EXPERT Q&A — President Donald Trump has called for the establishment of a new missile defense shield for the U.S., which he has dubbed an “Iron Dome for America,” named after the air defense system used by Israel with great effect against short-range rockets and artillery fire. The defense system Trump is imagining would have an exponentially greater scope, covering the entire homeland to counter cruise, ballistic and hypersonic missiles.
The U.S. already has a variety of lower-scale air defense systems — the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system serves as the primary missile defense system against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and various regional missile defenses, including the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.
Trump’s “Iron Dome for America” is also not the first time a U.S.-wide missile defense shield has been proposed. Perhaps the best-known precedent was President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative – the so-called “Star Wars” system – which would have involved space-based and ground-based interceptors. The initiative helped produce several technological advances but was canceled before a comprehensive system was created. The first Trump administration also explored space-based sensors and energy weapons for missile defense. However, the current Iron Dome idea has gained traction amid heightened tensions and the advance of missile technologies, as well as the second Trump administration’s shifting priorities on defense, which could put more resources towards the Iron Dome initiative.
The Cipher Brief turned to Tom Karako, Director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to discuss the prospect of an Iron Dome for the U.S. and break down current missile threats and how well the U.S. is positioned to counter them.
Karako spoke with Cipher Brief Editor/Writer Ethan Masucol. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Masucol: President Trump has been talking recently about his desire to build an “Iron Dome” to protect the United States. It’s not the first time that something like this has been discussed. What are the threats to the homeland that this would address?
Karako: The suite of UAS (unmanned aircraft systems), cruise missiles, hypersonic gliders, ballistic things, et cetera, that all applies to the United States.
It’s been fashionable to bifurcate the threats to the regions as opposed to the threats to the homeland. In fact, that dial kind of turns up and down and it’s going to be present anywhere on the globe, potentially. So we have to be far more attentive to that full threat spectrum for the continental United States.
For the past 20 some years, we’ve had the GMD (Ground-Based Midcourse Defense) system deployed in Alaska. That’s essentially to defend against a handful of rogue state ballistic missiles from the likes of North Korea. And we’re in the process of upgrading the missile interceptor for that, called the Next Generation Interceptor.
But the broad spectrum is not being addressed. We’ve kind of closed the door, but left open all the windows on this front.
It’s the cruise missile stuff that we’re actually extremely vulnerable to. A CSIS report, “North America’s a Region, Too” laid out our plan for an integrated and layered approach for air and cruise missile defense. The U.S. Air Force was designated as the lead service for cruise missile defense in 2022. They haven’t done much since then to get after this. There’s been some studies to be sure, but the missiles are coming and we need to accelerate that effort.
The Iron Dome moniker is really just a metaphor. It’s not a reference to the system made in Israel that we’ve funded and co-produced to the tune of many billions of dollars over the years. It’s a metaphor for the need to have a degree of protection against a full suite of threats. And you saw that reflected in the [Trump Administration] executive order.
The Iron Dome system for Israel is but the lowest layer of Israel’s multi-layered defense, to include David’s Sling, Arrow 3, and so on. And if we want to play with that metaphor a little bit for our purposes, we need to make sure that we don’t just go after the big ICBM threats, but we also are attentive to the lower-tier air and missile threats, air and cruise missile threats as well.
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Masucol: So how do you prioritize where to start to build out that capacity? There’s a lot of different targets and different threats depending on where you are in the continental U.S., or in Alaska.
Karako: The beginning of wisdom is to honor the threat and to acknowledge that you can’t defend everything. That’s not possible. There’s just too much stuff and it would be just impossible short of a “Death Star.” Not that I’m opposed to a “Death Star,” but it’s just impossible to defend everything well.
This is where hard decisions have to be made. What we will defend and what we would like to defend, those are two different things. That’s the difference between what’s called the critical asset list — that’s the things that would be nice to defend — and the defended asset list — that’s what we’re actually going to defend if we think a missile is incoming. And you have to make those hard choices. Any air defense design has to have those choices made in advance, because once the missiles begin flying, it’s too late to be picking and choosing.
It’s complicated, it’s hard, but how you derive that sort of thing is, What do you think is the likely target of an enemy attack, for what reasons, and what are the costs if those things are attacked and degraded? It’s unpopular to say, but population centers are not necessarily at the top of the list, and the reason is that that’s kind of a terror opportunity. From a strategic perspective, it’s probably going to be your command and control, it’s probably going to be your military ports and air bases and things like that. People talk about a cyber Pearl Harbor. I worry about an actual Pearl Harbor, which is to say kinetic attacks, that would be supplemented by space and cyber, that degrade or eliminate our kinetic ability to project power across the world. The way that you would do that is probably to hit command and control, ports, transportation command, things like that so that we can’t get the joint force from here to there. That’s the concept of how it would make sense for what I call non-nuclear strategic attack to affect our political calculus and to affect our ability to live up to our broader deterrence and defense goals half a world away.
That’s how you have to rack and stack and prioritize. It’s not the sort of thing that would be done on the floor of the House of Representatives — ”I like St. Louis more than Dallas,” something like that. This is where you have military commanders whose job it is to make sure that the military force stays intact and that the military purposes are able to be executed.
Masucol: How confident are you that we’re able to build out this capacity and counter these threats, both with what we have and also our ability to fill in the gaps?
Karako: Actually I’m fairly confident. Again, I’ve expressed concern and frustration over the years because we are so far behind. Our hypersonic defense enterprise dramatically needs more attention; we are so far delayed on that relative to the threat. Our cruise missile defense is so far delayed relative to the threat. Just look at what Zelensky is getting on a weekly basis — it’s the cruise missiles, and we are way far behind.
But from a technological point of view, this is not bleeding-edge rocket science. The hypersonic defense stuff is a little more bleeding edge, but the air cruise missile defense and the ballistic missile stuff, it’s no longer a question — we can hit a bullet with a bullet. It’s routine. It’s not news anymore. We just have to pick what part of the bullet we want to hit. The technology has advanced so much over the past 40-plus years since SDI (the Strategic Defense Initiative) began – all these advanced technologies that we throw around like JADC2 (Joint All Domain Command and Control) and AI (artificial intelligence) and all this. So much of that missile defense has been at the forefront of so many of those technologies over the years, advanced sensors and the like.
But it’s first appreciating and coming to grips with the nature of the threat and prioritizing it. And that’s why I think this Iron Dome initiative is quite welcome. I think it’s an umbrella concept. It’s not one thing. It’s going out and asking, frankly, the services, the Missile Defense Agency, all kinds of folks and saying, What can you do? What are the concepts that you can come up with to contribute to fixing this broad problem? So I think that’s all for the good. I hope that it will result in funding and significant funding in 2025, as well as ‘26 and beyond, because frankly, we don’t have another fiscal year to waste to get after these problems.
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Masucol: Let’s touch specifically on Guam, which has made news for missile defense development. What makes Guam so important to the U.S. and what are the threats to Guam right now?
Karako: Guam is, of course, U.S. territory. It’s part of the U.S. homeland. [Secretary of Defense] Pete Hegseth was asked in his confirmation hearing, What’s the most important island in the Pacific? His response was Guam, and he was right. The reason is that our operational plans for our broad deterrence and defense goals in that part of the world are disproportionately reliant upon the power projection, air bases and naval bases that we have there. There’s lots of talk about distributed operations and getting new air bases and things like that. And that’s all for the good, but that doesn’t happen overnight and it’s challenging. And so while it’s great to operate on the assumption that you’ll be able to move things around and use deception to hide, there’s certain things you can’t move or hide. Guam is one of those things.
That’s why there has been for a number of years, probably close to a decade, attention to the need for what former Indo-Pacom commander [John] Aquilino was fond of calling 360-degree air and missile defense protection, which is another way of saying defense against ballistic, but also non-ballistic air and missile threats, cruise and lots of other things..
That’s in a nutshell, it’s central to our broad operational plans and our operations in the Pacific generally.
Masucol: And of course these threats that we’re talking about are, we’re mostly talking about China and North Korea, correct?
Karako: Russia is there. They harass the Japanese from time to time, as well. But first and foremost, it’s about China, secondly about North Korea.
Masucol: We’ve talked to some other missile defense experts, and some of them have said the assets that are being committed to defending Guam right now may be not the most effective for that environment, may be too costly, for money, personnel and land requirements. What is your response to such critiques?
Karako: It would be nice if we didn’t have to do this. It would be nice if we didn’t have to have a military in the Pacific at all. It would be nice if the little strip of land that’s essentially the hotels on Guam was all we needed. The facts are simply that we are disproportionately reliant upon Guam. That sort of Riviera on Guam frankly wouldn’t exist if not for the broader military protection that the United States has provided since World War II, since it was acquired. So I think, yes, I’d like to have a pony. I’d like to have a unicorn in my backyard. But the simple facts are that the threat is very real. The threat is substantial. It’s not exaggerated.
If anything, our current plans for defending the island are insufficient. In fact, they’ve been scaled down in the last couple of years. I think that’s a problem. That’s not a solution. I’d like to see the environmental impact statement that’s done for what happens after China attacks. That kind of environmental impact is going to be very substantial. The impact on the Guam economy is going to be very substantial if China attacks. I think we’ve got to keep the big picture in mind here.
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