(NewsNation) — President Donald Trump has ordered the implementation of what the White House is calling “The Iron Dome For America,” which is designed to protect the United States from foreign attacks.
The model for the defense system is the Iron Dome, which, since 2011, has been the foundation of Israel’s defense system to protect the nation from attacks from Hezbollah, Iran and other neighboring countries.
The system is designed to intercept relatively primitive rockets and mortars that travel less than 44 miles. The Iron Dome was 90% effective against ballistic missiles fired at Israel by Iran in October, which has prompted Trump to order the planning of a “state-of-the-art” missile defense system to be designed in the United States.
Iain Boyd, the director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado-Boulder, called the Iron Dome a very effective missile defense system but said that Israel faces a much different level of threats being experienced in the United States.
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“Making sure that the homeland is defended against missiles is a very important idea,” Boyd told NewsNation.
Boyd said that some forms of missile defense are already in place in the United States. He said that Trump’s order for the implementation of a missile defense system will ensure that the existing missile defense system continues to evolve and move forward as foreign threats become more sophisticated.
As effective as Israel’s Iron Dome is in defending against missiles, it is not designed to handle long-range missiles across an ocean. The system being proposed by Trump would be 425 times larger than Israel.
Israel’s Iron Dome operates under a system that goes into effect when an enemy rocket is fired. Once that happens, the Iron Dome’s radar system detects the missile within seconds and begins to track it. The system’s control system estimates the missile’s point of impact and then the Iron Dome’s launcher fires a missile to intercept it. Finally, the missile explodes near the rocket and destroys it.
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“The Iron Dome system might make sense if it were deployed around American military bases around the world, particularly in Iraq, where U.S bases have taken missile fire,” geopolitical analyst Steven Terner told NewsNation.
“But the Iron Dome is designed to protect relatively small amounts of areas from short and medium-range missiles, so it would have to be modified to the extent that it would be a completely different system if it were to have any chance of defending mainland United States.”
Boyd, the University of Colorado professor, told NewsNation that the Iron Dome for America will bolster the nation’s current missile defense system.
However, protecting the homeland to this extent will come at a cost.
To modify the system, the United States would need to deploy more than 24,700 Iron Dome batteries to defend the continental U.S. at a cost of about $100 million per battery. That makes the cost of the project $2.5 trillion.
“This is probably intended mostly for China,” Boyd said. “And China has been developing very sophisticated new weapons, hypersonic systems, which means they go very fast, and they do challenge existing missile systems. So I think that what this is really representing is the U.S. saying to China, ‘We are going to ensure that our country is safe against these new weapons that you’ve been developing.’”
