Trump wants an Iron Dome for America. It won’t look like Israel’s

Former President Trump has repeatedly promised an Iron Dome missile defense system to protect the United States if he returns to the presidency. Experts say it would be a far cry from what's used in Israel.

In his pledge, first made in December and repeated at least twice at campaign stops since, Trump said he would work to build “the greatest dome of them all" due to "a lot of hostile people out there."

But experts say a promise to build something like the Israeli defense system, but better and over the entire continental United States, would come with an exorbitant price tag and little use for stopping the short-range missiles it's meant to protect against.

A more sensible goal would be an improved missile shield comprised of several layered systems, working with several protections the country already has in place, they say.

“Iron Dome was a system tailor-made for Israel,” said Tom Karako, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Missile Defense Project. “Putting an Iron Dome on every corner is neither affordable nor is it sensible.”

Trump’s promise should be taken as a metaphor, Karako said, because “in the popular consciousness, Iron Dome equals missile defense. So he's using it as a rhetorical device to say, ‘Hey, we're gonna do a lot of different kinds of things.’”

Israel’s Iron Dome stands firm in the public view as a system that, night after night, shoots down Hamas rockets fired from the Gaza Strip in the now seven-month war with the militant group.

The missile defense system, largely funded by the United States, is designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and artillery fired from no more than 43 miles away. Such a weapon would be of little use to continental U.S., which sees its potential threats from intercontinental ballistic missiles fired from the likes of Russia or China, not short-range projectiles fired from across the border in Canada or Mexico.

Still, Trump has latched onto the idea of a similar system for the U.S. homeland, first announcing in December his intentions to build one should he win a second term.

“It’s a very big deal for me,” he said in Iowa. “We’re giving billions of dollars to other countries so they can build a dome. But we don’t have a dome ourselves. We’re going to have the greatest dome ever.”

And at a rally in New Hampshire in January, he declared he’d “build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield, and it’s all made in the USA.”

That was followed by his latest remarks during a campaign speech in Michigan on May 1, when he said in a second term “we will build a great Iron Dome very much like Israel has, but even better.

“I'm saying, ‘Why don't we have that?’" he continued. "We should have that too. We have a lot of hostile people out there. We have a lot of bad actors out there. We're going to build the greatest dome of them all.”

In recent years, the U.S. has sought to compete with Russia and China in developing faster, farther-reaching missiles, while also preparing for future nuclear threats from the likes of North Korea and Iran.

The former president, who has on many occasions promised massive defensive infrastructure projects for national security — including a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border — has not offered specifics for his vision of an American Iron Dome. 

“Trump often will speak in branding terms that are easy to understand for the average American, and so I wouldn't necessarily interpret him saying that he wants an Iron Dome for America to mean literally like the same kind of system,” said Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute think tank. “I think there is lots of opportunity to build on the current systems that we do have in place.”

Trump is well known to tout the promise of U.S. military might, most notably in January 2019 when he announced at the Pentagon an ambitious goal “to ensure we can detect and destroy any missile launched against the United States, anytime, anywhere and any place.”

Many of the initiatives laid out at the time did not end up coming to fruition as “the Trump administration's actual programs and budgets were nothing like” what he was proposing, according to Karako.

And in May 2020, he revealed off the cuff at the White House that the U.S. was developing a “super duper” new hypersonic missile.

“We are building, right now, incredible military equipment at a level that nobody has ever seen before. We have no choice. We have to do it — with the adversaries we have out there. We have a — I call it the ‘super-duper missile.’ And I heard the other night, 17 times faster than what they have right now,” Trump said at the time.

Since he has left office, the military competition between the United States and Russia and China remains high, with moves to militarize space seen as the next step.

The United States protects from any potential incoming long-range missiles via a combination of ground-based interceptors located in Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., as well as the associated radars that accompany that system.

Other defense elements protect against shorter range missiles, such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, which at one point was ready to be used to defend Hawaii when North Korea ramped up its missile testing several years ago.

And Washington, D.C., is protected by NASAMS, a short- to medium-range ground-based air defense system.

The U.S. military has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into missile defense research and development over the decades.

Major upgrades to these systems would need buy-in from Congress, and would come with a hefty price tag.

Trump famously was not able to court Congress on the costs of building his border wall, and instead used several tactics to shore up funding, including pulling money from military construction coffers, much to the ire of defense officials.

Still, there are those in Congress who believe there is room to speed up several efforts already in the works at the Pentagon.

“President Trump is correct that our homeland is not adequately protected from China and Russia,” Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said in a statement to The Hill. 

“We need to accelerate the modernization and expansion of our early warning and missile defense systems, invest in capabilities that will help us track and engage high-altitude threats, and build a true counter-drone network for U.S. bases.” 

To get lawmakers on board, Heinrich of Hudson Institute said Trump would be wise to prioritize specific projects.

“If strengthening homeland missile defense is a priority for a second term in the Trump administration, you’ve got to start early and make these big changes and see what technology we can invest in and have available to get things deployed in a cost-effective manner,” she said.

A nationwide missile defense system is not a new concept. In 1983, in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, then-President Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed the Star Wars program, a system meant to protect the homeland from intercontinental ballistic missiles.

But the program, set up in 1984, didn’t move beyond research and development, as only several years later it was concluded that the technologies being considered for such a project were decades away from being ready to use.

What’s more, critics of the SDI worried it would possibly set off another arms race between the U.S. and the Kremlin, with then-Sen. Joe Biden in 1986 claiming the program “constitutes one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.”

The SDI was shuttered in 1993 after the end of the Cold War.