President Donald Trump has called for an expansive, next-generation missile defense shield for the mainland United States, something modeled on Israel\u2019s formidable defenses, typified by its signature Iron Dome system. <\/p>\n
A defensive dome for the US \u2013 a country hundreds of times the size of Israel \u2013 would require massive scale, as well as space-based interceptors, and almost certainly be decades away. <\/p>\n
Yet <\/strong>on the piece of US soil perhaps most vulnerable to missile attacks \u2013 the Pacific island of Guam \u2013 work is well underway on the kind of multi-layered missile defense that could point the way. <\/p>\n However, experts say even that faces steep challenges. <\/p>\n \u201cThere are no fast or panacea solutions, and we are making the decisions late in the game even though visionary military and political leaders saw this coming in the 1990s,\u201d said Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command\u2019s Joint Intelligence Center. <\/p>\n The US territory of Guam, a 210-square-mile island in the Pacific Ocean, is home to just under 175,000 people. It also hosts Andersen Air Force Base \u2013 a key deployment base for US Air Force bombers such as the B-1 and B-52 and sometimes the stealthy B-2 \u2013 and is homeport to US nuclear attack submarines that could be vital in any defense of Taiwan. <\/p>\n The island is less than 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) from China (PRC) and 2,100 miles from North Korea. Mockups of it have shown up in China\u2019s military propaganda videos, and North Korea has made threats against it. <\/p>\n But the US military has not stood still, advancing its ability to defend against regional threats. <\/p>\n Just last December, the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) conducted the first successful intercept of a ballistic missile target from the island using the Aegis Guam System, which fired a land-based interceptor of the type that US Navy ships have used to destroy ballistic missile targets in testing. <\/p>\n \u201cCurrent forces are capable of defending Guam against today\u2019s North Korean ballistic missile threats. However, the regional threat to Guam, including those from PRC, continues to rapidly evolve,\u201d the MDA\u2019s director for operations, Michelle Atkinson, said in 2023. <\/p>\n In the December test, a US Air Force C-17 plane released a medium-range ballistic missile target off Guam\u2019s coast. After the target was tracked by powerful radar, an interceptor was fired from a Vertical Launch System on the island, taking it out outside Earth\u2019s atmosphere, according to releases by MDA and Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of the Aegis system on Guam. <\/p>\n It was a \u201ca critical milestone in the defense of Guam and the region,\u201d said US Navy Rear Adm. Greg Huffman, commander, Joint Task Force-Micronesia. <\/p>\n But the intercept test went beyond the land-based Aegis system, with other military elements testing systems that would form key parts of the multi-layered concept Trump would like to see. <\/p>\n That\u2019s something akin to what Israel fields, a four-tiered system often lumped under the \u201cIron Dome\u201d moniker, after its best-known and lowest layer. While the Iron Dome combats incoming rockets and artillery weapons, David\u2019s Sling protects against short- and medium-range threats, and the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 systems stop ballistic missiles. <\/p>\n In a nod to a similarly layered defensive structure, US Indo-Pacific Command said it used December\u2019s intercept to test tracking capabilities of the US Army\u2019s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system based on Guam. <\/p>\n THAAD is designed to stop incoming missiles in their terminal, or descent, phase of flight, while Aegis makes its intercept in the mid-course phase, outside Earth\u2019s atmosphere, before the missiles dive on their target. <\/p>\n The US military also employs Patriot missile batteries, designed to make much lower-altitude intercepts, as the final phase of Guam\u2019s defense. Both the THAAD and Patriot systems have been successfully used in combat. <\/p>\n All three \u2013 Aegis, THAAD and Patriot \u2013 will eventually form what is called the Enhanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense System (EIAMD) on Guam, which the MDA says will provide \u201c360-degree coverage, and layered defense against regional ballistic, maneuvering ballistic, hypersonic glide, and cruise missile threats.\u201d <\/p>\n That system would also rely on input from US satellites and space-based sensors, according to the MDA, inching it closer to Trump\u2019s missile defense vision. <\/p>\n But the timeline for full Guam missile defense \u2013 expected to take at least a decade to put together \u2013 is indicative of the challenges in constructing any system to fight ballistic and hypersonic glide missiles. That\u2019s not helped by constant technological advances in missile technology, which often evolves more quickly than ways to defend against it. <\/p>\n And Trump\u2019s concept of a <\/strong>next-generation missile defense for the continental US goes well beyond what is still years away on Guam, an island about 10 times the size of Manhattan. <\/p>\n In his executive order, Trump said he would \u201cdirect <\/strong>(the US) military to begin construction of the great Iron Dome missile defense shield, which will be made all in the USA,\u201d as the US faces a \u201ccatastrophic threat\u201d from ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles. <\/strong> <\/p>\n His ambitious executive order called for an acceleration in \u201cthe development and deployment of Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor Layers, proliferated space-based interceptors, a Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, capabilities to defeat salvoes prior to launch, non-kinetic missile defense capabilities, and underlayer and terminal-phase intercept capabilities.\u201d <\/p>\n Trump\u2019s order does not give any estimate of the costs of such a system, but several hundreds of billions of dollars would probably be a conservative estimate. <\/p>\n \u201cThe costs of reliably defending an area the size of the United States against a wide variety of threats at multiple different intercept points would be astronomical,\u201d said Matt Korda, associate director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. <\/p>\n And as far as money goes, the advantage goes to the attacker. <\/p>\n \u201cOffense is cheaper than defense every single time,\u201d Korda said. <\/p>\n Even if US technology can develop and deploy all that Trump is asking for, impregnable missile defense could still prove impossible. <\/p>\n Though it is touted by many as the world\u2019s best missile defense, attacks by Iran last year showed that the Iron Done is far from unbeatable, with projectiles fired by Tehran and Houthi rebels landing in Israel. <\/p>\n Iran achieved that by firing large numbers of weapons at Israel. While many <\/strong>of the around 180 missiles launched were intercepted, some got through. Missile defense experts have long pointed out that\u2019s one way to beat any missile defense system. <\/p>\n Schuster, a former US Navy captain who worked on the Aegis missile defense system in its early days, said missile defenses can be \u201csaturated,\u201d pointing out that the incoming ballistic missile knows where it\u2019s going, but the interceptors have to be directed to their target. <\/p>\n \u201cYou can only guide so many (interceptors) at any one time while the ballistic missile has an internal guidance system,\u201d Schuster said. <\/p>\n The problem for defenders becomes more difficult once warheads with \u201cmaneuverable reentry vehicles\u201d \u2013 which can change directions after they reenter the atmosphere and approach targets from different directions \u2013 are added. Both China and Russia have such capabilities. <\/p>\n \u201cA target coming directly at you is the easiest to intercept. The greater the lateral displacement from that, the more challenging the intercept equation,\u201d Schuster said. <\/p>\n Adversaries can compound that problem by firing decoy missiles, which distract from more important targets \u2013 which if they involve nuclear warheads, could do catastrophic damage. <\/p>\n Of course, all that comes into play once a system is actually <\/strong>deployed. <\/p>\n And, <\/strong>according to Schuster, the biggest stumbling block for Trump\u2019s shield plan could be a US production and procurement system that has been neglected \u2013 <\/strong>despite the early successes demonstrated on Guam. <\/p>\n \u201cOur production rates are criminally low in my opinion,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have been asleep at the switch \u2026 for over a decade.\u201d <\/p>\n And it\u2019s not just a manufacturing infrastructure problem, it\u2019s also the limited knowledge and skills to produce them, Schuster said. <\/p>\n \u201cWe are going to have to invest in both plant, which we do well, and people, which we don\u2019t do well.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President Donald Trump has called for an expansive, next-generation missile defense shield for the mainland United States, something modeled on Israel\u2019s formidable defenses, typified by its signature Iron Dome system. A defensive dome for the US \u2013 a country hundreds of times the size of Israel \u2013 would require massive scale, as well as space-based <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12660,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12659","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Guam\u2019s early success<\/h2>\n
Difficult challenges<\/h2>\n
The long road ahead<\/h2>\n