June 13 (UPI) — Homeland defense has entered a new era with the proliferation of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles and President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome proposal aims to invest in protecting the United States against modern threats.
Trump shared some details about the Golden Dome missile defense system last month in the Oval Office, estimating it will cost about $175 billion to bring online during his term in office. Patrycja Bazylczyk, program manager and research associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Missile Defense Project, told UPI it presents an opportunity to take a new approach to defense.
“The Golden Dome opportunity really calls attention to the fact that we need to reorient our missile defense policy away from the sort of traditional threats that we’ve been forming our missile defense policy on for the past two decades — and mostly against [intercontinental ballistic missiles,” Bazylczyk said.
“We’re in an era of great power competition. Our adversaries China and Russia have next-generation weapons that can threaten the U.S. homeland. We need to prime our defenses to defend against these next generation threats.”
The past two decades of U.S. missile defense have been focused on potential attacks from rogue nations like North Korea and Iran, Bazylczyk adds. However, the development and use of hypersonic missiles, cruise missiles and unmanned aerial systems showcase how long-range capabilities have advanced.
The concept of the Golden Dome is not a singular system. Instead it is more of a system of systems, Bazylczyk said. Current air defenses such as the ground-based midcourse defense system — a system of missile interceptors located in Alaska and California — will remain active. Meanwhile new systems will be brought into effect to detect, deter and stop threats.
What those news systems are is not yet certain, Todd Harrison, defense analyst at American Enterprise Institute, told UPI.
Trump has earmarked $25 billion to start constructing the Golden Dome system and another $4 billion is earmarked for general air and missile defense investments.
“Where it stands right now is the Golden Dome is a concept,” Harrison said. “It’s an idea for building a missile shield to protect the United States. There are an infinite number of ways you can do that. It depends on what degree of protection you want to provide and how quickly you want to provide it. It can cost whatever you want it to cost.”
“That’s what we don’t know yet from the administration: how big of a system they’re envisioning,” Harrison continued. “At least publicly they’ve not picked an architecture.”
Trump’s legislative agenda bill, the reconciliation bill that is making its way through the U.S. Senate, does not directly reference the Golden Dome by name. It does allocate funding toward air defenses and development meant to bolster homeland defense.
“Congress is guessing what the money should be spent on because they are handing the administration a $25 billion check for Golden Dome as a down payment in advance of the administration actually asking for resources,” Harrison said. “This is just Congress saying, ‘Hey, we hear you want to build a Golden Dome. Here’s some money and here’s where we think you’ll probably need the money.”
A $25 billion “down payment” can put development of the Golden Dome into motion, but Harrison is skeptical that the funding announced will develop something operational.
One aspect that has been discussed in the defense industry prior to Trump’s proposal is a space-based interceptor system.
The National Academies of Sciences advised that developing the system would be costly and questions about its effectiveness and vulnerability to countermeasures remained.
Since 2012, space launches have become more common and less costly. The Congressional Budget Office published a new report last month, estimating that launch costs for space-based interceptors could be reduced by 30 to 40% compared to the 2012 report.
According to the latest estimate, a space-based interceptor constellation would cost $161 billion to $542 billion to implement and maintain for 20 years.
President Ronald Reagan proposed such a system in his “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative, though it was never realized.
The United States already has a series of space-based missile sensors in orbit to detect missile launches. A space-based interceptor system would be designed to enable the United States to destroy missiles while they are launching, which is a three to five-minute window.
The current system — the ground-based midcourse defense system — is designed to take down intercontinental ballistic missiles when they are cruising through the vacuum of space. Midcourse flight yields a 30 minute window.
Both systems introduce challenges.
Laura Grego, senior scientist and research director for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, told UPI the space-based interceptor system attempts to work around the physics and engineering problem the ground-based midcourse system faces.
The most difficult challenge for a midcourse system reliably distinguishing a nuclear-armed missile from a decoy.
“You can launch many, many decoys and require the defense to figure out which one is the real one or have to shoot them all down,” Grego said. “That’s the countermeasures problem. No one is demonstrating an adequate technical solution to that.”
This is one reason why space-based interceptors capable of targeting missiles as they are launching — before they can release decoys — is appealing. However, the small launch window presents another problem. In order to respond to a launching missile in three to five minutes, an interceptor must be in position at that exact time. To make that possible, thousands of interceptors must be in orbit.
“The problem is, because you need a lot of them to have one in place, you can imagine a strategy to launch a few [missiles] at the same time from the same place and that would require your defense to have many, many interceptors, potentially thousands or tens of thousands, in order to counter just maybe 10 launching at a time,” Grego said. “That’s one reason why it rapidly becomes very expensive. You’re sort of trading one hard problem for a different hard problem.”
The ultimate goal of the Golden Dome, according to Bazylczyk, is to deter attacks against the United States from ever happening.
“The Golden Dome is aimed at changing the strategic calculus of our adversaries,” Bazylczyk said. “It’s aiming to convince them that they have doubts that whatever attack they are trying to impose on the United States will succeed.”
“Russia and China have been increasing the capabilities of these next generation weapons, including hypersonics and cruise missiles,” she added. “All of these unique weapons are designed to outmaneuver our defenses. So of course we are trying to bolster them to respond.”
