The new US president wants to deploy a “next-generation missile defense shield” to protect the country from long-range attacks
US President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to develop a plan for a new integrated missile shield, arguing a potential sophisticated long-range aerial attack remains the “most catastrophic threat” the country is facing. The proposed missile shield takes its name after the Israeli Iron Dome system, which serves as the foundation for that country’s own multi-layer air-defense structure.
The freshly sworn-in president on Monday tasked the defense secretary with the creation of the system in an executive order, dubbed ‘The Iron Dome for America.’
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth now has 60 days to hatch the plan to protect the US from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries” and envision the new multi-layered missile shield.
“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 executive order reads.
The directive mandates the creation of various features of the proposed missile shield, including the “development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors,” capable of shooting down incoming ballistic missiles during their boost phase, bolstering of the “underlayer and terminal-phase intercept capabilities,” as well as unspecified “capabilities to defeat missile attacks prior to launch.”
While the order implies the plans should be incorporated into the next year’s budget, it does not provide any cost estimates on the ambitious program. Nor does it provide a timeframe on when exactly the missile shield should materialize.
Trump has repeatedly promised to create an Israeli-style integrated missile defense shield, yet it remains to be seen how exactly such an approach would work for the US, a country immensely larger than Israel.
“I will direct our military to begin construction of the great Iron Dome missile defense shield, which will be made all in the USA, much of it right here in Arizona,” Trump said during a rally last month.
Israel’s Iron Dome system is primarily designed to intercept small crude unguided rockets, drones and artillery shells, while other weapons provide capabilities against other threats, such as sophisticated long-range ballistic and cruise missiles.
