make sure that Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin continue to know that while they could wreak havoc on America with nuclear weapons, America could extinguish China and Russia as sovereign entities and transform them into desert wastelands.
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