One disconnect between the dream and the reality appears in the order’s title: “The Iron Dome for America.” Taken literally, this suggests the use of the Iron Dome anti-missile system made by Raytheon and Rafael and used effectively in recent conflicts by Israel. But Iron Dome is designed to protect cities or installations from missiles and drone threats of relatively short range, about 50 miles. Given the terrain and geography of the United States, the system might be useful for protecting a city like, say, El Paso, Texas, from a rocket attack emanating from Mexico, but not much else.
“Each Iron Dome system can defend an area of roughly 150 square miles. We would need to deploy more than 24,700 Iron Dome batteries to defend the 3.7 million square miles of the continental United States. At $100 million per battery, that would be approximately $2,470,000,000,000”—and that $2,470 trillion system would be good only against relatively small and slow weapons, not incoming ICBMs, nuclear analyst Joe Cirincione wrote last year for Defense One.
Trump’s order, however, appears to use “Iron Dome” as branding for a different kind of system entirely—one that, among other things, puts interceptor weapons in orbit.
The idea of space-based interceptors has been around since the 1960s, when the Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept, or BAMBI, was proposed but never built.
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The concept resurfaced in 1983, under President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, with the proposal of trump america would weapons space