When, in March 1983 in a nationally televised speech, Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, he asked the American “scientific community” — “those who gave us nuclear weapons” — “to turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”
Reagan was proposing SDI as an alternative to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction that he found personally repugnant. From the beginning, however, SDI was controversial. Opponents said it would cost too much, or lead to a renewed arms race, or scare the Soviets into striking first. Those who believed Reagan to be a warmonger or a dunce ridiculed the idea of space lasers and science-fiction weaponry. Ted Kennedy derisively called SDI “reckless Star Wars schemes,” and the name stuck. In 1986, then-senator Joe Biden harangued Reagan, calling his idea “one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.”
Funny how that all turned out. Fully fledged ballistic missile defense technology (BMD) may not have been ripe in the ’80s, but not only did Reagan’s push to strengthen America’s defenses not lead to nuclear war between the superpowers, it arguably contributed to the end of the Cold War by forcing Soviet leadership to realize that they had no hope of outcompeting the West in technological prowess at the dawn of the Information Age.
Now, 40 years on, President Trump has issued an executive order mandating the development and deployment of an American “next-generation missile defense shield” designed “for the common defense” of “its citizens and the Nation.” Because the Trump White House entitled its executive order “Iron Dome for America,” there has been much guffawing and mockery, not very dissimilar to the Kennedy/Biden reaction four decades ago. New York Times reporter Matthew Bigg’s reaction was typical: “Experts immediately raised questions about whether an Iron Dome-style system was feasible for the United States, which is more than 400 times the size of Israel,” he wrote.
That misses the point, though. The “Iron Dome” moniker is more branding — as what everyone knows as a highly effective defense system — rather than the precise model of what Trump seeks to create.
Iron Dome, of course, has been defending Israel from Hezbollah and Hamas rocket attacks since 2011. That system, whose deployment and improvements have been partly funded by the United States, was designed to work against low-tech rocket and artillery attacks fired from relatively short range.
But while Iron Dome is by far the most famous layer of Israel’s integrated air-defense complex, it is by no means its only component: David’s Sling, Arrow 2, Arrow 3, and the U.S.-developed Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems are designed to kill more advanced and harder-to-hit targets, including cruise missiles, kamikaze drones, and ballistic missiles.
What the United States needs — as the Trump executive order states — is a defense against “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.” That’s a tall order, and it will require fully exploiting the opportunities presented by space.
It’s not as if America is starting from scratch. Work done in the Reagan years has borne fruit in the design and development of THAAD and other currently deployed U.S. missile-defense systems. And much progress has been achieved in the years since President Bush’s 2001 decision to withdraw from the misguided 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
But we are going to have to prioritize, develop, and deploy advanced missile-defense technologies in space, as the Trump executive order calls for. In an era in which American aerospace companies are plucking their rocket systems from the sky for reuse as launch vehicles, during which Americans are contemplating manned missions to Mars, and when launch costs are drastically declining, a transformative system of space-based sensors and interceptors is plausible.
A space-based system opens up the possibility of tracking and engaging many more missiles than is feasible with ground-based interceptors. We should be thinking not just in terms of defeating a rogue-state attack from North Korea or Iran, but a wider assault from our peer adversaries in China and Russia.
For most of our history, the American people were free to live largely in peace, protected from foreign threats on our continent by our oceans. For three generations, however, we have lived under the black cloud of foreign tyrants pointing their missiles at us, threatening our people, our allies, and our way of life. No technology can forever solve the problem of evil men who wish to do us harm. But the American people have the power to develop tools that can, if not solve, then at least mitigate the threats against us. President Trump is right to make missile defense a national priority.
Reprinted with permission from National Review by The Editors.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.