It’s not news that President Trump sometimes sets out difficult-to-achieve goals on nearly impossible time frames.
This can lead to inevitable frustrations (we are more than 2,400 hours into the Trump administration and there’s still no Ukraine-Russia peace deal) and also to progress more quickly than most would have thought possible (see the extraordinary success of Operation Warp Speed).
We hope that Trump’s vision of a Golden Dome defense system to protect the U.S. against ballistic missile attack falls into the latter category, and we believe it can, so long as the project’s architects reject conventional thinking and bureaucratic practices and move with great urgency.
The most foreseeable existential threat to our society is a nuclear attack, and it’s always been insane that we’ve been so slow to develop and deploy the most robust possible defenses against one. Reagan was right when he advocated for the Strategic Defense Initiative during the Cold War, and Trump’s Golden Dome proposes to bring Reagan’s vision to fruition.
Trump says his program will cost $175 billion and can be operational before the end of his second term.
The critics scoff, pointing out that Israel’s Iron Dome — obviously the inspiration for the name of Trump’s program — defends a much smaller country than ours. That’s certainly true, but what’s most remarkable about the Israel experience is that the Jewish state has forged an effective, multi-layered defense against all manner of missile threats, when not so long ago critics of missile defense said it would prove technologically impossible to hit a “bullet with a bullet.”
What has opened up new technological vistas is space, and it’s important that the Trump administration put an emphasis on that realm. We need more interceptors of all kinds, but just buying more of what we already have will be an expensive boon to incumbent aerospace firms and won’t produce the leap ahead in capability that we need. A robust complement of space-based interceptors is necessary to countering threats bigger than a one-off rogue-state strike or an accidental launch. If a private entrepreneur, Elon Musk, can launch his own network of thousands of satellites, surely the United States government can work quickly to begin to get interceptors into space.
There is a political imperative as well. If Trump ends his second term with no space-based interceptors, it will be easy for a Democratic successor to squash the program and ensure they are never deployed. The Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations all moved to blunt progress on missile defense initiated by their GOP predecessors. It would presumably be politically difficult, on the other hand, for a Democrat to deactivate interceptors already deployed.
The government needs to take a page from Musk in terms of being willing to experiment and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good — whatever is initially deployed can be improved upon over time. It will also be essential to avoid typical Pentagon procurement practices, where it is the norm — as we’ve seen with the next-generation ground-based interceptor — for costs and timelines to balloon.
Finally, the funding for Golden Dome will have to be protected from other forces within the Pentagon who will want to take the dollars to pay for other priorities.
Our defenses are vastly improved since Reagan first announced SDI decades ago, but there is much work to do. Trump’s announcement on Tuesday set out the correct vision. It will take creativity, determination, and warp speed in the follow-up to make America less vulnerable to a catastrophic missile attack.