Real Clear Defense
U.S. adversaries’ missile-based threats, including ballistic, cruise, hypersonic, and novel combinations of these types, are growing in size and sophistication. The coercive military strategies of China, Russia, and North Korea rely heavily on missiles that can range the U.S. homeland; as threats against the US homeland grow, so does the danger to US vital interests. How then should US defense strategy adapt to this new reality? Deterrence will of course play its leading policy role, as the continuing bipartisan consensus behind modernizing US nuclear weapons and conventional forces demonstrates.1 Given the severity and the immediacy of missile threats to the US homeland, however, US policymakers should reexamine the complementary roles that expanded and improved homeland missile defenses could play in supporting deterrence and the US defense strategy more broadly.
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