The following piece, written by Jim Morris, first appeared on Warrior Maven, a Military Content Group member website.
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If President Donald Trump gets his way, the US will be defended from missile attacks by an Iron Dome-like system that Israel has used successfully over the last year to fend off barrages from Iran.
In an executive order headlined “The Iron Dome For America,” the president gave the Pentagon 60 days to come up with a plan for a next-generation missile shield aimed at defending against what he called “the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.”
The executive order calls for defenses against hypersonic and advanced cruise missiles, how the US will speed up the development and deployment of the hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor layer, and plans to develop the capability to defeat missile attacks prior to launch and in the boost phase.
“Since the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missiles Treaty in 2002 and initiated development of limited homeland missile defense,” President Trump’s order reads, “official United State homeland missile defense policy has remained only to stay ahead of rogue-nation threats and accidental or unauthorized missile launches.
“…the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex with the development by peer and near-peer adversaries of next-generation delivery systems…”
Last September, Israel’s Iron Dome was credited with destroying many of the 180 ballistic missiles fired by Iran. It was the latest successful test of a missile defense system that became operational in 2011.
The following piece, written by Jim Morris, first appeared on Warrior Maven, a Military Content Group member website.
—
If President Donald Trump gets his way, the US will be defended from missile attacks by an Iron Dome-like system that Israel has used successfully over the last year to fend off barrages from Iran.
In an executive order headlined “The Iron Dome For America,” the president gave the Pentagon 60 days to come up with a plan for a next-generation missile shield aimed at defending against what he called “the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.”
The executive order calls for defenses against hypersonic and advanced cruise missiles, how the US will speed up the development and deployment of the hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor layer, and plans to develop the capability to defeat missile attacks prior to launch and in the boost phase.
“Since the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missiles Treaty in 2002 and initiated development of limited homeland missile defense,” President Trump’s order reads, “official United State homeland missile defense policy has remained only to stay ahead of rogue-nation threats and accidental or unauthorized missile launches.
“…the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex with the development by peer and near-peer adversaries of next-generation delivery systems…”
Last September, Israel’s Iron Dome was credited with destroying many of the 180 ballistic missiles fired by Iran. It was the latest successful test of a missile defense system that became operational in 2011.
Iron Dome was built by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries with the help of the US, which paid at least $2.6 billion for its development.
Iron Dom is designed to intercept short-range rockets and 155 mm artillery shells fired from up to 43 miles away. It consists of three major parts – a detection and tracking radar, a battle management and weapons control center and a missile firing unit. Parts of the Tamir interceptor missiles are built by Raytheon at factories in Alabama and Arizona.
A US version of Iron Dome would most likely be focused on stopping long-range weapons.
In a paper published this month by the Atlantic Council, a former Pentagon missile defense policy official, Robert Soofer wrote that the current US missile defense is no longer effective. Soofer pointed out that North Korea is a growing missile power, while the US also has to be able to deter attacks from Russia and China at the same time.
However, others caution that it will be much tougher to build an Iron Dome-style defense in the US, which is roughly 400 times larger than Israel. A senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, Sidharth Kaushal, told the New York Times that the Trump administration order was vague and the president could either go all out on a new defense, or simply boost funding for existing systems.
