Defense News
President Donald Trump’s executive order to develop a next-generation homeland missile defense shield marks a shift in the United States’ long-standing homeland missile defense strategy, which has focused on threats from rogue nations like North Korea and Iran rather than from peer adversaries like China or Russia.
The order — titled “The Iron Dome For America” in a nod to the successful, lowest tier of Israel’s multilayered air defense system of the same name — also addresses a broader array of complex threats from hypersonic weapons to cruise missiles.
Further, the order revives the pursuit of space-based interceptors for missile defense, a concept that has been scrapped multiple times in recent history due to technological challenges and high costs associated with the development.
