President Donald Trump’s Monday night executive order on the creation of an “Iron Dome for America” calls for much more than the air defense system Israel utilizes.
The order calls for “a next-generation missile defense shield” to protect the homeland. It also calls on this new shield to protect the United States from ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks.
Comparatively, Israel’s Iron Dome, which has been operational for nearly 15 years and has intercepted thousands of short-range weapons, has a much narrower use.
Israel uses the system to intercept mortar shells, smaller rockets, and artillery shells fired from close range, primarily from Gaza. The military has other air defense systems for more sophisticated aerial threats, like David’s Sling and the Arrow system.
The Jewish state is also roughly the size of New Jersey, so Trump’s desire for a “defense shield” would have to be exponentially more expansive.
The U.S. and Israel have worked together on missile defense technology for decades.
Trump’s order calls “ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks” the most “catastrophic threat facing the United States.”
The order requires Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to submit to the president a “reference architecture” and implementation plan within 60 days that includes the acceleration of the deployment of hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor layer and the development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept, among several other requirements.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the executive order “directed the implementation of an Iron Dome,” as well as “research and studies to see how the United States can go about doing this, particularly the Department of Defense.”
The order, aside from its title, does not mention the “Iron Dome.”
The U.S. has spent more than $2.9 billion on the Iron Dome program, according to a Congressional Research Service report from 2023. Each interceptor missile that the Iron Dome fires at an incoming projectile costs about $40,000.
The military currently has air defense systems, primarily ground-based ones, in place to stop incoming attacks, but “the missing piece we have right now is with cruise missile defense,” Masao Dahlgren, a fellow with the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner. He also called the administration’s hat tip to Israel’s Iron Dome as a reference “in a metaphorical sense.”
“We should be worrying about hypersonic weapons, intercontinental hypersonic weapons, or hypersonic weapons launched from submarines, ships, bombers, off the coast, submarine-launched cruise missiles” among others,” he added.
Several recent events have highlighted the various threats posed by different types of aerial vehicles.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has shown the utility of drone warfare; the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea targeting transiting commercial vessels, which have involved drones, cruise, and ballistic missiles; the Chinese spy balloon incident from 2023; as well as the random and mysterious drone sightings in recent months primarily on the east coast.
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Leavitt also said during Tuesday’s briefing that the drones flying over New Jersey “were not the enemy.”
Three U.S. service members were killed at Tower 22, a small U.S. military outpost in Jordan, in a drone attack that targeted the base, while dozens of others were injured.