Dating back to his first days on the campaign trail in 2015, President Donald Trump has long made bolstering America’s defenses against missile attacks one of his top military priorities. Now, his commitment to building a “Golden Dome,” which he announced in his address to Congress last week, could become the crowning achievement of his defense legacy.
Since the early years of the Cold War, ballistic missiles have posed the most significant military threat to the American homeland. In response to the nuclear menace of the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” that laid the groundwork for the United States’ missile defense shield.
Three decades later, the missile threats facing the United States have evolved, and so too must the country’s missile defense infrastructure. Just this week, North Korea fired multiple ballistic missiles after condemning joint U.S.-South Korean military drills. As I reported for AMAC Newsline earlier this year, top Pentagon brass now believe that North Korea “probably can deliver a nuclear payload to targets throughout North America while minimizing our ability to provide pre-launch warning.”
Meanwhile, China and Russia have made major advancements in hypersonic missile technology that can easily evade existing U.S. defenses, posing another serious threat to the American homeland.
“You cannot defeat what you cannot see,” General Gregory Guillot, the Commander of U.S. Northern Command, told a Senate panel earlier this year. “Our adversaries have an increasing capability of reaching us and threatening us from ranges beyond what some of our current systems can detect and track.”
At present, the United States can only defend a small fraction of its territory against the most advanced missiles. “The only U.S. airspace that’s protected from cruise missiles is a stretch of downtown Washington between the Capitol and the Pentagon, and the entire country is vulnerable to a hypersonic threat,” retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery has warned.
As one of his first actions after taking office, President Trump signed an executive order directing construction of an “Iron Dome for America.”
“The threat of attack by ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks, remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States,” the order states. “To further the goal of peace through strength, it is the policy of the United States that 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.”
Then, in his address to a joint session of Congress last week, Trump asked Congress “to fund a state-of-the-art Golden Dome missile defense shield to protect our homeland, all made in the USA.”
While the first stages of the Golden Dome are still under discussion, I spoke with several experts who provided some early details on what it might look like.
For an effective and robust missile defense, the U.S. must design and build a complex network that blends satellites, dirigibles, and long-range land- and sea-based sensors to detect attacks, along with systems able to intercept and eliminate missile attacks. “Innovative solutions must engage through space and utilize near-space sensors,” one anonymous source told me.
One platform that could form a crucial foundation for the Golden Dome is the Aegis Combat System, a sophisticated integrated weapons system designed to detect, track, and destroy airborne threats, including missiles and aircraft. Currently, only around 50 U.S. Navy warships are equipped with this system. Australia, Japan, and South Korea have already made significant investments in these warships.
A land-based variant of the system known as Aegis Ashore could also become a key part of the Golden Dome. That system is only deployed in three countries today – Poland, Romania, and Japan.
Artificial intelligence (AI) could also prove useful for building the Golden Dome, but it is still in its infancy and has some serious limitations. While AI can help solve engineering problems or perform basic tasks, it cannot provide the human-level reasoning necessary to handle threats like foreign vessels entering identification zones.
The Golden Dome must also be able to defend against more than just missile threats. As the war in Ukraine has shown, drones could become especially deadly weapons in future conflicts. One government report I reviewed found that at least 4,000 drones have been launched each month by Russia and Ukraine.
Isamu Mizutani, a retired colonel in Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force, told me that the United States faces a “plethora of threats” ranging from traditional missiles to “unmanned aerial vehicles and glide bombs seeking a target.”
“For the Golden Dome to endure, innovation is fundamental,” he added, emphasizing that modern militaries must remain constantly alert to emerging threats. The war in Ukraine has again proven instructive on this point, as Western defense systems initially struggled to intercept and destroy Russian glide bombs. It was only after Ukrainian forces developed jammers that they were able to redirect the Russian bombs from cities to open areas.
Military leaders and engineers will have a difficult needle to thread in building the Golden Dome. While America’s missile defense shield needs a serious upgrade, time is of the essence, and the country’s adversaries won’t be standing still.
But as Trump has repeatedly shown, he is the right leader to achieve the seemingly impossible.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
