Is Donald Trump advocating for a new Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)? Four decades ago, then-President Ronald Reagan proposed the US embark on the unthinkable. Reagan suggested moving away from the US Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) nuclear national security strategy, which was, at the time, held sacrosanct. But MAD was based on the US having an offensive nuclear capability that was a counterforce to the Soviet Union’s and vice versa. It was a stalemate.
Is Trump Following in Reagan’s Footsteps?
What Reagan wanted to establish was a nuclear posture that included an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) defensive shield. That would put the US strategically in a stronger nuclear position to be able to destroy Soviet missiles attacking the American homeland while retaining the capability to destroy Russia in return. Former President Ronald Reagan posed the question from a different perspective in a televised speech from the White House on March 23, 1983: “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”
Reagan believed the weight of US technological prowess could achieve a defensive umbrella that would “pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the weapons themselves.” That hasn’t happened, but in the forty years since his proposal, derisively called by its critics “Star Wars” after the science fiction movie, the US has developed a growing but nascent capability to intercept ICBMs. America has deployed the Ground-based Midcourse Defense element of a Missile Defense System. According to the Missile Defense Agency that manages the system, “The Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) element of the Missile Defense System provides Combatant Commanders the capability to engage and destroy intermediate- and long-range ballistic missile threats in space to protect the United States.” Currently, there are 44 interceptor missile launching facilities, 40 at Fort Greely, Alaska, and four at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
In a world as it is today, the US must meet and deter global competitors like Russia, with 1,549 deployed nuclear weapons, and China, which is currently working to increase its ICBM capability. The Chinese government has “at least 300 new ICBM silos, and has loaded at least some ICBMs into these silos,” according to the latest US Defense Department report.
North Korea is testing its long-range nuclear-capable missiles as well and is believed to have at least 50 nuclear weapons. Facing that global threat, 44 interceptors seem inadequate. Donald Trump certainly thinks so. In his nomination acceptance speech last Thursday evening (July 18), the former president explained his intent to expand America’s defensive umbrella. “We will replenish our military and build an Iron Dome missile defense system to ensure that no enemy can strike our homeland, and this great iron dome will be built entirely in the USA. We’re going to build it,” he told the audience.
Candidate Trump was referring to the very successful Iron Dome missile defense system in Israel. Positioning an Iron Dome or a like system in the US to defend against missile attacks on the homeland has been a Trump initiative for some time. “In his pledge, first made in December and repeated at least twice at campaign stops since, Trump said he would work to build ‘the greatest dome of them all’ due to ‘a lot of hostile people out there,'” The Hill reported back in May.
Nay Sayers Question the Proposal
Critics of the idea maintain that the Israeli Iron Dome is a point defense system suited for defending a much smaller area than America. It would take hundreds, if not thousands, of systems to provide coverage for the entire US. Most authorities on large-scale missile defense see Trump using the Iron Dome and its success as a metaphor for a system to address the need to protect the US homeland from incoming ICBMs, drones, and cruise missiles. The layered defense of an Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and shorter-range anti-missile systems is appropriate for Israel, covering only 7,787 square miles, roughly the same size as New Jersey.
The threat facing the continental US is far more sophisticated than what Israel has regularly experienced so far. A system more likely to be useful and has proven itself in defending Israel is the Arrow 3, capable of intercepting incoming missiles outside the earth’s atmosphere. The US has tested it and found it capable. What the US must consider addressing are missile threats like the hypersonic maneuverable ICBM warheads currently being tested by China.
Critics claim that Trump’s proposal would be prohibitively expensive and would have no guarantee of success. These are the same criticisms that were leveled at Reagan’s SDI. But the ground-based interceptor is a reality, even if there aren’t nearly enough. Nonetheless, the US achieved the technology to engage ICBM warheads. It is no longer a “Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” America is faced with not just one near-peer enemy, as was the case during the Cold War. The US national security can no longer take comfort from being at parity with just one nuclear adversary to achieve a deterrent from being attacked.
The US must counter a multi-nation, highly sophisticated host of different airborne and space-born missiles. The US government has an obligation to defend its people and its cities. Donald Trump believes that obligation should be accepted now. But if not now, when?
The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliate.
