Latest news with #TheIronDomeForAmerica
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Iron Dome for America gets a golden makeover
In a bit of verbal alchemy, the Pentagon is turning iron into gold. The Midas touch of Pentagon bureaucracy has just hit President Trump's 'Iron Dome' missile defense shield, which shall be henceforth known as 'Golden Dome.' The billionaire president – known for his love of incorporating gold details into his own residential aesthetic – in his opening line of his inaugural address, promised a 'golden age in America.' Naturally, such an endeavor is best protected by a dome in matching colors. Trump signed an executive order in January to develop a next-generation homeland missile defense shield. The order – titled 'The Iron Dome For America' shared a name with the successful, lowest tier of Israel's multilayered air defense system of the same name. Yet the name sparked confusion that the order actually called for the use of the specific Israeli system to defend the homeland, which was never the case. Missile defense experts agree Iron Dome would be ill-suited for such a mission to provide air and missile defense to a vast territory like the continental U.S. And, in fact, Iron Dome is a trade-marked name owned by Israeli defense firm, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. 'Please note the Department of Defense has renamed this program from 'Iron Dome for America' to 'Golden Dome for America,' a Feb. 24 amendment to a request for information from industry, posted to the federal business opportunities website, reads. The Missile Defense Agency's RFI posting notes that since the deadline to receive information from industry on developing a new missile defense shield is Feb. 28, the agency will continue to use Iron Dome in reference to the program as answers are submitted to avoid confusion. In other words, the bureaucracy has yet to catch up on the metallurgical magic. The Missile Defense Agency and the Pentagon referred queries on the reasoning behind the name change to the White House. The White House did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's missile shield marks shift in homeland defense strategy
President Donald Trump's executive order to develop a next-generation homeland missile defense shield marks a shift in the United States' long-standing homeland missile defense strategy, which has focused on threats from rogue nations like North Korea and Iran rather than from peer adversaries like China or Russia. The order — titled 'The Iron Dome For America' in a nod to the successful, lowest tier of Israel's multilayered air defense system of the same name — also addresses a broader array of complex threats from hypersonic weapons to cruise missiles. Further, the order revives the pursuit of space-based interceptors for missile defense, a concept that has been scrapped multiple times in recent history due to technological challenges and high costs associated with the development. The executive order requires the defense secretary to submit an architecture design, outline requirements and develop an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield within 60 days of its signing. 'The foundation of an Iron Dome for America needs to be air- and cruise-missile defense, and then we work our way up from there,' Tom Karako, a missile-defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Defense News. 'Those are the gaps that we're most vulnerable with and that we need to fill and work on filling most urgently. … It's not just the high-end hypersonic stuff or the ICBMs, it's all this other stuff.' The Pentagon has worked for years, including in Trump's first term, trying to come up with a plan to defend the U.S. homeland from cruise missiles. Officials were said to be closing in on a design framework for the mission as the Defense Department was formulating its fiscal 2024 budget request, yet the work appeared to have lost some traction in favor of other defense priorities. Land-attack cruise missiles can be launched from the air, ground or sea, and because they fly at low altitudes under powered flight it is difficult for radars to detect them. Ballistic missiles, on the other hand, can be detected much earlier, which allows more time to track, decide and act on a threat. Meanwhile, for cruise missiles, decision-makers may have only a couple of minutes to respond, and salvos of cruise missiles can attack from different directions, complicating the approach to defeating the threat. Currently, the United States' homeland missile defense posture consists of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense System. The system, developed to counter intercontinental ballistic missile attacks aimed at the continental U.S. from North Korea and Iran, is made up of ground-based interceptors primarily in Alaska, with a few silos at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The Missile Defense Agency is developing a new interceptor capable of addressing more complex threats, which will ultimately replace the current interceptors. Additionally, the defensive architecture includes radars positioned in places like Clear, Alaska, and at sea in the Pacific, and a constellation of space-based detection capabilities is also in development. While the U.S. has focused on ballistic missile defense of the homeland from rogue states, near-peer adversaries Russia and China have made investments over several decades to develop cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons. The 2019 Missile Defense Review highlighted the need to focus on near-peer cruise missiles and directed the Pentagon to recommend an organization to have acquisition authority of cruise missile defense for the homeland. The designation requirement also appeared in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Much of the architecture would include capabilities already well under development, including the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor layer, solutions to address threats prior to launch and in the early 'boost' phase of flight, and nonkinetic and kinetic defeat capabilities for advanced threats. Yet, the order renews a push made in Trump's first administration to develop and deploy 'proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept,' the order states. The concept for space-based interceptors to take out missiles launched from the earth was first championed in the Reagan administration. The fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act required the MDA director to establish a space test bed to conduct research on an intercept layer in space, but Congress agreed to repeal the requirement in the fiscal 2020 policy bill after Trump's Missile Defense Review released in 2019 did not include investment in the pursuit. Instead, the Pentagon planned to launch a study, lasting potentially six months, to look into the most promising technologies and come up with estimates for cost and time. The Pentagon would then consider the findings before choosing whether to move forward. Following that, the MDA did little to fund research and development in the space-based interceptor arena in its FY20 budget, aside from allocating less than $15 million toward feasibility studies. Congress turned its focus to backing the budget for a space-based sensor layer, now in development and making progress toward an ability to track complex threats like hypersonic missiles that can fly under ground-based sensor radars. Putting interceptors in space has been controversial for myriad reasons, including its technological feasibility to the likelihood of high development costs to the idea that it could trigger an arms race in space. Developing space-based interceptors is difficult, Karako said. 'Furthermore, there are a number of threats that space-based interceptors are not useful against, like cruise missiles, maybe hypersonic stuff,' he said. Those threats would fly outside of the range of a space-based interceptor, closer to the earth's surface. 'The implications of what it means to treat space as a warfighting domain are just beginning to sink in,' he said. 'We are now at the advent of a new national conversation about space-based interceptors.'
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How Trump's proposed ‘Iron Dome For America' protects homeland
(NewsNation) — President Donald Trump has ordered the implementation of what the White House is calling 'The Iron Dome For America,' which is designed to protect the United States from foreign attacks. The model for the defense system is the Iron Dome, which, since 2011, has been the foundation of Israel's defense system to protect the nation from attacks from Hezbollah, Iran and other neighboring countries. The system is designed to intercept relatively primitive rockets and mortars that travel less than 44 miles. The Iron Dome was 90% effective against ballistic missiles fired at Israel by Iran in October, which has prompted Trump to order the planning of a 'state-of-the-art' missile defense system to be designed in the United States. Iain Boyd, the director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado-Boulder, called the Iron Dome a very effective missile defense system but said that Israel faces a much different level of threats being experienced in the United States. Federal judge temporarily blocks Trump's funding freeze 'Making sure that the homeland is defended against missiles is a very important idea,' Boyd told NewsNation. Boyd said that some forms of missile defense are already in place in the United States. He said that Trump's order for the implementation of a missile defense system will ensure that the existing missile defense system continues to evolve and move forward as foreign threats become more sophisticated. As effective as Israel's Iron Dome is in defending against missiles, it is not designed to handle long-range missiles across an ocean. The system being proposed by Trump would be 425 times larger than Israel. Israel's Iron Dome operates under a system that goes into effect when an enemy rocket is fired. Once that happens, the Iron Dome's radar system detects the missile within seconds and begins to track it. The system's control system estimates the missile's point of impact and then the Iron Dome's launcher fires a missile to intercept it. Finally, the missile explodes near the rocket and destroys it. California denies military 'turned on the water' in state 'The Iron Dome system might make sense if it were deployed around American military bases around the world, particularly in Iraq, where U.S bases have taken missile fire,' geopolitical analyst Steven Terner told NewsNation. 'But the Iron Dome is designed to protect relatively small amounts of areas from short and medium-range missiles, so it would have to be modified to the extent that it would be a completely different system if it were to have any chance of defending mainland United States.' Boyd, the University of Colorado professor, told NewsNation that the Iron Dome for America will bolster the nation's current missile defense system. However, protecting the homeland to this extent will come at a cost. To modify the system, the United States would need to deploy more than 24,700 Iron Dome batteries to defend the continental U.S. at a cost of about $100 million per battery. That makes the cost of the project $2.5 trillion. 'This is probably intended mostly for China,' Boyd said. 'And China has been developing very sophisticated new weapons, hypersonic systems, which means they go very fast, and they do challenge existing missile systems. So I think that what this is really representing is the U.S. saying to China, 'We are going to ensure that our country is safe against these new weapons that you've been developing.'' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
