On the menu today: The executive orders are coming fast and furious now, almost faster than the news cycle can digest them. President Trump’s order to create an ‘Iron Dome for America’ is likely to get lost in the shuffle, and it shouldn’t. America’s enemies are militarizing space, and even missile defense critics concede, “The arms control framework — that was developed during the Cold War and early post-Cold War period to put some guardrails on the nuclear aspirations of the world’s nuclear weapon states — has fallen apart.” It’s fair to wonder if mutually assured destruction is a sufficient deterrent for the likes of Kim Jong-un or the Iranian mullahs. Very soon, Congress will face the question of how much it is willing to spend to upgrade us from having very little chance of shooting down an incoming ballistic missile to a somewhat better chance of shooting down that missile.
America Needs a Security Upgrade
One of last year’s bestsellers in nonfiction, Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War, is a heavily researched speculative fiction scenario of what would happen if North Korea launched two intercontinental ballistic missiles at the United States. In her envisioned scenario, the U.S. is not able to intercept the incoming ICBMs. She writes, “With forty-four [defense] missiles in its entire inventory, the U.S. interceptor program is mostly for show.” (I don’t want to give any spoilers, but Jacobsen’s scenario makes The Day After and Threads look like Spongebob Squarepants.)
According to the Arms Control Association, as of this month, “The Pentagon deploys 44 ground-based interceptors (GBIs) — 40 at Fort Greely, Alaska, and four at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.” The U.S. Navy also has the Aegis ballistic-missile-defense program; the Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) most recent budget submission stated, “By the end of FY 2025 [June 30], there will be 56 total [ballistic missile defense] capable [Aegis] ships requiring maintenance support.”
Everyone who works for MDA would disagree that these interceptor systems are “for show.” But they might concur that they’re insufficient, considering the scale of the threat and the stakes.
On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the creation of an “Iron Dome for America.” Mitch Kugler, who has worked on missile-defense policy and programs in the U.S. Senate and the defense industry since starting on the SDI program in 1988, wrote in our pages Tuesday that Trump’s order “calls for the application of the incredible advances in American technology since 1999 — among other things, increased and miniaturized computing power, reduced launch costs, and the application of sundry other commercial advances to national security needs — to finally make it a priority to put defenses in space; that’s where they will be most capable against longer-range threats.”
It is worth noting that Israel’s Iron Dome system is designed to shoot shorter-range incoming rockets, which are slower and traveling through the atmosphere, not intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Lots of people know the gist about Israel’s “Iron Dome.” (Well, not quite everyone; Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, back in 2014: “The Iron Dome has been a big reason why Israel has been able to withstand the terrorists that have tried to tunnel their way in.” Er, no, that’s not how it works, ma’am.)
Built by Raytheon Missiles & Defense teams with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Iron Dome is considered the most advanced and effective missile-defense system in the world. It is also one of the most expensive missile-defense systems in the world: “Each battery has radar, control equipment, and 3-4 missile launchers (each with 20 missiles) and costs $37 million to 50 million depending on how many missiles it is shipped with . . . if the computers predict a rocket coming down in an inhabited area one (or often two to be sure) $50,000 Tamir guided missiles are fired to intercept the rocket.”
According to Raytheon, “Ten Iron Dome batteries protect the citizens and infrastructure of Israel, with each battery comprising three to four stationary launchers, 20 Tamir missiles and a battlefield radar. Each of the batteries can defend up to nearly 60 square miles.”
You can do the math on that: Ten batteries protecting 60 square miles is 600 square miles.
Israel’s total landmass is more than 8,000 square miles, and each coast of the U.S. is hundreds of thousands of square miles. But when it comes to air defense, countries prioritize population centers and critical infrastructure, and the Iron Dome batteries are designed to only fire at rockets projected to hit a vulnerable area; it doesn’t go chasing after every rocket, if the likely landing area is unpopulated desert.
The Iron Dome system is consistently described as “90 percent effective” — which is great, but it also means about 10 percent of missiles could get through and hit their targets.
Fewer people know about “Iron Beam,” the new laser component being added to the existing Iron Dome system. Here’s how the Israeli manufacturer Rafael describes the system:
IRON BEAM is a 100kW class High Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) that is expected to become the first operational system in its class. It quickly and effectively engages and neutralizes a wide array of threats from a range of hundreds of meters to several kilometers. Engaging at the speed of light, IRON BEAM has an unlimited magazine, with almost zero cost per interception, and causes minimal collateral damage. Complementing RAFAEL’s IRON DOME, it can be integrated with a range of platforms and can become part of any multilayer defense system
Israel said in late October 2024 that Iron Beam should be integrated within the existing Iron Dome system “within a year.” Decades after the scoffing about “Star Wars,” the Israel Defense Forces are close to deploying actual laser weapons in the field.
The U.S. . . . is nowhere near as close:
Consequentially, as the report, “Directed Energy Weapon Supply Chains” published by the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute in January 2024 pointed out, the United States has no established laser weapon industrial base to speak of — no supply chain, no factories, no cadre of workers. The U.S. military has fewer than 20 laser weapon systems, all of them built in laboratories, according to a list provided by the Pentagon’s Joint Directed Energy Transition Office.
One of the advantages of Iron Beam is how it is much more cost-effective than the existing system of trying to shoot down an incoming missile with another missile:
The price of a Tamir missile, which is the interceptor launched by Iron Dome, is about $100,000, while the cost of interception using a laser shield is the price of the electricity used to launch it. Laser interception is meant to revolutionize the economy of air defense, which so far has favored attackers because missiles and drones are cheaper to deploy than to shoot down.
Trump’s executive order brought the usual skeptics and critics out of the woodwork; the New Republic scoffed it would be “a waste of time and effort.”
We’ve been working on missile-defense systems for decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. It began under Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” — sigh, yes, Star Wars. It was renamed the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization under President Clinton in 1994, and in 2002, BMDO was renamed the Missile Defense Agency. All of the good Democratic presidents that arms-control advocates love — like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden — signed budgets maintaining these programs and continuing this research.
One of the objections to space-based missile-defense components is that it represents “militarizing space.” This objection ignores the fact that space is already militarized. In February 2024, President Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, reported:
“China has counterspace-weapons capabilities intended to target U.S. and allied satellites. China already has fielded ground-based counterspace capabilities including electronic warfare systems, directed energy weapons, and antisatellite missiles intended to disrupt, damage, and destroy target satellites. China also has conducted orbital technology demonstrations, which while not counterspace weapons tests, prove China’s ability to operate future space-based counterspace weapons.”
In April, the United Nations Security Council considered a resolution that would have barred the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in space; Russia vetoed it.
You may recall in May, U.S. officials stated concern about Russia’s planned deployment of “an antisatellite nuclear weapon in space, and have obtained information that undermines Moscow’s explanation that the device it is developing is for peaceful scientific purposes.”
Our enemies have already militarized space; the question is what we are going to do about it. One part of Trump’s executive order calls for the “acceleration of the deployment of the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor layer” — those are satellites built by Northrup Grumman; two are already deployed.
No missile-defense system is guaranteed to work. Even the best-working ones have an error rate. The skeptics are correct that the aim of hitting an incoming ballistic missile, hypersonic missile, or even a fast-moving drone out of the sky is a technologically difficult task.
But up until those 44 interceptor missiles were deployed and ready in July 2004, the U.S. had zero ability to attempt to shoot down an incoming nuclear weapon. Now we have a small chance.
If we expand the program, we will have more chances.
Every dollar spent on missile defense seems like a waste, right up until the minute a missile is fired at you. Then you wish you had spent a whole lot more.
You’ve heard the old saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” In the last state budget, California cut $105 million from various fire-prevention programs. No doubt there was a lot of competing interests for funding, although the state did have $16.9 billion in its rainy-day funds. Now the state is facing total economic losses of $50 billion to $150 billion from the wildfires. No, no particular state, county, or city budget decision would have completely prevented the devastating wildfires, but those cuts — including city cuts to the fire department budget — proved to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.
What would you pay to not have a U.S. city or cities hit with a nuclear weapon?
As a reminder, North Korea has test-fired two missile types so far this year: a hypersonic intermediate-range missile and short-range ballistic missiles.
ADDENDUM: Hey, remember yesterday’s big deep dive into the Chinese AI DeepSeek, and the doubts that it was built from scratch in a couple of months by a bunch of Hangzhou-based geniuses for the cost of the tech world’s equivalent of pocket change behind the couch cushions?
Bloomberg with a big scoop this morning:
Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI are investigating whether data output from OpenAI’s technology was obtained in an unauthorized manner by a group linked to Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek, according to people familiar with the matter. . . .
David Sacks, President Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence czar, said Tuesday there’s “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek leaned on the output of OpenAI’s models to help develop its own technology. In an interview with Fox News, Sacks described a technique called distillation whereby one AI model uses the outputs of another for training purposes to develop similar capabilities.
“There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled knowledge out of OpenAI models and I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about this,” Sacks said, without detailing the evidence.
Maybe DeepSeek isn’t such a . . . great leap forward (heh) in artificial intelligence. Maybe it’s just a great leap forward in industrial espionage.