Trump’s new missile shield for the US – challenges and dangers - Voice of Asia

Just a week into his presidency, U.S. President Donald Trump unexpectedly announced his plan to create a missile defense system, calling it "an American Iron Dome," a move that shocked the world and surprised many policymakers.

Initially, the name conjured up images of Israel's Iron Dome defense system, which is designed to intercept and destroy short-range, low-flying targets such as rockets, mortar shells, and cruise missiles. The system is tailored to Israel's defense needs and land area.

However, the continental United States is vast, spanning four time zones, and possesses long coastlines. Therefore, what Trump advocated on January 27 was, in effect, creating a "next-generation missile defense shield" for the U.S. to defend against ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks.

In essence, this is an upgraded version of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, the "Star Wars" program. The term "Iron Dome" has now become synonymous with "missile defense shield." This new, multi-layered defense system is designed not only to protect the U.S. homeland but also to protect forces deployed on the forward edge of battle.

Reagan's dream of a missile defense shield largely remained just that, a dream, despite the billions of dollars poured into the program. The problem, then and now, is that a comprehensive missile defense shield is prohibitively expensive, technologically nearly impossible to achieve, and, in reality, impractical because existing technology can easily deceive or overwhelm even the most advanced missile defense systems.

However, the science and technology behind missile defense have advanced tremendously in the past 40 years, and missile defense systems have been tested in combat in Ukraine and Israel and are becoming increasingly effective. The United States has already established an early warning and interception system, but its capabilities are limited, only capable of stopping attacks from smaller nuclear states like North Korea.

It cannot stop a large-scale attack launched by a determined and capable adversary like Russia or China. As missile guidance and detection technologies have developed at breakneck speed, missile defense technology has also rapidly matured over the past decade. The analogy of "hitting a bullet with another bullet" hints at the scale of the challenge involved in developing missile defense systems, except that missiles move more than 20 times faster than bullets.

To make a missile defense shield feasible, incoming missiles need to be detected and tracked rapidly, and all the information needs to be relayed to interceptor missile launchers. The interceptor missiles must then be guided to hit the target, destroying the incoming enemy missile. Ideally, this should happen as far away from one's own territory as possible, especially considering that these missiles are likely to be carrying nuclear weapons.

The U.S. and Israel have invested billions of dollars in research and often collaborate, and the results are becoming apparent. In conflicts over Ukraine and Israel, incoming missiles are being detected and destroyed with increasing frequency. The information gained in actual combat is invaluable to developers. The White House has stated that the next-generation missile defense shield must be able to defend against "ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries."

This is a daunting task. Modern long-range missiles are equipped with decoys and other penetration aids. They are incredibly fast, reaching speeds of 25,000 kilometers per hour (15,500 miles per hour) or faster. Part of how missile defense works is predictability. A person can catch a thrown ball because they know how the ball moves through the air in a predictable arc.

Hypersonic missiles are designed to circumvent this and take random paths to their targets, making them much harder to intercept. Cruise missiles, originally developed as offensive first-strike weapons, fly below radar coverage and arrive at their targets with little warning. The challenges posed by these types of missiles are immense, and stopping them will require new networks, capabilities, and weapons to be effective.

The U.S. Space Force, initially ridiculed, was created by Trump during his first term and established in 2019, and it will be an integral part of this new missile defense shield, along with U.S. Strategic Command and Northern Command. The emphasis is on intercepting any missile attack as early as possible, preferably during the missile's first phase of flight, the "boost phase."

Such interception would require a network of space-based radar systems to detect the hot plume of a missile that has just been launched. The plan also calls for a series of space-based interceptors that can destroy missiles in this early phase. Whether this means interceptor missiles or the introduction of space-based laser batteries in orbit remains to be seen. Space-based laser technology has made significant advances since such weapons were first proposed in the 1980s. However, more investment and miniaturization will be required before it becomes a viable weapons system.

What can provide enough energy for a laser to destroy a missile from hundreds of kilometers away, while its target is moving at ever-increasing speeds? Tactical short-range laser technology has been used to intercept targets in Ukraine, but the energy required to destroy an incoming missile would be an order of magnitude greater. Space-based "kinetic kill" missiles could also be used to hit and essentially shatter incoming missiles into pieces. All of these weapons would be in orbit, covering vast areas while monitoring for missile launches and attacks.

The deployment, coordination, and control of this vast network of interceptors and detectors would be controlled by the Space Force, which is now being given an increasingly "warfighter" role, using active weapon systems against adversaries. How would adversaries react? Most likely by beefing up their own weapons programs and greatly accelerating the arms race that already exists among nuclear-capable nations. Technologies already exist that could easily overwhelm the ability of a missile defense shield to detect and intercept every launch.

No system is 100% effective, so success or failure will be a matter of degree. How great that degree is will depend on the measures taken by America's adversaries. Besides decoys, basic countermeasures already exist. Mirrors will weaken the power of any laser beam aimed at them. Warhead fairings equipped with liquid nitrogen coolants can mask the temperature of incoming warheads so that early warning infrared detectors will not see them. The technology to deceive a system that is still in its infancy is far cheaper than the missile defense shield itself.

It is increasingly likely that the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on research will snowball into trillions, and that every American development will be thwarted for a fraction of the cost. Besides the enormous costs and technological challenges, there is another major issue. Trump's executive order contained a requirement to seek the ability to "defeat missile attacks prior to launch," in other words, to preemptively strike. This gives something that has always been touted as a defensive weapon system a very different connotation, but now it would have an offensive component.

The order also requires that the technology "guarantee its secure second-strike capability." The U.S. already possesses a very robust second-strike, or retaliatory, capability: its fleet of nuclear missile submarines has the ability to destroy the planet several times over with its firepower. The ability to strike back at an enemy who attacks the U.S. would be supplemented by surviving land-based missiles, air-launched missiles from airborne bombers, and various other delivery systems.

America's second-strike capability is guaranteed, so why the need for a defense shield? An effective defense shield upsets the decades-long balance of terror, the basis of which is Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD): even if attacked first, we can all destroy each other, so let's not start a nuclear war that would lead to everyone's destruction. If one side can hide behind an effective missile defense system and be confident that if it strikes first, the new and improved missile defense shield can stop a weakened retaliatory response, then that balance is greatly undermined.

This shift in balance is particularly dangerous because it sends a signal to near-peer competitor nations, prompting them to take their own countermeasures. The world becomes more dangerous, and space will become more crowded.