Just over 100 days into his administration, President Trump’s landmark defense initiative is showing signs of moving beyond the conceptual stage. The Golden Dome directive, which directs the Pentagon to create a comprehensive integrated air and missile defense system for the United States, marks the greatest potential change in American defense strategy since the early Cold War.
The Trump administration would benefit by moving quickly to kick-start development and ensure that the U.S. delivers this capability within his time in office, given the scale of the threat the U.S. homeland faces.
Creating a national integrated air and missile defense network, however, is no simple task. The Pentagon must carefully combine new defense providers with the current defense-industrial system, leveraging proven technologies as the base of an innovative, potentially transformational capability.
China is in the midst of the most rapid nuclear modernization of any power since the Cold War. Per the Pentagon, it will field 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, and 1,500 warheads by 2035, placing it at near-parity with U.S. and Russian deployed warheads.
Russia, like China, now fields a series of nuclear-tipped hypersonic weapons, which can evade all but the most sophisticated modern air defenses. Iran has yet to cross the nuclear threshold, but it remains on the cusp of nuclear breakout. North Korea has undoubtedly gained valuable technology from Russia as compensation for its military support.
Unlike during the Cold War, when the U.S. confronted only one major nuclear threat, by the mid-2030s it is likely to confront several concurrent nuclear threats of varying sophistication.
Strategic stability through mutual vulnerability is extremely difficult to generate with a greater number of nuclear powers. Moreover, advances in hypersonic weapons have increased an attacker’s ability to hit hardened silos more reliably, while the promise of space-based submarine detection has also increased, potentially jeopardizing the Cold War era’s assurance of a naval second strike.
The Golden Dome program is strategically crucial considering the investments America’s rivals have made in their nuclear arsenals and advances in military technology. Delivering the capability requires the rapid integration of new technologies with proven capabilities to deliver hardware at scale.
A full-scale national air and missile defense system requires technological advances to rapidly and accurately integrate data from multiple ground and space-based early-warning sensors, track incoming targets, discriminate between incoming missiles, warheads, and decoys, and cue interceptors to the right targets. Modern defense-focused technology companies can help in this respect, particularly if they can leverage foreign experiences, namely Israel’s design of its multi-tier interceptor system and Ukraine’s remarkably successful attempts at wartime sensor integration.
Nevertheless, the Israeli and Ukrainian models both highlight the need for hardware. Neither Jerusalem nor Kyiv deal with an air and missile defense problem nearly as complex as securing the United States. Even if an integrated system is initially concentrated around specific major urban areas and critical national and military infrastructure this remains a tall task.
It will require a comprehensive ground-based radar network, including very long-range radars, a space-based detection system, and potentially a seabed sensor network to identify hostile nuclear-armed submarines. Thousands of high-performance interceptors are necessary for top-tier targets to make Golden Dome credible, while a variety of low-end interceptors are also necessary, particularly if the threat from Chinese dual-purpose merchant shipping is combined with cheap, plentiful loitering munitions.
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Seth Cropsey is the founder and president of Yorktown Institute.
Harry Halem is a Senior Fellow at Yorktown Institute.
