After a June 2024 campaign rally in Wisconsin, Donald Trump took to social media to announce his signature defense initiative: to “PREVENT WORLD WORLD III” by building “A GREAT… MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY!” He has been inspired by the success of Israel’s Iron Dome, a short-range missile defense system that has proven itself capable of intercepting missiles from non-state players like Hamas, Houthi rebels and Hezbollah, as well as nation-states like Iran. Yet, Trump wants a far more expansive and reliable system for the United States– and he wants work to begin immediately. What will be the effects of Trump’s ambitious “IRON DOME FOR AMERICA” (as the executive order is titled) plan, and is he serious about the proposition?
Donald Trump sees the United States’ military might as an instrument for forging a new “golden age” of American military dominance – but has been inconsistent in his expression of military policy. On the one hand, Trump has long pledged an “America First” approach that would extricate the U.S. from Ukraine and the Middle East. Yet the president’s sense of himself is as a dealmaker, and he has turned his gaze abroad, invoked the name of William McKinley and so far announced plans to buy (or conquer) Greenland, Canada, Panama, Gaza and Mars.
The Iron Dome for America is equally confused. Trump compares the proposal to Israel’s system of the same name, which was built for about $3 billion with U.S. backing. However, the scopes of the two projects are entirely different. Where Israel hopes to stop militant groups’ small, homemade rockets from pockmarking Tel Aviv, Trump has pledged a system that would be capable of withstanding simultaneous nuclear attacks from China and Russia — whose missiles move at 20,000 miles per hour and reach the edge of space — across all U.S. territory.
This is a proposition more closely related to the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (or, as it was derisively dubbed by critics, “Star Wars”) — a scheme to end the Cold War by creating a system of satellites, loaded with heat-seeking missiles, that would shatter a Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) attack. The project got nowhere: it was well beyond the technical capabilities of the day and would have devoured the federal budget. Trump’s scheme shares many of the same limitations: launching, as he has described, hundreds of satellites over Russia, China, North Korea and Iran would not just provoke considerable ire, it would also be disastrously expensive. The figure cited by some news outlets has been $2.5 trillion. Trump’s allies point out that, even if this figure were true, it is not totally without precedent: the U.S.’s F-35 fighter jet program is projected to cost $1.9 trillion over fifty years. Still, that the Iron Dome would not bankrupt the U.S. military doesn’t make it fiscally responsible – nor does it make it the best way to spend defense money. Indeed, programs in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence would, as the agility of Ukraine’s armed forces has demonstrated, be far more suited to 21st-century conflict.
Suppose, though, that Trump can overcome these technical hurdles and create an impenetrable missile shield that will last in perpetuity. Besides the U.S.’s vulnerability to other forms of attack that would be borne of a defense budget substantially expended on a missile shield, the paradoxical effect of a fully effective ICBM defense system could be to make nuclear conflict more likely. Game theory holds that no rational actor will ever launch a nuclear attack – because the enemy’s warheads are hidden underneath lakes, inside mountains, and in railcars: it is impossible to eliminate them all without suffering a devastating retaliatory attack. The knowledge that a nuclear attack could be stopped with near-perfect accuracy could empower future leaders to lob nukes around as readily as they do conventional missiles, knowing that they are safe behind a missile shield.
Where, then, should Trump invest new defense spending? A natural priority is cheap automation, which has proven effective in Ukraine, as AI-enabled drones costing a few thousand dollars have eliminated million-dollar tanks. The U.S. has a few companies trying to produce inexpensive military hardware at scale – most notably the Costa Mesa-based Anduril Industries – but their products remain far more expensive than foreign ones. At the same time, foreign adversaries like China are tendering contracts for millions of mass-produced drones at a time: large-scale drone warfare is a frontier in which the U.S. desperately needs to innovate. Driving costs down in these new sectors, rather than investing in senseless and technically absurd missiles for the sake of out-rocketing other nations, should be Trump’s priority.
